FAMILIES OF THE FUTURE
Assume for a moment that twenty-five years from now 15 percent of the work force is employed part- or full-time in the home. How would working at home change the quality of our personal relationships or the meaning of love? What would life be like in the electronic cottage?
Whether the work-at-home task is programming a computer, writing a pamphlet, monitoring distant manufacturing processes, designing a building, or typing electronic correspondence, one immediate changeis clear. Relocating work into the home means that many spouses who now see each other only a limited number of hours each day would be thrown together more intimately. Some, no doubt, would find this prolonged proximity hateful. Many others, however, would find then* marriages saved and their relationships much enriched through shared experience.
Let us visit several electronic cottages to see how people might adapt to so fundamental a change in society. Such a tour would no doubt reveal a wide diversity of living and working arrangements.
In some houses, perhaps the majority, we might well find couples dividing things up more or less conventionally, with one person doing the “job-work” while the other keeps house—he, perhaps, writing programs while she looks after the kids. The very presence of work hi the home, however, would probably encourage a sharing of both job- work and housekeeping. We would find many homes, therefore, in which man and wife split a single full-tune job. For example, we might find both husband and wife taking turns at monitoring a complex manufacturing process on the console screen in the den, four hours on, four hours off.
Down the street, by contrast, we would likely discover a couple holding not one, but two quite different jobs, with each spouse working separately. A cellular physiologist and a CPA might each work at his or her craft. Even here, however, with the jobs differing sharply hi character, there is still likely to be some sharing of problems, some learning of each other’s work vocabulary, some common concerns and conversation relating to work. It is almost impossible under such conditions for the work life of an individual to be strictly segregatedfrom personal life. By the same token, it is next to impossible to freeze one’s mate out of a whole dimension of one’s existence.
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