When I started working from home full-time last May, I felt liberated. No more dumb, numbing, expensive, dangerous, and unfulfilling commute! The Economist, as pointed out to me by my boss this afternoon, has a great series of articles on this very phenomenon. This from Labour Movement:
"James Katz, a professor at Rutgers University who leads a research centre on the sociology of mobile technologies, says that the shift amounts to a “historical re-integration” of our productive and social spheres. In the hunter-gatherer, agricultural and pre-industrial artisan eras people did not separate the physical space devoted to work, family and play. Blacksmiths, say, worked from their homes, with family and village life all around. It was only with the capital-intensive work of the industrial era that a separation of homes and factories became necessary, because workers “had to be co-located” in order to work efficiently. This also applied to bureaucracies before the digital era. Now, however, the different spheres of life are merging again."
I like to think I tailored my house to fit my work, like the old blacksmithy.
