Teleworking

Hello everyone, today I’m going to talk about this document and explain why it represents well the axis Private and public space in my opinion.

So for starters, what’s a public space and what’s a private space ? A private space is a space that is only for 1 person or a small group where they feel their belong, while a public space is a space that involves more people and is open to the wider public, rather that limited to a particular person or group.

This document is a picture from the article “Will Today’s Covid-19-Prompted Teleworking Keep Working Tomorrow?” which was published in the The Magazine of the American Society of Civil Engineers the 24th of April 2020, so it’s basically about teleworking.

So on the first place, you can see on the front of this picture a man who’s holding his 2 babies while working. You can see a kitchen behind them, so we can easily guess that they are at home. By judging the father’s facial expression, we can see that he is really tired and overwhelmed. He seems to have a lot of work to do in addition to taking care of his children. But the emotions we feel when we see the father, are contrasted by those we feel when we see the children. They are trying so hard to help their father by taking calls, without even knowing how to speak and I found it funny since the littlest baby has a too big headset for him. What else, thanks to the caption we can understand that this picture took place during the COVID quarantine in 2020, so maybe the man was not used to teleworking, and had to adapt himself.

So the photo is linked to the axis as it shows that in some cases there is no more borders between the private life at home and the public space at work for example.

Indeed since the beginning of the 20th century, teleworking has highly increased in Western countries. This phenomenon was even more accelerated by the 2020 Covid-19 worldwide pandemic. During these troubled times, many companies in a lot of countries affected by the virus had to adapt to implement teleworking for their employees when it was possible.

Back then, the office and working, in general, had nothing to do with personal space. An employee would come at the agreed time to do his work. Then, he would go home without carrying his task any further until the next day. But the photography is showing that nowadays, teleworking allows people to work right in the middle of their living room not far from their kitchen, and even at times while having their children with them like you can see right there. So teleworking is a really good way of showing the sometimes blurry border between private and public space.

And as you can see a person who’s in bad conditions, can get easily overwhelmed. Teleworking can be really useful for employees, but only when you know how to dissociate your private life and your work. Taking care of children can be a challenging task when you already have to do a lot of work, they can disrupt you when you have to be concentrated. By mixing too many things, you can do everything wrong like this man on the photography. What’s more, teleworking keep you from making new friends at work and remembering that you have to make some pauses.

Nevertheless, teleworking has good aspect for employees for sure. For example when you live too far from your work office, teleworking can help you to spend less travel time. What’s more, you can save money instead of hiring a baby-sitter for your children and of course you help the planet by emitting less fuel.

In conclusion, this picture shows how teleworking affected the line between private and public space for several years and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Teleworking can be useful for employees but if you’re not in good conditions, teleworking can easily become a burden in the daily life. So we could ask ourselves if teleworking should be generalized from now on.

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