arrive in the morning to contact customers and get a sense of the workload for the day. Most of the employees spend a great deal of time driving to client locations to repair computers. The moments when everyone is in the office are lively and full of conversation and collaboration.
The third workplace is the call center for a national distance-learning company.13 The offices feature multiple rows of cubicles with employees sitting at terminals dedicated to specific types of calls. This office is enormous and feels much less congenial than the other two smaller offices do. Despite the impersonal “cube farm” environment, there is a lot of collaboration between coworkers and a general atmosphere of enthusiasm. Compared to Ameravant’s and Latitude 34’s employees, the call center employees have less direct supervision (though their computers are monitored by a program) and are more responsible for their own workload. Workload is determined by the volume of calls and emails fielded by each division. The sales teams, whose job it is to send out calls, are by far the busiest employees; the online tech-support team is the most relaxed group, since their work does not involve having to respond instantly to a caller’s questions.
The Morning Routine
Employees at each of these offices began their workdays with an invigorating media snack that helped them prepare for the day. As soon as computers were operational, employees logged in to email, instant-messaging services, and Facebook, immersing themselves in that day’s workload and social world. To assist in the preparations for the day, employees in each of the locations set up personal mobile devices (tablets, laptop computers, and mobile phones) to act as second screens. One employee described his second screen as his “distraction computer,” which he used to separate his personal media from his work screen. The term “distraction computer” suggests that he sees his personal media as detrimental to his productivity, and so he segregates his media snacks from his primary work screen in order to keep them from drawing his attention from his work. The media snacks on these mobile devices primarily featured audio content including music, podcasts, and talk radio. The sound from these audio snacks blocked out office noise and helped employees focus on their individual tasks. Rather than causing work distraction, mobile audio devices actually gave workers tools to manage existing distractions through customizable offerings.
The use of sound to manage distraction has been a popular practice in work environments long before the advent of mobile devices. Streaming audio services can be considered modern incarnations of field songs sung by agricultural workers or radio broadcasts piped into factories by business owners in the 1940s.14 Employers have long believed that music improves workers’ productivity by creating a soundtrack that fades into the background and becomes a kind of white noise, masking the sounds of other activities.15 Silence is nearly impossible to attain in the workplace, so the radio, and now mobile devices, offers a controllable and consistent source of noise that assists employees’ focus on the completion of their work. Studies have found that employees who listen to music during repetitive tasks or during work preparation show increased productivity.16 Employees in all the workplaces I visited certainly believed that music enjoyed via a personal mobile device helped them prepare for their workday. Furthermore, they appreciated the ability and freedom to self-manage their focus by creating a comfortable white noise.
The music industry has carved a niche for itself in the procrastination economy through the development of user-friendly, customizable digital platforms. The subscription-based music service Spotify offers a variety of focus-boosting playlists for the workplace featuring music that fades into the background and blocks distracting noises. Spotify users can also create their own playlists, which workers frequently label with names that evoke a specific workplace context. For example, Spotify features playlists called “Workday Pop,” “Workday Lounge,” “Workday Soul,” “Your Coffee Break,” “The Office Mix,” “The Office Stereo,” “Jazzy at Work,” and “Rock at Work.” The playlists of Spotify users Sarah-Louise Thexton, who has a playlist called “Safe for Work (Pop),” ihascube, who has a playlist called “Work Music (Clean),” and Lisa Roach, who has a list called “Work Playlist,” as well as hundreds like them, reflect the workers’ understanding that there is particular music that is appropriate for the workplace.17 Spotify and its users make playlists for the rhythms of the workplace and censor their music tastes to be appropriate for public listening.
The ability to manage distractions is especially important in shared workspaces, where, at any given time, multiple workers may be talking on the phone with clients or discussing work with colleagues. The call center, with its rows of people talking on the phone, was a prime example of digital content being used to manage distraction: employees switched from phone headsets, used during phone calls, to headphones, used while working out problems on their computers. In the small offices of Ameravant, the customer service manager often met with clients in a room adjoining the computer programmers’ workspace. Much to the programmers’ chagrin, the door that separated the two rooms was frequently left open. Even after sitting in the office for only a few days, the customer-service pitch quickly became repetitive. The employees used their mobile devices to combat this distraction. Some workers sought refuge in their iTunes library; others listened to streaming music services and podcasts. These technologies are similar to personal radios because they allow employees to select a particular genre of music, an album, or a playlist. Employees can further customize their “white noise” by choosing forms of audio beyond music. For example, one of the employees toggled between NPR podcasts, previously viewed episodes of favorite television shows, and movies. He explained that accessing a variety of media was essential to his productivity.
Often the employee’s choice of digital content depended on whether he or she was using headphones or listening through speakers. Michael Bull has written about his concern over the use of headphones and portable media devices, claiming that these devices put people in their own “private bubble” and cut them off from their surroundings, as “sound enables users to manage and orchestrate their spaces of habituation in a manner that conforms to their desires. The sound of the personal stereo is direct, with headphones placed directly over the ears of the user, thereby overlaying the random sounds of the environment passed through with privatized sounds.”18 One employee remarked that his choice of music depends on who is in the room. When a fellow programmer with a shared sensibility is working near him, he puts on a song they both enjoy, and this provides a consistent background beat. If there are not multiple people in the office to share the music, he is more likely to put on his headphones and listen to a podcast related to his interests. In this instance, the ability to customize and stream music through digital services encourages a connection between coworkers; when working solo, the programmer uses sound to alleviate his isolation.
The ability to personalize a workday soundtrack is one of the ways mobile devices have enhanced everyday office practices. Before the Internet, the options for “white noise” were limited to media that were playable on a personal stereo. Smartphones and other mobile devices enable catalogs of content to travel with an employee into the workplace. Barbara Klinger, drawing on the work of Roger Silverstone, has argued that the proliferation of home entertainment products has expanded the role of media texts within our daily lives.19 Though she mainly focuses on home viewing, she describes repeat viewing of media texts as part of an intense process of personalization in which a text can help “confirm individual identity.”20 The workplace is another venue where people are actively engaged in this identity exploration, and digital content’s inherent portability and customizability supports that practice.21 A favorite film or television show may contain dialog or a soundtrack that is reaffirming to an employee, but, being sufficiently familiar, it does not distract from work-related tasks. These media snacks become a form of audio pleasure that serve multiple purposes: they provide pleasant background noise, allow employees to assert control over their workday, and give employees a way to express their identities through their media consumption choices.
Lunch
Musical media snacks help concentration and motivate employees to start the day, but by lunchtime, employees are hungry for more relaxing and communal media snacks. Mobile devices offer mobility and community that surpasses the offerings of traditional break rooms and the limitations of modern labor schedules. Employees within the service industry do not leave for lunch together because someone is required to stay and answer phones or continue working.