On consent, friendship and conversation

You know, you used to be pretty sure when a conversation was over. You would leave or hang up the phone, or disconnect from the internet and it would be done. Conversations were social accomplishments, discrete events that were bounded and open to analysis. Somewhere along the way conversations became more fluid, there was always the possibility of more, another text, another email. This got more complicated the avenues of having a conversation were available to us. I send my friend an Instagram post, she DMs me back on messenger, we Skype while trading links back and forth. The boundaries have become blurry, we’ve been having the same conversation for years now, it never ends, sprawling across platforms and contexts. The conversation is always on, always growing, knitting the fabric of our friendship as we go.

The augmentation of conversation across platforms and contexts, is I think closely tied to the enthusiastic identification of emotional labour, in, well, everything. Emotional labour is a term coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, from her 1983 book, The Managed Heart. Recently, The Atlantic asked her about the popularisation of the term, and its stretching to include the labour of life. Often used interchangeably with the concept of a ‘the mental load’, aka the job of running a life and existing in the world which seems to infinitely multiply once you have a partner, and then again once you have children.

Bluntly, Hochschild described herself as ‘horrified’ by the expansion of her term. Emotional labour as Hochschild describes it is the emotional component of paid labour or example, smiling when you might not particularly feel like it, because it is an expected part of a customer service interaction. Anyway, you should read the whole Atlantic interview, because it clarifies and demonstrates an analytical gap to be filled. That is, emotional labour cannot be stretched to encompass all the ways we find the act of living and relating burdensome.

One thing I do want to pick up on is what Hochschild observes is the “alienation or a disenchantment of acts that normally we associate with the expression of connection, love, commitment.”

Which brings me back to mental load and its connection to capacity. The popularisation of the mental load (which I will not be calling emotional labour), is linked closely to questions of capacity. The framework of mental load is also a framework that puts boundaries around our capacity to engage and do. This issue has re-emerged in interesting ways on Twitter over the last week. It all started with this series of tweets:

These tweets frame the act of giving emotional support to friends as ‘emotional labour’. If we are to follow Hochschild’s definition, we can see that this is a misuse, or at least a very stretched use of the concept. So, what is going on here, exactly?

The thread concludes with a template of how to handle these mediated requests for support, which are again framed as emotional labour.

Of course, this quickly became a meme, it has a strong and translatable template that is begging to be made into a meme. Variations on this meme, highlight I think the positioning of emotional engagement with a friend as difficult or draining labour.

This in and of itself would be unremarkable, except for the fact that it was quickly followed by two other examples, also involving mediated communications, or what I call augmented conversation. Digital communication and conversation exist on top of and in addition to face-to-face interaction, and more ‘traditional’ forms of mediation like voice calls.

The difficulty with augmented communication is that it lacks the distinct bookends of a phone call or a catch up over dinner. As such, technology is changing and challenging our understandings of communication and conversation as we talk across multiple platforms, apps and contexts.

Where then, does conversation start and stop? What are its temporal limits as the hum of augmented conversation threads its way across day-to-day contexts, on the bus, in that boring meeting, while you’re buying groceries, while you’re on a date? Is this emphasis on consent an attempt to re-establish boundaries around augmented conversational practice? On the phone, or in person we can generally get a sense of how the conversation is going, our friend’s mood and their pre-occupations.

Augmented conversation lacks the information rich context of a face-to-face meeting or a phone call. We send texts out into the blue, out of the blue, never quite knowing the context in which they will be received. The desire to control the boundaries of augmented conversation, I think results in the developing narratives we are seeing develop around conversation, friendship and consent.

I still haven’t figured out if the ‘sexting’ template above is a perfect and laser guided troll or not, but I am going to include it as a serious example.

But what about the whole ‘friendship’ aspect of this situation? Friendship is a pure affective relationship. While some friendships can be instrumental or based on utility, generally we are friends with people become, well we like them and want to be around them. Friendship, I have come to suspect is affective alchemy part circumstance, part similarity and part magic. The magic of friendship occurs in its emotional intimacy and in its bonds of trust. We reach out to our friends because we trust them and in the act of trust we reaffirm the affective potency of friendship and ad layers to its durability.