Summary of ALL lectures (and guest lectures) Digital Media @ Work (master's Psychology of Digital Media)
5 views 0 purchase
Course
Digital Media @ Work (FSWP4020P)
Institution
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (EUR)
Summary of all lectures and guest lectures of the master's course Digital Media @ Work. Most of the assigned readings/articles are also summarized. This summary has been very useful for making all the assignments as well as the research practical. Good luck! :)
Lecture 1: Communication Technology: observations, facts and nomological net.
How does work related smartphone use in your free time/weekend/ holiday affects your
wellbeing and performance?
Before: How are media portrayed in the media?
➢ Younger people have different views on media use than older people
➢ Technosapiens: modern men in digital age who use a lot of technology, use it daily,
for all kinds of occasions: school, work, private issues, etc. Spend even more time on
their smartphones than with their friends even! They use it as a tool to get
acquainted with people and to create relationships with other people.
➢ Besides all the positive portrayals of media in the media (e.g.: more freedom, more
autonomy, more control on how and where to work, using to navigate your holidays,
staying in touch with friends), but in the media you mostly see the negative effects.
- Dangers of being distracted (in terms of parenting, driving in the car)
- Worries about whether smartphones make our lives more stressful
- Always on culture: how healthy is that?
- How does mobile working relate to work life balance?
- It can lead to depression: people feel more lonely even though they have more
contact. It might be because online contact tends to be more superficial and not
so real. People represent their ideal self rather than their real self. It looks like
everyone has a nice life which looks like everything you don’t have.
- Screentime for kids, how much? Is it bad for their health/eyes?
- Smartphone addictions
→So there’s a lot of discussion and questions. It is a very current problem.
COVID-19
→A lot of people gained experience in working from home, homeschooling, virtual
teams, etc.
➢ Forced to work from home
➢ Teams became virtual.
- We just HAD TO become virtual and HAD TO become a team.
➢ Homeschooling children
➢ Impact on work life balance
➢ Integration work-home domains (whether you have a home office or if you had to sit
on the kitchen table or in the same children as your kids)
- This had impact on peoples’ detachment (=how easy is it to psychologically
detach from work when you’re being in a home domain. All of a sudden,
commuting seem to have a function. Commuting often helps to detach physically
and psychologically from your work)
- This also impacted peoples’ recovery (=related to detachment; if you’re not able
to psychologically detach from your work and not think about your work when
, 2
being in your home domain, it also has implications for how you recover from
your workload. It is important to stay healthy in your work.)
➢ Always on culture → boundaries between work-home have literally disappeared.
- People were actually working and living in the same rooms and were at home all
the time.
- This lead to the Present-absent paradox
- This also lead to empowerment – enslavement paradox (=on the one time, it
gives you more control/power/autonomy, but on the other hand you also
become almost employee of your smartphone who tells you what do, where to
do it with all the notifications and push messages)
Smartphone facts
➢ Smartphones are everywhere
➢ 86% of all individuals > 12 year possess a smartphone. 96% even have access to it!
➢ More employees online during free time (holiday, evenings, weekends)
➢ Breakdown Blackberry servers (in Rotterdam, it was complete chaos, because people
became so dependent on their smartphones)
➢ BMW switches mail servers off during the weekend (it shows that they’re doing it for
their employees)
➢ Smartphones and tablets cause sleep deprivation (blue lights. If you stay active very
long, you will be both cognitively very aroused and the light disturbs your melatonin
(which increases the likelihood of not sleeping)
➢ Smartphones in traffic (if you pay attention to something it comes to cost of
something else. Very dangerous!)
→In USA, there are a lot of campaigns about stop texting while driving)
➢ Pay-off between delays and interruptions
- When you’re working, you get a lot of emails. You have to make a decision to
quickly answering them or delaying them. People have to make a pay off
between delay and interruptions. (=if you respond really quickly on emails, the
likelihood that you get a quick response when you need one also increases)
- If you have to wait for a long time for a response from your manager before you
can go further with your task = delay
→The higher you are in hierarchy (like your boss), has less interruptions (because
people don’t interrupt the boss that easily). People tend to interrupt people who
are equal or even down to them in hierarchy.
→Someone high in hierarchy has low interruption and low delay. (because if the
boss asks something, people want to answer as soon as possible.
- If you’re being low in hierarchy (secretary) than you have a lot interruptions (a lot
of people who need your help) and you also have a lot of delay (because you’re
not highest on the priority list) → Can be difficult for your work.
Excessive smartphone use
➢ Brazil has the highest smartphone use
➢ 96% of Americans own a smartphone
➢ People feel scared/anxious when losing phone or being without it
➢ Average smartphone user clicks/swaps over 2000 times a day
, 3
➢ We check our devices a lot after just waking up
→We are very excessive in using smartphones
Why do we work overtime? Why are we able and prepared to work overtime?
→If you’re on your smartphone in the weekends/on holidays you’re still working and you
don’t get additional salary/bonuses. So why do we do it?
➢ Ambition (you want to get promoted)
➢ Work engagement (=if you’re really enthusiastic about your work/ liking it a lot, you
also like to spend time on your work)
➢ Commitment (= committed to the organization you’re working for)
➢ Workaholism (=work addiction, you need to work: not because you want to, but
because you have to)
➢ Financial motives (=some people have multiple jobs just to provide for their living)
➢ Culture (cultural dependent, some people comply to these norms)
➢ Juggling work and family demands (=when you’re kids are young, you spend maybe
more time working in the weekend or evenings so that you can take care of your
kids)
➢ Smartphones (=smartphones become more and more the reason why people work
overtime, because they’re being triggered by push messages and because of the fact
that your smartphone is present in your home domain. This makes your work salient
in your home. It’s a trigger to think about your work and not to psychological detach
from it.
Go digital go mobile…
➢ Number of ‘mobile’ workers is still increasing
➢ Many functionalities → access to email main reason for work-related use
➢ Smartphone facilitates this process
➢ Email become mobile
- More synchronous communication (email was supposed to be asynchronous, but
became more synchronous)
- Shorter response time
Advantages of using a smartphone
➢ Productivity increases (Locke, 2005)
➢ Improved collaboration with colleagues (Baron, 2005)
→Because of closer contact
➢ Response time decreased (Rood, 2005)
➢ Increased flexibility and higher worktime control (Taylor, 2003)
→It can help you to work from home
➢ Access to “real time” information (Rood, 2005; Taylor, 2003)
➢ Improved work-family balance (Parasuraman & Greenhaus, 2002)
→Old researches.. Even though we still see advantages but overtime, there are more
researches about potential side backs and disadvantages.
, 4
Negative implications of smartphone use
➢ What started as: anytime anyplace
➢ Became: everywhere, all the time
➢ Shifting expectations regarding availability
➢ Constant monitoring, “Crackberry”
➢ Blurred boundaries
➢ Work intensification (micro breaks)
→We don’t have many breaks anymore, because we spend our breaks on our
phones and sometimes even work related
➢ Addictions
Smartphone addiction
→You’re not necessarily addicted to your phone, but more to the internet/games, etc.
Criteria addiction
➢ Excessive use
➢ Dependence / obsessive thoughts
➢ Constant monitoring
➢ Craving
➢ Touch screen (Scandinavian study: actually touching your screen can be tactilely
addicting).
➢ Disturbance / loss of control over daily routine
→Your smartphones need to be addicting, which disturbs your routine (like not
eating healthy or taking care of yourself)
- Derks didn’t find a lot of people being addicted to their smartphones. Why was
that? Some criteria (like excessive use, dependence, obsessive thoughts, constant
monitoring) were really evident in her research. However, disturbance wasn’t
found in her sample of employees
- Maybe the working population (as a sample to their usual studies) do not meet all
these criteria for addiction).
- However, there’s another criteria:
Workplace telepressure (also have elements of addictive symptoms, but more finetuned
to the sample of employees)
“Symptoms” (Work place telepressure=)
➢ Thinking about ICT messages (almost all the time)
➢ Overwhelming urge to respond
➢ Consider asynchronous communication as synchronous
→Even if you get an email (asynchronous), you still feel the need to respond
immediately and you even get worried when you’re not able to respond as fast as
you wanted to
Nomological net I
➢ In this field, we look at work related smartphone use during off job times (evenings,
weekends, holidays)
➢ This is different to telework / new ways of working
The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:
Guaranteed quality through customer reviews
Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.
Quick and easy check-out
You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.
Focus on what matters
Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!
Frequently asked questions
What do I get when I buy this document?
You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.
Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?
Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.
Who am I buying these notes from?
Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller sannedebrij. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.
Will I be stuck with a subscription?
No, you only buy these notes for $16.57. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.
