Connecting in a Disconnected World

The College of Coastal Georgia is back in session. Campus is bustling. I’m teaching three face-to-face sections of Introduction to Sociology this fall. I love the “collective effervescence” (a sociology term) that everyone feels in these first few weeks. It’s good to be back.

This summer was busy. I taught three online classes. I interacted with students in discussion boards and virtual office hours. I participated in several trainings and workshops, attended meetings, and played my part in seven student orientations. I read some sociology. I made time to write, including From the Murphy Center columns. This summer was a success, but something was missing.

I was missing “connective labor,” according to Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World. Pugh defines connective labor as “the forging of an emotional understanding with another person to create valuable outcomes.” It’s not just membership in an organization or integration into a social milieu. Pugh states, “Connective labor is how we see the other, and how we convey to the other that they are seen.”

Connective labor won’t be found in a job description, but it’s a fixture of being a teacher, nurse, pastor, counselor, or coach. It is not limited to professions focusing on others’ well-being. It can be found in management, entertainment industries, sales, consulting, and criminal justice careers.

Connective labor is often invisible, unrecognized, and uncompensated. Yet, it’s a catalyst and vehicle for accomplishing one’s job duties. Connecting with others requires work, but it yields dividends. It’s the “magic” that occurs in the social relationships that underlie work. Connective labor can create better outcomes in patients, increase sales, maintain control in a prison, or improve student learning. It’s a mechanism for generating belonging for the individual and community for the collective.

Over the summer, I was longing for the magic of connective labor. I wasn’t alone. Pugh warns that we’re amid a “depersonalization crisis.”

Relationships have been outsourced. In many industries, data-driven decision-making and a pursuit of efficiencies limit time for developing human connections. Organizations strive to make work “more efficient, measurable, and reproducible.” Automation, apps, and AI take the human element out of work. Much service work is standardized through managerial control, analytics, and assessment plans. This corporate or industrial logic leaves less time for connective labor.

All of this comes at a cost. Autonomy and creativity are threatened. Client and patient relationships are standardized and routinized. Workers are demoralized, experience stress, burnout, and job dissatisfaction. This has resulted in labor crises in connecting careers, including teaching and nursing. On the other side, clients, students, and patrons don’t experience meaningful relationships, trust, shared humanity, or solidarity.

All of this is occurring in the context of atrophying social life. 12 to 14 percent of workers in the U.S. are fully remote. Participation in unions, churches, and social clubs is on the decline. We exist in mass media and social media siloes. Social isolation is a serious social problem for seniors and the rapidly expanding population of Americans who live alone.

Self-checkout at retailers, Amazon Prime, and in-app ordering limit our interactions with others. Social media, curated smartphone apps, and AI utilize data to offer us personalized answers to our questions and information that we require to do our jobs. Unfortunately, these personalized technologies alienate us from others.

A decline in connective labor is no doubt playing a role in many social problems, including the overdose epidemic, teen mental health crisis, and struggling K-12 schools. Smartphones and social media get a lot of the blame, but there’s more going on than depression from doomscrolling or comparing ourselves to rich and beautiful people online. The decline of connective labor in education, healthcare, and other industries deprives us of human contact and meaningful connections with others.

Roscoe Scarborough, Ph.D. is chair of the Department of Social Sciences and associate professor of sociology at College of Coastal Georgia. He is an associate scholar at the Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. He can be reached by email at rscarborough@ccga.edu.