Always on standby: acknowledging the psychosocial risk of our postdigital presence in online digital labour in higher education

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on our experiences as higher education workers and the changing work culture that has resulted in the move to online digital labour. The shift to online and remote teaching has had disastrous impacts on academics’ ability to both pursue research, and maintain a work–life balance. Examined in this paper is an understanding of how online digital labour has created an ontological shift that has inexorably blurred the boundaries between home and work. We theorize how forms of psychosocial risk in the academy has been normalized in both an intensification of digital labour and in part, an entire sector transformation away from physical campuses. Through a nomenclature of ‘postdigital presence’ we discuss how there has been a fundamental change in how we experience academic work, and narrate how it has (re)formed our working worlds. As future projections, we situate notions of the Slow University and Quiet Quitting as counter hegemonic tactics for policy makers to consider, by reflecting on three ‘interruptions’ around Remote and Isolated work, Job Demands, and Digital Fatigue. We conclude that there is a need to engage in critical questioning around digital labour as an emergent social, anthropological and technological phenomena, not only for improved academic well-being, but also due to the financial risk to institutions of academics being always ‘on standby’.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education workers
• online digital labour
• work–life balance
• psychosocial risk
• postdigital presence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).