Homecoming. Notes from Self- Isolation
The article discusses relationship of working conditions with the type of time perception the era of modern, postmodern and premodern. Sociology is increasingly turning to the problems of the social future, emphasizing fluidity and changeability as main characteristics of the emerging new society. One of these changes was the spread of the home-based form of work, which destroys boundaries between home and work, work and leisure. Such change was essentially due to the development of telecommunication technologies intensified by quarantine measures against coronavirus pandemic. This bring about a situation that was the norm for the pre-industrial era when peasants, artisans, workers, office workers and people of free professions worked where they lived and lived where they worked. Only with the industrial revolution did work move away from home; this shift served as one of the reasons for the formation of a specific temporality. Such specific temporality is characterized by an increased value status of the past and the future, which resulted in the self-history of social consciousness of the modern era. On the contrary, with post-industrial counter-revolution a new merger of work and home leads to the formation of non-traditional temporality, specificity of which is expressed in dominance of the present. That dominance in turn results in the supplanting historicism by presentism. People begin to live by instants, moments, zero time, in the “now world”, where the past and the future are absorbed by the present. Individual thinking and social consciousness hereby become ahistorical. This postmodern is likened to premodern: the analogue of the new normality is not just the old one, but the ancient and longest existing normality of hunters and gatherers, and the author asks the question - perhaps, this is normal?