The New Horizontal Worker: Privacy, Sexuality, and Professionalism in the Digital Bedroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay we examine media coverage in 2020 and 2021 of the COVID-19-related practice of “working from bed.” Although presented as a new phenomenon, working from bed has a long history. We suggest that the late modern bourgeois understanding of the bedroom as a private space has long been manipulated by artists, writers, and other celebrities, both through staged photos and more self-conscious representation. These representations play on the paradox of a public figure making their intimate self visible and invite an audience without losing control of the scene. By contrast, media representation of (and advice about) working from bed for white-collar professionals is fraught with anxiety about how to create an image of a desexualized, generic worker whose bed, bedroom, and self-in-bed are newly available to clients, co-workers, and bosses. Presenting distinctive challenges for women workers, the advice we surveyed focuses on aesthetics and comportment, using “professionalism” as a code for discipline and trivializing the consequences of home surveillance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".