Adbusters: Media Trance: "If you ask people today why they turn on the radio when they get into the car or listen to the tape deck while washing the dishes, the answer is usually the same. The primary activity engaged in seems boring, a form of drudgery or marking time, and the background medium, usually music, allows the chores to be accomplished with less sense of their dreariness.
By far the greatest proportion of media used as background or secondary activity occurs during periods devoted to what Ivan Illich has called 'shadow work,' the labor that people living in modern market economies routinely do as an unpaid complement to industrial production and distribution. According to Illich, shadow work:
...comprises most housework women do in their homes and apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and from the job. It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which one is compelled, and many of the activities usually labeled 'family life.'
(Shadow Work, 1981)"
