Surveillance and Everyday Life

Posted on | January 18, 2012 | 1 Comment

Sydney University’s Surveillance and Everyday Life project is running a two day conference next month, and the program (pdf) has just been announced.

Looks like I’m speaking on day two. The paper is something I’m working on for a collection on ‘identity technologies’ edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak.

This is one of a series of pieces inspired by teaching my course, Intimacy, Love and Friendship, which runs again this semester. I welcome input and more examples! Details below.

All in your hands: Smart phones, intimacy and adultery

This paper explores emerging practices of intimacy, publicity and privacy evident in a range of mobile media applications, particularly those that facilitate and obscure adulterous behaviour. The forms of surveillance imagined through these technology designs, and their gendered assumptions, will be features of the analysis. The paper draws together a history of writing on love and flirtation, theories of intimacy and friendship, and empirical studies of mobile media – including research conducted by the author on technology use among white collar professionals. In this framework, smart phones are shown to reflect the vulnerabilities of contemporary relationships as much as their changing function. If mobile technologies provide an infrastructure to relieve the tensions inherent in normative coupledom today, they also hold the potential to refigure our sense of domesticity’s function, most obviously in terms of the link between physical proximity and intimacy. The surveillance capacities of new media devices here offer insights into emerging models of friendship, sexual ethics and care.

Category: Academia, Gender, Research, Sexuality

Orientation

Posted on | January 16, 2012 | No Comments

An impressive new post at Music for Deckchairs takes on an extreme case in recent university marketing strategies – no doubt expressing some of the reservations others may feel in the lead up to a new academic semester. It reminds me of the remarkable experience I had heading out for lunch outside the Quadrangle at Sydney last year, only to witness a massive jumping castle and fairground ride perched on the front lawn. (I think there was free fairy floss that day too?) In contrast to the dunking case, the Sydney event was sponsored by the student union. Do these things happen elsewhere too? What have they got to do with students enrolling and coming to class?

Category: Academia

Flux or precarity? It depends who you write for

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 4 Comments

Two articles I read this week offer contrasting insights into the state of the work world at present. One is from a notorious business cheerleader, one is from a Leftist magazine, but it seems to me they are writing about the same thing.

The first piece, coming out in next month’s Fast Company, describes Generation Flux, or “GenFlux”. It profiles a crop of successful urban professionals apparently delirious from their encounter with the outlet’s styling and grooming team. These icons of new industries share thoughts on the future of business – though “There Are No Perfect Role Models” in this chaotic new landscape. Still, readers are encouraged to turn to these informants for guidance at a time when “our visibility about the future is declining”. In classic Who Moved My Cheese logic, the article announces:

The entire world of business is now in a constant state of agile development. New releases are constant; tweaks, upgrades, and course corrections take place on the fly. There is no status quo; there is only a process of change.

Successful fluxers are those prepared for constant impermanence, who embrace instability without fear:

The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort… with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you’ll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating.

This passage links to a further article on The Four Year Career, part of the issue’s broader showcase of admirable go-getters.

Adrenaline fuelled work worlds promising constant challenges for thrill-seekers are generically familiar to anyone who remembers No Collar – Andrew Ross’s study of the glamorised workaholism that fed the dot.com boom. In the latest vision however “government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we’ve lived” are now described as “legacy institutions… the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap”.

The message of the article is clear: individuals need to equip themselves with the skills and know-how to survive what is a Darwinian drama. Constant stimulus is “the new normal”. Hear how the story moralises against resistance:

Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we’ve learned and relying on what’s worked before. It’s also about as useful as an appendix right now. When times seem uncertain, we instinctively become more conservative; we look to the past, to times that seem simpler, and we have the urge to re-create them. This impulse is as true for businesses as for people. But when the past has been blown away by new technology, by the ubiquitous and always-on global hypernetwork, beloved past practices may well be useless.

The second piece from Dissent magazine takes as its subject the rise of the not-for-profit Freelancers’ Union in the US. Running out of Brooklyn, the organisation has seen considerable growth in its seven year lifespan, no doubt partly due to the unstable work conditions outlined above. But rather than flux, writer Atossa Araxia Abrahamian defines today’s work environment as one of “precariousness”:

The General Accounting Office estimates that 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is “contingent” — meaning freelance; temporary; and, most significantly, taxed differently from employees and not entitled to such benefits as health insurance, retirement, paid vacation, even weekends. Job turnover in the United States is also astoundingly high: according to some accounts, 45 percent of the American workforce will switch jobs within a year.

The article uses Guy Standing’s typology to explain how precarity affects workers differently according to education, income, class and cultural background. This welcome observation is crucial for gaining a handle on the complexity of compensation claims for contingent labour – especially in the creative economy.

The piece also gives a useful overview of the way “flexibility” has been used in recent organisational culture. The morphology this term has taken is a fantastic case study in the power of sliding signification chains. The article concludes that individual work styles (and the impossibility of imagining self-less solidarity?) lock employers and freelancers alike into a mutually beneficial, if simultaneously risky, “flexonomy”.

Taken together, we might read these articles as alternative takes on the same structural problem – the increasingly mainstream experience of non-permanent work. But one reads as a celebration, another a lament. Is this not one way of witnessing the difference between right and left wing economic views more generally? Does the performative effect of embracing change over nostalgia ultimately wield more power than the defeatist language of precarity? This is something I wonder at the moment, as I work on a chapter for a new collection called Theorising Cultural Work.

According to Safian, GenFlux “is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one”. Not all workers will join the movement, whose members are defined by “a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions”. The trouble is, avoiding the movement is likely to result in the very outcomes described so vividly in the Dissent piece: management forcing permanent staff out of work, only to re-advertise the same jobs without secure conditions. (If this can happen to journalists, I wonder how much longer we will wait for it to happen on a wide scale to academics).

I guess the intended audience for the two pieces also hints at the significant distinction between those who get to choose flux and those who don’t. Certainly the decision not to invest in workers for the long term is the one choice high-flying contract-based managers are increasingly willing to make. Of course, this is not the only way to respond to operational pressures. But it is likely to be an all too common response to reading hyped-up articles in publications like Fast Company.

[Thanks to Courtney and JW for original links to the articles]

Category: Reading

Willunga Connects – public release

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | No Comments

This time a year ago I was heading off to Willunga, South Australia, to study the roll-out of the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network.

Just before Christmas, the South Australian Government’s Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology released the public report on our findings.

This is the only research of its kind that took place at the point of implementation at one of the five first release sites. Its recommendations therefore have relevance for ongoing stages of the project, just as they give insight into attitudes about the NBN among ‘ordinary’ Australians.

In addition to the cultural analysis of the town, a feature of the report is the survey of 422 Willunga school students that we conducted towards the end of the study. This offers some interesting new data on young people’s use of online technology.

You can download the report here, or let me know if you would like a hard copy.

Category: NBN, Publications, Research, Willunga
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Participants needed: Popular Music and Cultural Memory project

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | No Comments

Brisbane music writer/researcher/legend Ian Rogers is in Sydney next month to do interviews on a project called Popular Music and Cultural Memory. He needs help recruiting participants for interviews during the period Monday Feb 13th til Wed Feb 22nd (also in Adelaide Jan 16-25 and Canberra Feb 1-8).

As he puts it: “The interview is DEAD easy and fun. Mainly about your experiences listening to music growing up and how it informed your life.

A present I’m available throughout that period but am trying to lock in the early interviews.”

Here is a brief about the project:

—
Popular Music and Cultural Memory: localised popular music histories and their significance for national music industries.

We’re looking for people with an interest in music. Perhaps you have been a die-hard fan, or just a casual listener? You might be 21 or 91? Whatever your investment in popular music, or your age or stage, we’d like to hear from you. Write to us and share your memories as part of a research project about popular music and cultural memory.

The interview is generally considered fun by most respondents. We’re trying to answer questions like: What do people remember about popular music?
How has it been part of people’s personal history? What does it mean to our nation?

If you have the time and the inclination, please get in touch and we’ll come and have a talk to you.

Ian’s contact details are:

Ian Rogers
Popular Music and Cultural Memory Research Team
Griffith University
Email: iankeithrogers@gmail.com
MOB: 0431 955 371

The interview is for scholarly research into music and memory and is confidential.

A whole bunch of information about the project can be found here: http://musicmemoriesproject.blogspot.com/

Please spread the word and volunteer!

Category: Uncategorized

NTEU Future of Higher Education Conference

Posted on | January 6, 2012 | 2 Comments

Has anyone heard of this conference? I hadn’t – even as a union member and a Sydney employee – but am interested to know who would go based on the speakers listed. From the titles alone, it’s not clear that any of the academic speakers are active teaching staff in the present, let alone the future. Surely this should be addressed?

Category: Academia
Tags: > > >

Holiday consumption

Posted on | January 3, 2012 | 1 Comment

This fascinating post at Supervalent Thought is timely motivation for new year writing projects. Makes me wonder if I should rethink my avoidance of MLA. I’ve never been, having lost touch with literary studies after my Honours year. I still think in terms of textuality though… indeed the more I go through peer review processes the more I think this training continues to linger. But more on peer review, etc later.

The past few weeks I’ve been away from Sydney, my job and my computer, and now have some much needed new year energy as a result. I am (maybe?) joining the #pomodorojerk writing group when I am back at work, although I am a bit ambivalent about productivity as a value system. I mention it in case you might want to join too.

So far summer has involved about 2500kms of driving – from Sydney to Port Douglas – visiting relatives and friends. It has included a fairly average attempt to read whole books, including novels: Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot; Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing; Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (belatedly). These are all campus novels, in one way or another, so they weren’t an ideal way to tune out from academic life. Still. It helps sometimes to see your world as a genre.

I’m also most of the way through a biography of Elton Mayo which I think will be the source of a lot of writing and thinking plans in the coming year. I had no idea he was Australian and taught at the University of Queensland! This history opens up all kinds of interesting pathways and connections.

With the benefit of aircon, I’ve been catching up on Homeland as well. Read Jason Jacobs’ great take on it here. (And please, no spoilers; I’m still at ep 8).

Category: Academia, Reading, Travel, Viewing
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The 8 hour day in the iPhone age

Posted on | December 2, 2011 | 1 Comment

This is my text for tonight’s ALP fringe event hosted by the Australian Services Union. The opening story is a small edited section from “On Call”, Chapter 9 of Work’s Intimacy.

The first time we interviewed Jodi* she was enjoying working from home once every few weeks. These were days when Jodi was encouraged to think about the big picture, to be “less operational and more strategic”. A typical day at work for the telco involved wall-to-wall meetings: “you have half an hour break and then you run to another one, or you have one that goes all day”. So working from home was a chance to work on longer term projects without this sense of coercive presenteeism.

On her home days, Jodi claimed she would have her email open an extra hour at each end of the day, from 7.30 in the morning until 10.30 at night: “Just because I’m addicted to it and I have to see and respond to everything because often a lot of urgent things come up”. Even though she cherished working from home to get away from the office schedule, Jodi felt obliged to stay connected nonetheless. Putting an “out of office” reply on her email account sent the wrong message, she felt:

if you put an ‘Out of office’ on saying ‘I’m working from home today and not available on email’, then they’d be like ‘Well, how are you working?’ People don’t understand that you could just be working on a project when you need to just spread out and think.

Another reason Jodi monitored email around the clock was because on any given day it was the main source of directives from superiors asking for tight turnarounds.

Like this morning… I planned all this stuff I needed to get done today and then something came up this morning that needed to be done by close of business at 8, and it was going to take up quite a bit of time, so lucky I saw that email and responded to it and was able to manage it and get it done before close of business today.

Jodi’s use of email, which she calls an “addiction”, is actually a matter of having learned to prepare for perceived emergencies, and adapting to the communication preferences of more powerful colleagues in the organisation. With her managers so often in meetings, face-to-face contact was rare. Email was the one constant in a chaotic schedule.

Following our first interview Jodi’s role changed to include being placed on an on-call roster in addition to her regular duties. For 48 hours every fortnight, she had to be available for conference calls to deal with critical incidents affecting the company. Service faults and coverage issues were among the key problems. Our meeting transpired in the middle of this period:

I was on-call all day Sunday, Monday and today… I was on a teleconference last night until 7.30, and I was on one again at 8 a.m. on the train this morning, and I was going to go to the gym in my lunch hour and I got called to another business bridge, and these are just urgent things. We have 20 minutes notice that you have to hop on, and they’re critical incidents that are happening to our customers and we have to work out how to manage them.

Jodi was conscious of how this new requirement of her role was affecting her usual routine:

it’s really hard for me to have that work/life balance when I – like I was doing my conference call last night while doing the groceries and driving to the grocery store, and this morning trying to do it on the train with all these people around me who are not supposed to know this confidential customer incident. And then, you know, again trying to have some balance in your lunch hour with some gym, and that doesn’t ever happen. I’ve had a membership for six months now and I’ve gone maybe for the first two months, and then I had it scheduled today to go and then a bridge was called in the middle of it. So I couldn’t go.

The urgency and unpredictability involved in Jodi’s new job obligations made it difficult for her to make the simplest of plans. Her efforts to place limits on work’s invasiveness sound like a series of traps or enclosures, as work follows her every turn once she leaves the office. Not knowing when work would be required while she was on call also affected her home life.

I had to keep my mobile on last night because they told me at the 8.30 bridge they were going to call one at 6 o’clock in the morning. So normally I would have my phone on silent and only turn it on when I woke up, but because I knew this one was coming, I had to have my phone on so that – I didn’t sleep very well, actually, and I had this by my bedside and I was just thinking about this stuff I had at work and I had to get up, about 3 o’clock in the morning, and write down the things that were running through my head that I had to do for work because my head was racing with all the stuff I have to do and I couldn’t relax until I’d written it down and my mind could forget about it.

To make matters worse, this on-call extension to Jodi’s job was unpaid. It was a mandatory add-on for an indefinite time, justified by the fact that the telco she worked for was going through “a five-year transformation period”.

We’re migrating our customers from one platform to another and things happen all the time, like ten a day, incidences of things going wrong. So one example this morning was 100 per cent of our systems were freezing and they couldn’t do any transactions at all, at all. So whenever a customer comes in: ‘Sorry, can’t help you; system frozen’. We had to develop a work-around and some comms for our staff to be able to tell customers what to say in the situation.

Jodi acknowledged that these improvements to the company were unavoidable:

The annoying thing is like it’s not something that you’d ever get recognition for or not something you’re going to make the business money; it’s just something that has to be done and we just have to do it as part of our job.

Even though she hated the extension to her role, Jodi modulated her frustration by saying: “my manager’s also on-call, so she understands what it’s like, so that’s something”. But her manager, Holly, was paid a higher salary for this level of responsibility. By contrast, Jodi had simply been told: “Someone has to do it and you’re the one that’s skilled to do it”. Like the technology she was using to stay in touch with work, Jodi’s job had become subject to function creep.

Jodi’s relatively junior position gave her few choices. While she would be entitled to time off in lieu, she seemed unlikely to claim back the hours. Too much individual complaint would look like trouble-making in this team-based workplace: “I haven’t heard of anyone asking for it. I think if I did ask, my manager would probably say ‘Well I’m doing it and I haven’t asked for it’, so I don’t think so”. Within a few months it became clear that the five-year “transformation period” for the company also involved offloading 800 workers across the country. Jodi’s manager was one of the redundancies, and most of the team was wiped out entirely.

Jodi’s story gives us clear evidence of the impact of the iPhone on the 8 hour day. Most obviously, online technology changes our sense of availability when it comes to job commitments. Work can invade spaces and times that were once protected from its reach. This is a process we might describe the presence bleed of contemporary working life, where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities slowly dissolve – and when work becomes so intimate that it carries in to the grocery shopping, even sleep.

Presence bleed explains the now familiar experience whereby the location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with a “to do” list that seems forever out of control. It captures the sense of responsibility workers feel in making themselves willing to work beyond paid hours, and the anxiety that can arise in jobs that involve a never-ending schedule of tasks that must be fulfilled – especially since there are not enough workers to carry the load. Checking email, monitoring phones and maintaining online awareness are the inevitable outcomes when technology design has meant that our office is now in our phone. And when the phone is always within reach – in your pocket, by the bed – how can you claim to be unavailable for work contact?

As the office has become virtual, work is no longer a noun, a physical space for labour to be contained. It is instead a verb: a practice that takes place wherever it seems most convenient. The challenge for labour politics today is that a growing number of us exist in workplaces no longer governed by “clock time” but by an unpredictable schedule of rolling “events” – and transformation periods that never end because managers stay employed by enacting them.

What Jodi’s story also tells us is technology plays a role in naturalising and disguising this additional, unmeasured and therefore unacknowledged labour. How many of us regularly check email on a mobile device, at random times of the day, because it is “convenient” to do so – or because email doesn’t “count” as work? And how many people today realistically have a job where answering email isn’t expected as part of the daily requirements? In my study, people would regularly get up at dawn, before the rest of the house woke up, to get on top of email before going to the office to do “real work”. Others, especially mums, would wait until late night, the dinner cooked and the kids asleep, to “catch up” on work. These are the dawn raids and midnight attacks in the ongoing war on email. And like the war on drugs, it is a war that can’t be won. By its very design, network technology delivers more information than it is humanly possible to process – so why do we think that tomorrow morning will be any different?

In the guise of “convenience”, the iPhone has helped to ensure that there is no excuse for workers not to be on top of information, up to speed, and ready to answer the call. The irony is that managers regularly see these devices as key to better workforce productivity. Now, I grew up on a farm. My first workplace was my dad’s shearing shed. People in this audience will know that shearers fought for a workplace with the clearest 8 hour day you can imagine: 4 x 2 hour shifts, with smoko and a lunch break in between. In the work worlds I live and study today, people are sleeping with their phones, and checking email over breakfast. Is this the kind of life that a relatively wealthy country gives rise to? What room does it leave for social participation beyond paid work? If we are moving to a knowledge economy, as ALP leaders regularly tell us, it is time we came up with a new language to put limits on these seemingly inescapable labours.

*Not her real name.

Category: Events, Research, Work

Book reviews, excerpts & party!

Posted on | October 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

Work’s Intimacy has been out in Australia for a few weeks now after an earlier release in the UK. Some reviews are coming in already; this one from The Guardian is very exciting, as is this in The Irish Times. There is also a write up in the Times Higher Education.

In Australia a couple of excerpts have been published online if you are after a peek. At Inside Story, “Home Offices and Remote Parents” comes from chapter seven of the book. This is the chapter that lots of readers seem to react to, as it contains some of the most troubling stories of working parents with signs of chronic connectivity. Thanks to Peter Browne for his efforts putting this together.

Over at The Conversation, the piece I intended to write was sidelined with the news of Steve Jobs’ passing. As it happens, Jobs has a significant place in the concluding arguments for the book, so I decided to share some of them here. Thanks to Pat McGrath for that opportunity.

There have been some great radio experiences I have been lucky to have over the past little while, too, which I just wanted to store here for posterity. Thanks to Steve Austin and Richard Glover for having me on their programs as well.

The string of events that have unfolded since the book’s release – which also now include Occupy Wall Street – makes me realise how much more I would like to say about work and intimacy in future. For the moment, though, I want to announce the launch party for the book in Sydney in a few weeks. Everyone is welcome. The details are here and below. Come if you can!

Date: Thursday November 17th 6.00 for a 6.30pm

Place: The Beauchamp Hotel – Terrace Bar – 1st Floor
Corner of Oxford & South Dowling Sts, Darlinghurst, Sydney

To be launched by Annabel Crabb, the ABC’s chief political online writer and presenter of The Drum

RSVPs advised by November 15th to Simon Spivak at sspivak@wiley.com

Category: Events, Publications

Next project

Posted on | September 27, 2011 | No Comments

Lots happening on the book front this week, which I’ll post about separately. For now, I just wanted to mention that I’ve updated my current research section to include a description of the project I hope to do next year while on sabbatical. ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’ extends some of my previous work on technology and office culture by going back to the archives. The intention is to trace the emergence of efficiency regimes and management mantras as they appear in various funded studies and curricula formative in the development of HR.

As part of this, I am trying to expand the idea of professional technologies to include psychological processes as much as externally imposed devices (and here I’m influenced by Dom Pettman’s work, in Love and Other Technologies, as much as by Foucault and his successors). I’m really keen to get some feedback on these ideas, so please take a look if you’re interested.

The proposal includes an extended period in the US some time after July 2012 and I’m currently looking for hosts and schemes that might support a trip of about 4 months’ length. If anyone would like me to do a talk or visit during the second half of next year to help with this, please get in touch!

Category: Research, Travel
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