What I am and am not doing

For the past week I’ve been doing the revisions for my paper ‘Freedom to Work: The impact of wireless on labour politics’ for the MIA issue I’m editing with Gerard Goggin. The process has led to some deep introspection about my own work habits, particularly the amount of time I spend “online” and why (hence I’ve resisted blogging about it until after having the weekend off!). One of the things I suggest towards the end of the article is that wireless technologies provide an impetus to re-evaluate traditional forms of leave entitlement - including provision to demand absence from online as well as physical presence. From my perspective it seems clear that people in information jobs have been slow to develop strategies to cope with the increased expectation of connectedness (in part because we like it, just to simplify the argument). But we will need to get much more articulate at explaining the impact of work’s potential presence through personal wireless devices if we are likely to resist its thorough invasion of our leisure time.

With that in mind, I’ve decided my experiment with Twitter is over. Inspired by some on- and offline conversations with Axel, some topical comments from Merlin Mann, and a timely rediscovery of The Little Book of Calm (!! that the inside cover tells me I was given by a friend on my 21st birthday… I have been stressed for 8 years?), I’ve realised it hasn’t been having the best effect on me. Partly this is because of circumstance. I started with a public profile which influenced what I would write. Then, the group of fellow Tweeters I accumulated skewed the updates I received in certain directions. Many being work colleagues and/or geeky types, I would know what conference someone was speaking at or the latest software they were frustrated with but I wouldn’t know if they had been particularly moved by something or what they wanted their life to be like in 3 months’ time. This is the problem I have with social networking sites more broadly: the forms of intimacy they allow for have to be tailored in particular ways to account for the blurring of ‘friends’ with ‘contacts’. Meanwhile, the temporality they encourage is so wrapped up in reporting on the perpetual present that we seem to be losing our capacity to imagine the future.

The soundbite dimension to the technology also meant that Tweets were often loaded with affect - and usually more negative than positive. On a cumulative basis, hearing how busy/ stressed/ productive/ bored someone is doesn’t feel pleasurable, it just feels like a magnification of my own chronic and less than healthy anxieties. Of course there have been moments of joy and fun too, but not enough to outweigh the contagiousness of more destructive states of mind. So if you want to know what I’m doing from now on, you’ll have to leave me a comment, email, call or drop by the office - probably enough options for the moment.

In the MIA article, and my earlier Continuum article on blogging, I argue that maintaining an online presence seems to offer a new form of workplace solidarity, providing solace and camaraderie in tandem, at a distance. But there’s something about the way this manifests on Twitter that feels too distant for me. There’s also something going on with the constancy of Tweets (and the idea of a personal ‘news feed’) that I want to think more about, perhaps in terms of security rather than community. Above all, what Axel’s helped me understand is that form is maybe just as important as content to what I value in blogging (but in terms of the latter, this would have to be one of my favourite blog posts of the year to date: Laura seems to be having a Meaghan Morris shopping centre moment). On that note, Axel and I will be leading a conversation about research blogging at The Australian Blogging Conference here in Brisbane in a few weeks. We’ll be asking people to consider questions like:

* What’s there to research about blogging?
* What research methodologies can be used to research blogging?
* How do blogs support the research process?
* How do blogs contribute to disseminating research?

It would be great to have as many of you along as can make it.