Various forms of constraint

Posted on | January 25, 2008 | 7 Comments

I am shifting to Google Reader today after years of Bloglines. Am I making the right decision? Do I care? I’m not overjoyed that Google will have even more information about me because of this – they already have all of my most intimate email. But Bloglines is just slow and it started to bore me. How can a RSS reader bore someone? you may ask. Well, this is why we need more aesthetics theory in internet studies.

So far I have resisted the integration potential that Google or Facebook offer (I still use MySpace, Flickr, AllConsuming, de.licio.us and Adium, for instance). I want to support diversity, I want to resist fashion, and these programs still do things that are uniquely useful for my interests (unlike Twitter, as I mentioned before). Plus no level of personal convenience outweighs the amount to be lost by having only a few superpowers ruling over the new media landscape.

Since reading this Guardian article I’ve been feeling slightly condemned as an internet researcher. But whatever conspiracy theories I might entertain or believe – and hence whatever impulses I have to leave some websites – go against my methodological preference for participant observation and producing sympathetic accounts of online culture. As Christine Hine wrote, in a quote Catherine and I are using in an article we’re writing for MIA:

As the Internet becomes more and more embedded into everyday life, social research will have to come to terms with it in order to achieve its goals of effectively researching and portraying everyday life. If the people you study move some aspects of their life onto the Internet, then so must you.

What this means is if we are in the middle of the biggest personal security heist in history – or if my heart rate and iris size will be used to persecute me in my job in future – that’s the deal. There will be millions of us doing pilates together in US jails, or potentially unemployable because of our Facebook profiles… and surely that can’t be good for the economy.

My stars warned me it would be a week for feeling agitated; I managed to channel most of it into work-related causes. After throwing caution to the wind on fibreculture, I’m now bored stiff to think that I might have to wade through even more talk about young people and social networking to finish our riposte to the ‘digital literacy for a knowledge economy’ agenda. Sigh.

On a brighter note, summertime wanderings in bookshops and the Lifeline Bookfest have inspired me to start a new side project on management self-help (as you can see from the ‘currently reading’ section of the side bar). I want to write a history of the social networking and ‘getting things done’ movements online but trace them back to their pre-web origins; going beyond net-centrism and 2.0 mantras to connect to a longer lineage of sociological writing on white-collar labour and subject formation. Not only will it contextualise some of the cybertariat/cognitariat/precariat stuff that’s so prevalent right now, I also suspect there is an unspoken gender distinction going on in the growth of stress management literature. Blokes read Who Moved My Cheese because their boss does while women read ‘self-help’ or marie claire: both are the same personalised mode of learning to accept structural constraints.

The breathlessness and utilitarianism of business discourse makes this kind of work especially difficult to produce now, but I figure I have at least two years left on this contract…

Category: Research, Web studies

Comments

7 Responses to “Various forms of constraint”

  1. barry
    January 25th, 2008 @ 2:39 pm

    i like using google reader, google reader notifier and growl. it means i get a nice little bubble show up in the corner of my window every time a new article drops into my reader. does make it hard to focus though….

  2. melgregg
    January 25th, 2008 @ 2:45 pm

    And I was just thinking of you…

  3. barry
    January 25th, 2008 @ 3:53 pm

    a heh. that’s a bit scary.

    I do like this though

  4. barry
    January 25th, 2008 @ 3:54 pm

    gah, link was broken.

    http://lifehacker.com/software/feature/geek-to-live-ban-timewasting-web-sites-146448.php

  5. Laura
    January 29th, 2008 @ 4:50 pm

    At my partner’s last workplace everyone in the ‘team’ was made to read WMMC?, indeed each person was given a copy. They were then sent on a team-building retreat with secret special guest who turned out to be none other than Dr Whatshisname the author of WMMC?. Only later on they found out it wasn’t really world-famous Dr Thingo but an actor their manager hired for the day to impersonate him.

  6. melgregg
    January 31st, 2008 @ 2:52 pm

    Oh Laura! Funny. Yes it’s not uncommon for the book to be handed out ‘for free’. Which already makes you wonder.

    What industry does yr partner work in? Must be ok if they can afford team-building retreats. A friend of mine in high finance got sent on those too. Cocktails at night, paint-ball during the day. She showed me the bruises afterwards, and they seemed… symbolic.

  7. Laura
    February 4th, 2008 @ 1:43 pm

    Local Government. That was at his last job, in Peter Costello territory – most councils don’t have that sort of money to chuck around.

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