Always on: the seminar
Posted on | August 26, 2008 |
CENTRE FOR CRITICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES
PUBLIC SEMINAR SERIES for 2008
Tuesday 9th September 2.00-3.30pm
Dr Melissa Gregg
Always On: Coping with Constant Connectivity
Social Sciences and Humanities Library Conference Room
Level 1 Duhig Building (Bldg 2) St Lucia Campus [See Map]
Abstract:
While expensive advertising campaigns continue to promote the benefits of new media technologies, particularly for time-poor executives , far less is known about how these same technologies are deployed in more traditional middle-class jobs. For those in large organisations, mobile and wireless devices deliver new forms of imposition and surveillance as much as they do efficiency or freedom, and with email increasingly considered an entrenched part of organisational culture, ordinary workers are finding it necessary to develop their own tactics to manage a constant expectation that they will be available through the screen, if not in person.
This seminar will present interim findings from one of the first Australian studies looking at the impact of new media technologies on work and home life. It will be based on interviews with employees working in information jobs in some of Brisbane’s largest organisations over the past two years.
Placing these findings in the broader history of white-collar work, however, this seminar will argue that the compulsiveness behind much online behaviour has a lineage that a fixation on new media technology actually overlooks. That is, the desire to be connected, and hence to be recognised as desirable, productive and efficient, has its roots in a middle-class professional persona that is only now learning to adjust to the demands of an ‘always-on’ society.
About the Presenter:
Melissa Gregg is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. In 2007 she received a UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award for her research on new media technology.
This seminar will be chaired by Professor Graeme Turner.
Members of the university community and the general public are invited to attend this free seminar with refreshments to follow. For further information please visit the website .
Further information please contact: Rebecca Ralph ph. 3346 7407 or on email: r.ralph[at]uq.edu.au
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