I’m so grateful to Rebecca for her work on this and the experience of collaborating together. It’s taught me a lot about the difficulty of writing interdisciplinary analysis – and reminded me of the challenges in producing internet research beyond social sciences paradigms. I really value the determination and imagination Becky is showing in bringing together different disciplinary influences in her PhD work, which this paper has developed from.

Unfortunately in the process of peer review we were asked to remove the song lyrics we originally included in the paper. (I hadn’t realised that copyright was so strict… and have had song lyrics published in the same journal before). Anyway, when reading, know that we originally wanted this as our main intertextual reference. Lily says it better than us.

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.

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.

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.

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!

The paper is called “The Return of Organization Man” and I’m just trying to figure out the final part of the analysis, which follows on from a discussion of the film adaptations of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road.

I think overall I am trying to illustrate the shift from organizations to networks, at least as this manifests in certain representations of commuter space on screen… hence the choice of examples. But my other objective is to tease out some of the ideological work that The Organization Man has done over the decades as a trope for a specifically US obsession with individualism versus conformity.

Put simply, the final switch in the argument will be to substitute Google for the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit as a model for the kind of compromised surveillance we accept following on from The Organization. All the while the suburbs remain a resilient index of conformity. This makes me wonder about the class composition – and cultural geographies – that bands like The Arcade Fire speak to in their representations of “the suburbs.” Here I am taking the apparent uproar about their Grammy win as symptomatic of something broader, i.e. could it be that networked employment may in fact only be the dominant model for some city-based types? It may not be so obvious for the many workers who still choose to live and work in the suburbs (and who I suspect despise Mad Men).

But I need help. It’s now clear that The Wilderness Downtown has become something of an industry darling – not least because it managed to get so many users to make the switch to Chrome. The first question for any friends reading this in North America is: how well does it work on your computer? I am just trying to gauge how much the whole project relies on the (North American) bias of Google Maps for its full effect. Given current broadband speeds in Australia, it’s also not possible to tell from here exactly how good the images and much lauded “experience” might be. So of course other responses are welcome from elsewhere too.

While I’m at it – and this is really for music friends: has anyone read anything interesting about The Arcade Fire aside from the typical tour interview + album review? Specifically their obsession with suburban nostalgia? There must be stuff I’m missing. I’d love to know about anything that takes on the website collaboration/ experiment from a slightly critical or scholarly point of view. Given the nature of the interwebs, it’s hard – and way too time consuming – to wade through the Grammy and FWA accolades to narrow a search.

Which is maybe something to do with what the paper is about.

One is that it breaks the stranglehold of multinational publishing houses owning the terms of access to our work. While I always appreciate the effort that goes in to editing and peer-review, traditional scholarly publishing is not always an ideal way to share new ideas. This is particularly important for those of us who want to be read by people other than currently employed academics and enrolled students. Given the politics of institutional subscriptions to journals it is hardly the case that publication guarantees a relevant readership anyway, leaving aside the open secret about just how much time teaching academics have to read articles at all.

Tied to this is the way in which existing networks of academic exchange – be they conference circuits or “walled gardens” like Facebook – sometimes constitute a narrowing of consensus among established interest groups. What’s striking to me within 24 hours of joining academia.edu is the number of non-Anglosphere users. This is genuinely exciting and pedagogical and it ties in with some of my longer term efforts (through involvement with the International Association of Cultural Studies, for instance) to agitate against Anglo-American dominance in scholarship.

I was reminded and re-angered about this recently at the Boston ICA during the session on “The university in crisis.” Despite the different geographical location of the four speakers, and a searing indictment of the Bologna Process offered by my fellow panellist Isabel Gil, question time was dominated by US speakers spanning several generations seeking to discuss exclusively US experiences. This left me lamenting the function of “international” as well as “communication” in “International Communication Association” – and wondering what lessons might need to be learned for such a grouping to attract associates from further afield. (To the young guy who came up to Isabel and I afterwards and apologised on behalf of his peers: thanks for noticing.)

So, I will continue to post publications here on the blog – and it’s perhaps not a coincidence that there is a new one I’m adding today on autonomism and the politics of love. But in an effort to expand critical horizons (and be open to the “common wealth” of scholarly peers beyond Empire, to draw from Hardt and Negri), I will also be urging lots of you to make use of this fantastic, open-access resource.

The class was also an attempt to introduce some frank discussion about life in academia, since I worry that a lot of students have little idea as to what the job actually entails. I certainly had no concept as an Honours or PhD student just how much things change on the other side of the fence. So we had a look at some of these clips to see the funny and the serious sides to the situation:

Both of these representations skew to a US audience, of course. I always try to urge the students to contextualise the issues and find out if they are the same in countries like Australia. Next week, I’ll be on a panel at ICA discussing ‘The University in Crisis’ where I imagine some of these problems will be raised. It will be interesting to compare notes with academics in other parts of the world to get some perspective on the activism that is focusing attention here.

One of the challenges in my current teaching context is the diversity of students’ aspirations. On one end, there are those who dream of being an academic (including some who think they already are one!). On the other, there are those who can’t even articulate what kind of career they might want – except to say that being an academic seems completely crazy.

Given some of the statistics I came across in preparation for the discussion last week, you’d have to see the logic of the latter group. In a number of fields the number of PhD graduates relative to jobs is simply untenable. But of course we’ve been through this before – and the situation is subject to change over time.

So rather than offering blanket prescriptions that endorse one path over another, or lose hope in the profession(s) entirely, what seems useful pedagogically is to offer as much advice as possible to students with their own specific tensions and questions facing the future. In the last half an hour I answered questions about research pathways that students submitted anonymously at the start of the class. I also offered to answer questions that they hadn’t found a satisfactory answer for in other classes so far in their degree.

In the following few posts, I’m going to share some of the questions here, in the hope that others might also like to help answering. This way we can create an archive and perhaps also a demonstration of the online communities of support that are available when we feel like we are facing big questions alone.