Working for Nothing

Notes from Andrew Ross’ keynote at the International Labour Process conference last week. These are just the sections on virtual labour. One of the founding principles of the labor movement was that the bosses needed the workers. Now we may be reaching a point where bosses have worked out how to get by without workers. [...]

Gaining momentum

A month later, I am slowly getting my head around the new job, and the wonders of Southern California (also downtown Hillsboro, OR, where my Intel lab buddies are located). On top of the adjustment to the corporate world, the amount of life admin involved in the move has been relentless, so I won’t dwell [...]

From here to there

Just before Christmas I went public with the news that I’ve been hired as a Researcher in Residence at the new Intel Centre for Social Computing based at UC Irvine. This is the last of a series of centres Intel is funding across the US and internationally. It’s a massive investment. This latest centre is [...]

Avoiding telephone interruptions

Notes from Alec Mackenzie (1990) The Time Trap: The New Version of the Classic Book on Time Management. Published by The Business Library – an imprint of Information Australia [anyone with further info on this imprint and its history, please get in touch] The number-one underlying cause of telephone interruptions is your presumption of legitimacy. [...]

Updating papers

One of the little pleasures of rewriting is forcing yourself to add nuance and further examples to test your overall argument or theme. This week I’ve been trying to improve a paper I started roughly a year ago for a conference on surveillance in everyday life, one that I’ve already submitted for publication in an [...]

Is anyone thinking of going to this?

Call for Submissions Interdisciplinary Conference HDEA – TCS ICTs and Work: the United States at the Origin of the Dissemination of Digital Capitalism Université Paris Sorbonne, 29-30 May 2013 Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have revolutionized work practices: the acquisition, processing and storage of data thanks to hardware, software, and networks have changed the face [...]

The territory of the post-professional

Here is the start of a paper I’m working on for the ‘Data, Memory, Territory’ workshop at UWS in November. It is lonely writing in a foreign hotel room! So I post it here in case anyone has any feedback. Given the frame for the event I’m hoping to develop the relationship between time, mastery [...]

Women and work in Australia – notes

The following notes and links are from reading Elizabeth Windschuttle (ed) Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788-1978, Fontana Press, Melbourne, 1980 Ray Markey, ‘Women and Labour, 1880-1900′ (83- 111) Louisa Lawson – the Dawn Club: demanded economic and social equality (The Dawn newspaper now archived online thanks to this successful campaign; more [...]

What can we learn from TV work? Below the line (II)

The significance of Mayer’s book is not just the challenge it issues television studies. On this front, the careful and sympathetic details in its judicious case studies illustrate the potential for the field if it opens its analytic lens. If it is to mean anything, production studies cannot only be satisfied with better accounts of [...]

Below the line – notes (I)

I keep meaning to post notes from all the books I’m reading on sabbatical… but there are so many of them it seems pointless and overwhelming, not to mention compromising. Too many notes will doubtless reveal the depths of my scholarly obsessiveness, left unchecked. I once went to a radical kinesiologist who said that my [...]

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