Also, on Friday 24th, Kane and I are organising an all day workshop, ‘Researching intimacy, sexuality and space’ at The University of Sydney. It will feature a series of speakers from Sydney and elsewhere, and finishes with a public forum with Sara and others debating “Why Gender Matters.”

Full details of the line-up will be available shortly. For now, I wanted to mention that in preparation for the Friday event we are running a weekly reading and discussion group that people here may wish to follow online or come along and join.

We’ve decided to group the discussions under three themes that relate to the Friday program and the drawcard speakers – Annamarie Jagose, Kate Lilley, Melissa Hardie, Lee Wallace, Kane Race, Elspeth Probyn and Sara. The readings will give a good sense of each speaker’s background and key ideas, and we will use the meetings to discuss how their work and the different lineages relate to each other – and to the field.

Here’s how it will look:

Week 1 – Sex (AMJ)
Week 2 – Style (KL, MH, LW)
Week 3 – Space (SA, KR, EP)

The themes are broad but from each we will get a chance to discuss 1) politics of queer/sex/identity 2) aesthetics and style – especially in cultural forms 3) theories of space, embodiment, belonging, scenes.

If you are interested in coming along to one or several of these we will meet on campus each week starting this Friday (3rd) at 3pm. Both Kane and I will be there and possibly other faculty depending on availability.

The following readings are the starting point for this week’s meeting:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.
Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.
Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Get in touch to find out more…

I am also conscious of being heavily influenced from having just finished Andrew Ross’s latest book, Bird on Fire. This fantastic and important work covers so much that I can’t manage to address in this piece: property speculation, migration, climate change, gender and racism. It’s what I have in mind when I try to link the forms of biomediated calculation that service our online experiences as much as our credit rating.

I’ll post more about Andrew’s book another soon; I just mention it here to signal how much the financial crisis seems tied to what I’m describing as ‘the waning of the commute’. Put another way: there are suburbs, and then there are suburbs.

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.

The first piece, coming out in next month’s Fast Company, describes Generation Flux, or “GenFlux”. It profiles a crop of successful urban professionals apparently delirious from their encounter with the outlet’s styling and grooming team. These icons of new industries share thoughts on the future of business – though “There Are No Perfect Role Models” in this chaotic new landscape. Still, readers are encouraged to turn to these informants for guidance at a time when “our visibility about the future is declining”. In classic Who Moved My Cheese logic, the article announces:

The entire world of business is now in a constant state of agile development. New releases are constant; tweaks, upgrades, and course corrections take place on the fly. There is no status quo; there is only a process of change.

Successful fluxers are those prepared for constant impermanence, who embrace instability without fear:

The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort… with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you’ll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating.

This passage links to a further article on The Four Year Career, part of the issue’s broader showcase of admirable go-getters.

Adrenaline fuelled work worlds promising constant challenges for thrill-seekers are generically familiar to anyone who remembers No Collar – Andrew Ross’s study of the glamorised workaholism that fed the dot.com boom. In the latest vision however “government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we’ve lived” are now described as “legacy institutions… the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap”.

The message of the article is clear: individuals need to equip themselves with the skills and know-how to survive what is a Darwinian drama. Constant stimulus is “the new normal”. Hear how the story moralises against resistance:

Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we’ve learned and relying on what’s worked before. It’s also about as useful as an appendix right now. When times seem uncertain, we instinctively become more conservative; we look to the past, to times that seem simpler, and we have the urge to re-create them. This impulse is as true for businesses as for people. But when the past has been blown away by new technology, by the ubiquitous and always-on global hypernetwork, beloved past practices may well be useless.

The second piece from Dissent magazine takes as its subject the rise of the not-for-profit Freelancers’ Union in the US. Running out of Brooklyn, the organisation has seen considerable growth in its seven year lifespan, no doubt partly due to the unstable work conditions outlined above. But rather than flux, writer Atossa Araxia Abrahamian defines today’s work environment as one of “precariousness”:

The General Accounting Office estimates that 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is “contingent” — meaning freelance; temporary; and, most significantly, taxed differently from employees and not entitled to such benefits as health insurance, retirement, paid vacation, even weekends. Job turnover in the United States is also astoundingly high: according to some accounts, 45 percent of the American workforce will switch jobs within a year.

The article uses Guy Standing’s typology to explain how precarity affects workers differently according to education, income, class and cultural background. This welcome observation is crucial for gaining a handle on the complexity of compensation claims for contingent labour – especially in the creative economy.

The piece also gives a useful overview of the way “flexibility” has been used in recent organisational culture. The morphology this term has taken is a fantastic case study in the power of sliding signification chains. The article concludes that individual work styles (and the impossibility of imagining self-less solidarity?) lock employers and freelancers alike into a mutually beneficial, if simultaneously risky, “flexonomy”.

Taken together, we might read these articles as alternative takes on the same structural problem – the increasingly mainstream experience of non-permanent work. But one reads as a celebration, another a lament. Is this not one way of witnessing the difference between right and left wing economic views more generally? Does the performative effect of embracing change over nostalgia ultimately wield more power than the defeatist language of precarity? This is something I wonder at the moment, as I work on a chapter for a new collection called Theorising Cultural Work.

According to Safian, GenFlux “is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one”. Not all workers will join the movement, whose members are defined by “a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions”. The trouble is, avoiding the movement is likely to result in the very outcomes described so vividly in the Dissent piece: management forcing permanent staff out of work, only to re-advertise the same jobs without secure conditions. (If this can happen to journalists, I wonder how much longer we will wait for it to happen on a wide scale to academics).

I guess the intended audience for the two pieces also hints at the significant distinction between those who get to choose flux and those who don’t. Certainly the decision not to invest in workers for the long term is the one choice high-flying contract-based managers are increasingly willing to make. Of course, this is not the only way to respond to operational pressures. But it is likely to be an all too common response to reading hyped-up articles in publications like Fast Company.

[Thanks to Courtney and JW for original links to the articles]

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.

As he puts it: “The interview is DEAD easy and fun. Mainly about your experiences listening to music growing up and how it informed your life.

A present I’m available throughout that period but am trying to lock in the early interviews.”

Here is a brief about the project:

—
Popular Music and Cultural Memory: localised popular music histories and their significance for national music industries.

We’re looking for people with an interest in music. Perhaps you have been a die-hard fan, or just a casual listener? You might be 21 or 91? Whatever your investment in popular music, or your age or stage, we’d like to hear from you. Write to us and share your memories as part of a research project about popular music and cultural memory.

The interview is generally considered fun by most respondents. We’re trying to answer questions like: What do people remember about popular music?
How has it been part of people’s personal history? What does it mean to our nation?

If you have the time and the inclination, please get in touch and we’ll come and have a talk to you.

Ian’s contact details are:

Ian Rogers
Popular Music and Cultural Memory Research Team
Griffith University
Email: iankeithrogers@gmail.com
MOB: 0431 955 371

The interview is for scholarly research into music and memory and is confidential.

A whole bunch of information about the project can be found here: http://musicmemoriesproject.blogspot.com/

Please spread the word and volunteer!

The past few weeks I’ve been away from Sydney, my job and my computer, and now have some much needed new year energy as a result. I am (maybe?) joining the #pomodorojerk writing group when I am back at work, although I am a bit ambivalent about productivity as a value system. I mention it in case you might want to join too.

So far summer has involved about 2500kms of driving – from Sydney to Port Douglas – visiting relatives and friends. It has included a fairly average attempt to read whole books, including novels: Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot; Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing; Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (belatedly). These are all campus novels, in one way or another, so they weren’t an ideal way to tune out from academic life. Still. It helps sometimes to see your world as a genre.

I’m also most of the way through a biography of Elton Mayo which I think will be the source of a lot of writing and thinking plans in the coming year. I had no idea he was Australian and taught at the University of Queensland! This history opens up all kinds of interesting pathways and connections.

With the benefit of aircon, I’ve been catching up on Homeland as well. Read Jason Jacobs’ great take on it here. (And please, no spoilers; I’m still at ep 8).

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.