Below is the text from my talk at last week’s cci conference, “Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons”. Thanks to the participants of my study for allowing me to publish this. Given the overall tone of the event, and the upbeat nature of many presentations in the Workplace Futures stream, I think it’s important for stories like these to be heard. An accompanying powerpoint with pictures is here; meanwhile some liveblogging and other reflections from the conference are available over at Gatwatching. I would urge the many other bloggers in attendance to share their thoughts!

I’m currently in Brisbane airport waiting to start the long haul to Jamaica. With whatever wireless I can steal during transit I’ll try to account for the last few weeks of hard-core conferencing…

In trying to understand the workplace of the future, it is crucial to understand the workplace of the present. In this paper I provide some evidence of changes to contemporary white collar employment in recent years, particularly the impact of new media technologies on the work and home lives of information professionals working in some of Brisbane’s largest cultural and communications organisations.

At this conference we will no doubt hear a lot about the emancipatory promise of a creative workplace that is always on the horizon. But for every enterprising innovator or start-up entrepreneur that is heralded as the employee of the future, there remains a vast layer of information workers in large organisations who facilitate, disseminate and respond to the creative ideas produced by others—and will continue to do so in order for the information economy to flourish.

My current 3 year research project, ‘Working From Home: New media technology, workplace culture and the changing nature of domesticity’ studies the workstyles of these employees in the engine room of the cultural and creative industries, and includes academics, public servants, policy officers, branding and marketing strategists, librarians, senior directors, infrastructure and assets managers, online journalists and web developers. My research is trying to identify what I call the ‘presence bleed’ that results as mobile devices increasingly allow employees to work outside the office, on the road and at home, asking what effects this has on people’s lives and relationships.

For this paper I’ll focus on the youngest workers in my study, because it seems that the experiences of this latest generation of workers can help to identify priorities for training and policy fitting the current and coming employment landscape.

To provide a profile for these employees, they are all university educated and in their mid to late 20s. Their location in the workplace hierarchy means that they are usually on fixed term contracts, often hired repeatedly and at short notice to deliver specific tasks that the organisation depends upon for its functioning. The security of ongoing employment therefore eludes them, despite their ongoing and important contributions, and there is pressure on them to perform to a standard that is proven and reliable—if not for their current employer to recognise, then to build a portfolio for prospective employers.

Their casual status typically prevents them from accruing any of the added benefits of salaried work within a large and authoritative organisation. One participant, for instance, found it easier to come in to work late at night or on weekends because as a casual she couldn’t get access to studios during normal hours. She also didn’t have a log-in provided for her computer to export the audio she needed to produce as part of her job—she had to borrow another person’s which would regularly change for security reasons. She had no on-site tech support for the hours she spent filing her stories (between 7pm and midnight):

The big problem with that is obviously I’m always coming in after hours, so there’s no tech support at all. The mini disc in this studio doesn’t work, so I have to try and crack into the next… I run on mini disc, because that was the equipment supplied to me… when I started my employment.

And the mini disc in this studio doesn’t work, so I have to try and use the set up in the next room to upload the mini disc and then come back in here to do the editing. Although sometimes that studio is locked because somebody’s been using it and then it’s locked onto their user name and I can’t unlock it without putting in their user name. Yeah. (Female Casual Reporter, 25)

For this casual reporter, work is often a lonely, independent venture met at odd hours without senior surveillance, security, technical support or indeed any contact with colleagues. Another key obstacle is that her modest income means the technology that would assist in making the job easier (eg. using mp3s or working from home) is prohibitively expensive, and both the training and the technology formats she was initially provided are now outdated. Because the actual experience working with the organisation involves inadequate training, modest pay, a lack of wider institutional funding, and little if any collegial interaction, these employees use the organisation’s name as CV filler to move somewhere else: the authority of the employer’s brand name assures cultural capital that can be traded up in time.

Another casual employee who has moved on from her position since this interview shares some of these sentiments:

It was like I didn’t know how to do shit and I knew I didn’t know how to do shit but I was very passionate about the job. But I didn’t know like technical stuff and I didn’t know how to do it but no one was there to really support you or help you or teach you. It was like well, this is what you do and you figure out to do it. (Female Office Casual, 24)

An interview participant who spent a lot of time on her own in the office had developed a term for keeping herself company and amused at work—what she called “recreational internetting”. Apart from using social networking sites, she also listed a range of daily activities that weren’t exactly work-oriented:

I look up the news, I do Internet banking, I look up celebrity gossip, I look up YouTube and general browsing of crap; Wikipedia – if I ever think of something that I want to look up; IMDb – the Internet Movie Database. But that would be mostly it. I do a bit of – flights – I look up flights and travel, do my travel arrangements. (Female Sessional lecturer and PhD student, 26)

In her office, she claimed, ‘we tend to eat our lunch at our desk, and that’s when I’ll do a lot of that recreational Internetting.’

For this generation of employees the split between work and lunchtime is rarely marked by any attempt to leave the office environment but instead tends to be differentiated by consuming different content on-screen. Other younger workers share similar stories. In the typical 7 or 8 hour day, one web worker claimed: “We don’t get up from our desk at all”:

There’s a culture in here of eating at our desks; so you go and warm something up in the microwave, and then come back and eat at your desk, which I don’t like. (Female Online News Editor, 30).

Comments like these suggest that the literature on workplace culture gets it wrong when it claims that working from home has a negative impact on employee sociality. Employees that are physically co-present also regularly prefer to communicate through the screen, not only because it makes interaction more controllable from the sender’s point of view, but because of the perhaps mistaken assumption that it is less disruptive.

Of course this assumption leads to some significant effects: namely, the chronic email overload in information jobs. Email is the cause of constant lament and frustration and has clearly become an entrenched part of organisational dynamics, with individual workers having to develop tactics to manage a constant expectation that they will be available through the screen, if not in person. This employee of a major telecommunications company has strategies for dealing with the expectation of fast-turnaround requests. The start of the day is a crucial time:

I try to delete and file as soon as I get them and I like to make sure that my emails don’t go over the page as in the one pane that you can see on the front. I try and keep it to the one pane otherwise I start to get stressed out.

But usually when I come in, in the morning there is like three panes and then it’s just a matter of getting it down to a level where I feel comfortable to be able to go to meetings and not feel like I should be doing all my emails.

I definitely get stressed about the amount of emails that come through and the urgency of some of the emails. Like they come through and expect a response by close of business that day and it might require you to check with the whole team about something and it’s hard to get in touch with everyone.

This potential that an email might be important and require action affects her ability to concentrate when things aren’t actually urgent. That she is always expecting that something might be requiring action affects her overall disposition:

I notice every time a single email comes in. I don’t close it and only look at it every three hours which you’re probably supposed to do but I’m like an addict with email and have to see the minute it comes in and see if it’s important or not. If it isn’t I’ll continue but if it is I’ll do it straight away. (Female Telco Marketer, 25)

So those workers that do hold secure positions but are at entry levels of the organisation are subject to highly bureaucratic and hierarchical management cultures. For them, mobile and wireless devices deliver new forms of imposition and surveillance as much as they do efficiency or freedom. The fast turnarounds and deadlines that these technologies facilitate are the cause of high anxiety. Some of the measures used to manage email volume include clearing the inbox during breakfast, monitoring and replying during knock-off drinks and continuing work-related contact even in bed.

It is for this reason that online technologies must now be factored into any test of ‘work-life’ balance—and workplaces need to develop explicit policies to set limits on the levels of screen commitment required of employees.

My final example is what we might call the ideal creative employee: a 24 year-old radio producer and part time musician. Employed in morning radio, his schedule involves early starts and a lot of media monitoring to stay abreast of breaking stories. The temptation of such an interesting job is to keep working when he gets home, a tension that heightens when working different hours to his partner. He describes the rules he has been trying to establish about this, such as:

I try not to work right before I go to bed. Apart from just checking what’s happening in the news but that’s more - I think I do that anyway because I think I’m a little bit paranoid that some place has blown up and I just want to know about it before I go to bed. But no, not work as such before I go to bed.

Also I try not to feel like, if I for some reason, am not able to see the news or if there’s something that’s preventing me from being as connected, I try not to feel too guilty about it.

Like many, this participant uses online platforms like MySpace and Facebook to share intimacy, solidarity and friendship while at home, but as an amateur musician, the pleasures of these social networking sites are increasingly limited. In his words:

Obviously I want to be in touch with people. I feel as though technology is blackmailing me. I’m feeling as though if I don’t maintain some kind of - especially with music - online hyperactive presence, not that I aspire to this but just my impressions, that suddenly everything that’s dear in my life would just sort of go away and disappear and vanish that I will have no friends, that no one will turn up to my gigs and then I will practically cease to exist. I mean, that’s kind of the reality, that’s the threat that I feel with technology at the moment. It’s a terrible thing.

These workers are increasingly tethered to the keyboard for business and pleasure, and the health ramifications of this require serious discussion as ever more media-savvy generations gain employment.

Placed in relation to the other employees in my study it seems clear that new media technologies have been embraced by workers in information jobs because the desire to be connected, and hence to be recognised as valuable and productive, has its roots in a middle-class professional persona that is only now learning to adjust to an ‘always-on’ society. In their use of new media technology, information professionals demonstrate their loyalty to an increasingly unfashionable ‘social ethic’ (Whyte 1956)—one that can be positioned precisely between the motivations of commerce and commons.

But this paper has outlined some of the problems that younger workers currently face as always-on technologies exacerbate the precarity that is already a constituent feature of white-collar apprenticeships. Technologies are part and parcel of the loneliness and anomie of the office cubicle; the lack of support from physically present colleagues; and the new forms of stress arising from the demands of constant contact and identity performance.

These developing health issues emerging from repeated computer use that my participants report—even in their mid twenties—include high levels of anxiety and paranoia about missing vital information, RSI-related conditions, overall body tension, and various kinds of (often denied, forgotten or overlooked) back, arm and eye discomfort. These symptoms are the result of mental labour fast supplanting manual labour as the basis for physical distress among workers and are part of the overall effects of the sedentarism normalised in many office jobs.

Part of my overall aim with the study is to argue that workplaces of the future will need to pay close attention to current obstacles to sustainable work practices—particularly those that develop in tandem with new media technologies supposedly so liberating. And if large organisations are to keep a ready supply of workers beyond their poorly paid traineeships, they are going to have to ensure that employees at every level of the organisation are valued.

The question this poses for discussion is: How do we train workers for what can often be a disappointing, lonely and challenging workplace reality?

The recent post about Rudd’s social networking strategy is now available over at Online Opinion. Since I wrote the piece there have been some pretty spectacular examples of Facebook journalism–the most notable being The Courier Mail’s massive headline last Saturday, June 7: “FACEBOOK MURDER”. The web version of the story includes a link to the dead victim’s MySpace page that I won’t be directing people to from here, but is still live if you’re into that kind of thing.

In the same week I was interviewed at length by the Sunday Mail for a story about Facebook groups, although by comparison this was a positive experience since they also ran an additional story about how people are using communication technologies for efficiency reasons at work.

Still, there is a problem in the way that these publications continue to foster sensationalism about the ‘weird wild web’. Elsewhere I’ve noticed that the binge-drinking panic has also been linked to Facebook, i.e. it is kids putting glamorous photos of themselves getting trolleyed online that normalises such behaviour and avoids any discussion of the after-effects. In this story it is unclear from the last para of Ann Roche’s quote whether she is talking about kids (’they post photos’) or herself (’of our own drinking moments’)– a grammatical slip that seems telling.

Meanwhile today’s story about the online database for Queensland school children had the Education Minister reassuring parents that ‘it wasn’t like Facebook’–meaning that it wasn’t a threat to their privacy. This shorthand equation, Facebook = threat, is understandable in a context where the mainstream press seems bent on trawling profile pages and quite possibly their contacts for story content. But it doesn’t help to explain to parents that both Facebook and the intranet database being proposed have privacy controls embedded. Indeed the motivated hacking that would be required to break into a system of the kind being described is ironically only likely to pose enough interest and challenge for those with the skills to be bothered to do so now that parents have expressed such concern over it.

The real issue is whether a centralised computer database poses any more threat to a child’s personal information than filed hardcopies of the same information, or even locally saved electronic copies that can just as easily be distributed online by people with malicious intent. These genuine anxieties about surveillance and lack of consultation are certainly valid but they need to be framed within a wider conversation about the many ways that personal information is stored without notification, let alone approval–and not just when it affects kids.

Computer literacy and online participation is now being demanded from all of us in all kinds of educational, consumer and citizenly domains. To move beyond this impasse, where utilitarianism and convenience are pitched against paranoia and privacy, we need a conversation about the benefits of online records and archiving, whether it is of a public or personal nature. It is easy to see Facebook as simply a photo repository when your business is filling pages with colourful content or providing uncomplicated soundbites. But if you are part of online culture and have enjoyed some of its benefits you will also appreciate that like many other web based communities, Facebook reflects the rhythms and priorities of Monday morning as much as of Saturday night.

Let’s stop exaggerating what happens online when networked computers are such a major part of everyday life in our much vaunted ‘information economy’. And anyone who is writing about the ethics of Facebook journalism, or with tales to tell of what’s happening in newsrooms, please do get in touch.

A message from Bo, my wonderful RA. Please consider linking to this post if you are a blogger and want to support more cultural research in this area!

Do you have a favourite blogger that you want to talk about?

I am an Honours student from the University of Queensland, Australia and I am conducting an email-based survey that looks at the experiences that blog readers have with their favourite bloggers.

To take part in this research you cannot be a blogger yourself and you cannot know the blogger offline.

For ethical and legal issues you MUST be 18+ years of age and an Australian Citizen to partake in this research.

If this sounds like you and you would like to participate in this original and exciting research project then please email Bo at:

s4029966[AT]student.uq.edu.au

Participation is until August 2008.

All inquiries are very much appreciated!

When photos of the Prime Minister’s ‘butler’ appeared in various Sunday papers this past weekend it was the latest example of an emerging genre of so-called news stories based on allegedly revealing photos available on Facebook (Australian readers may well remember the media frenzy around swimming star, Stephanie Rice).

Rudd’s apparent reaction to the front page controversy has been to force staff to remove their Facebook profiles — a response that, as numerous commentators point out, is more than a little hypocritical given Labor’s own election campaign deployed these sites as part of a sophisticated campaign strategy.

Again the Prime Minister seems to be saying one thing while doing another when it comes to his own employees. Just as it’s fine to note the concerns of working families when they are blue-collar battlers and not middle-class public servants, it’s fine to exploit the potential of social networking sites that other people use. I suppose the difference is that Rudd regards public service as a vocation, and this logic justifies the sacrifice of something as trivial as an online profile.

Then again he may simply be as poorly informed as his staff appear to be about the privacy options available on Facebook and many other social networking utilities. Telling friends you are having a party on these sites does not necessarily leave your house open to looting and ruin, either. But you wouldn’t know this based on the sensationalism and selectivity of mainstream media coverage.

Social networking users are actually quite familiar with the way marketing firms mine these sites for personal information, developing algorithms to promote products to them based on stated preferences. But they could have been forgiven for expecting a little less opportunism from the fourth estate. The weekend coverage has caused a remarkable amount of unsolicited attention for John Fisher, who now has assumptions about his sexuality to deal with along with everything else.

There is another story to be written here about how the press is gaining access to these images which may or may not be publicly searchable. Are newsrooms actually setting aside time for staff to mine Facebook all day in the hope of uncovering scandal? Are journalists drawing on their own networks online, to gain access to or pass on damaging information? Either scenario raises important questions about ethical and professional standards, and there should be more debate about it.

My own interviews with working journalists show that maintaining links on sites like Facebook is now a crucial part of the job. It provides a convenient and ready-to-hand pool of commentators for stories going to air while the international distribution of a user’s network keeps them aware of stories breaking elsewhere — often before newswires can. The ambient nature of technologies like Twitter also provides a ‘meta-conversation’ on breaking stories, pooling together the news gathering habits of people who spend most of their day at the computer. Finally, the presence and status functions on messenger programs and on Facebook saves time wasted in the to-ing and fro-ing of emails and missed calls.

This is the present workplace reality that the theatre of the media beat-up and Rudd’s reaction both effectively mask: that middle-class employees use these sites as a matter of course, that there is nothing spectacular about them, and they tend to use them precisely because they are committed to their vocation. If you expect employees to spend long hours alone in front of a screen with a keyboard, they will use that technology to pass the time and soothe the solitude of the office cubicle. And when they are under pressure, as newsroom and public service employees certainly are, they will be the best judge of whether a communication platform is helping them do their job faster.

Returning to the butler, that the PM’s assistant had time for some sightseeing in London is surely proof that Rudd doesn’t enforce a 24/7 commitment from all staff. They get time to relax and rest and have fun now and then, as any worker should. In fact the whole thing seems to suggest that the PM has an effective social networking strategy after all. In terms of improving the negative impressions of a lacking work/life balance for his assistants, it was nothing if not an inspired leak.

**This post is also a response to the Passion Quilt Meme. I tag Supervalent Thought, Purse Lip Square Jaw, Unemployed at Last!, and tactical.**

Some people will have seen that one of UQ’s most respected television scholars made the editorial of Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Friday, after giving an address to The Sopranos conference at Fordham University this past fortnight. Terry Flew has a fitting response to the story here. This kind of thing is par for the course in cultural studies, and if conference attendance is now gaining the same scrutiny as ARC funding in the tabloid press, I should probably prepare myself for Melbourne in November where I’ll be presenting a co-authored paper called “Ordinary Australians? Aspiration, commodity fetishism and masculinity in Underbelly”. I can only hope for the same amount of column space Jason’s work received.

But coming on top of Jill Walker’s effusive synopsis of this talk by Clay Shirky, I’m starting to wonder how many other people believe the claim that watching television has been the ‘collective bender’ of the 20th century; that we are only now just starting to wake up to the vast cognitive surplus that television (and previously gin) consumption has ‘masked’. According to Shirky, who laments the many hours he spent watching Gilligan’s Island as a kid, television sitcoms have been the social lubricant of the past century, ‘without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise’. He finds it regrettable that ‘every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list’. He also argues shows like ‘Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat’.

I don’t even know how to engage with this last statement, but as I wrote in response to Jill’s post, it seems incredible to me that this kind of rhetoric is necessary to say why Web 2.0 is new or different or important. The argument that ‘it’s better to do something than to do nothing’ is spurious and lacks all context; nor does it reflect what we already know about the ways people use and manipulate and engage with broadcast media. Previous mass communication theories may well have characterised television as a one-to-many platform–what others might choose to describe as a ’sit back’ versus a ‘lean forward’ medium. But even these approaches overlook the realities of domestic media consumption revealed over decades of cultural studies: how it is so often a background companion to the routines of household labour, when it isn’t an excuse for many subtle and explicit forms of relationship building, or a closely observed entertainment platform with its own rituals and rewards for interaction.

Shirky’s argument does a disservice to those involved in developing and improving genuinely useful online endeavours by pitching their efforts against the platforms available to creative people in previous generations. He also pretends there hasn’t been an evolving sophistication in television production and consumption. Shows like The Simpsons have demonstrated this for many commentators in the past, but Ugly Betty, My Name is Earl, 30 Rock and Extras do the same for audiences today.

Relating the leisure pursuits of a small minority of educated and highly networked early adopters to the prospect of far broader social empowerment seems to imply that being able to make a lolcat is a step towards taking control back from the structural constraints of everyday life (ever tried explaining a lolcat to someone who doesn’t read blogs? i.e., still the majority of people? It will give you a sense of the significance of these ‘typical’ examples of online literacy). The notion of ‘cognitive surplus’ in leisure time actually risks taking capitalism’s productivity and efficiency imperatives to new extremes, part of the pernicious influence of the Getting Things Done industry as it enters the private sphere. But the complicity of Web 2.0 celebrities with capitalist logic is worth a book rather than a blogpost.

Perhaps the thing that remains inconvenient for the current bunch of web prophets is that unlike internet access and participation, television is cheap. Poor people can watch it, and those that do so regularly ‘consume’ television in ways that are as sophisticated and as knowledgeable as people who currently hold the cultural and educational power to manipulate present forms of media production and performance.

I bet that if you asked those who aren’t online regularly what their idea of ‘participation’ meant it would incorporate their work, their friendships, the support they offer their families and maybe also the sporting team they play in or follow. In short, banal civic activities within a recognisable public sphere that television also serves. To them, using the internet to make the most of their time after all those commitments have been met might well be a bizarre notion.

Shirky points to an optimistic future. He cites the wisdom of a four year old who is habituated to having a mouse attached to her screen as evidence for the naturalness of interactivity. His inspirational conclusion is that:

We are going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?”

Like the DIY ethos of other prominent bloggers, this kind of language troubles me, and I’m not sure how best to argue with it. So for the moment I’ll just focus on that the same little girl Shirky refers to. I hope that despite the seductiveness of new media, she will also be allowed to indulge in the most time-wasting and apparently passive of all communication platforms, the novel. I hope that she may grow up to recognise the echoes of Steinbeck deployed in the passage above. I hope that knowledge allows her to contemplate how America’s subsequent affluence has been distributed unevenly. And I hope that she will be able to discern the unique brands of spin that currently feed new and old media alike, regardless of the screen she’s using.

A discussion paper describing the Rudd Government’s planned Future Fellowships for mid-career researchers is now available on the ARC website (the pdf is here). I’d urge people to take a look at it at this stage, because there is some cause for concern about the proposed model, particularly for arts and humanities researchers.

The weighting of the selection criteria for the awards gives 50% to the individual’s record, 20% for the project’s strategic alignment with the proposed host university and 20% for collaboration evidence (with industry, across institutions, or across disciplines). It also awards 10% for areas of national priority, which will set limits on the kind of research that will ever be funded through this scheme.

The model seems to be based on the Federation Fellowships currently available for senior scholars but this is problematic in a number of ways. Firstly, fellowships are timed to begin in the second half of the year, which doesn’t match the current ARF/APD cycle. Wasn’t the whole point to offer continuity for research careers, and alleviate the anxiety and time commitment of having to apply for funding far in advance of when it was really needed? Apparently not - the document reveals how much these fellowships are being targeted to bringing overseas Australians back home to work.

Secondly, it puts a lot of onus on young researchers to sell themselves to an employer for top dollar when technically they may have only been out of their PhD for 5 years. It takes longer than that to be able to wield bargaining power or monetize networks, even if such objectives were really key to producing world-class scholarship. This model also means young researchers will be pressured to place themselves in the established research areas of universities they may have little or no relationship with, and spend valuable time trying to build that relationship without any financial backing, or when they may be only half way through a current project.

Finally the draft makes no mention of support for parental leave during the fellowships and how this affects part-time or full-time transitions during the overall limit of 6 years. Can we expect people who are the likely candidates for these grants to have had the time to have any, let alone all their babies?

I hope others will feel compelled to respond to the draft (submissions close June 27). We are used to having to feel grateful for any kind of initiative to boost research spending in this country, but these abstract documents need to be populated by and interrogated with the concerns of actually existing, not to mention aspiring researchers.

To become insomniac, love-struck or bulimic is to enter into another everydayness – Henri Lefebvre

On Saturday June 14 I’m going to “Internet Histories 2: Australia and Asia-Pacific” at the State Library of Western Australia. It’s part of a two day workshop organised by Gerard Goggin, Mark McLelland and the Cultural Research Network (the program and abstracts are here). I’ll be presenting part of a chapter from the book I’ve been writing with Catherine Driscoll in which we try to highlight the benefits of cultural theory in writing internet histories.

Our main source is Michel Foucault, and the title of our book chapter ‘The Order of Pixels’ is indebted to the project of The Order of Things, particularly its effort to analyse the systems by which things are ordered and known - and therefore counted as history. From our abstract:

…despite its evident availability to spatial conceptions and linear historical narratives about technology and capital, online culture is manifestly disorderly. Thus we might think of historicising online culture along such lines as Foucault calls heteroclite – where “things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all”. Our paper considers what it would mean for internet histories to see their sites of study as heterotopic rather than utopic.

For the book publication coming out of the day I’ve also been exploring some further theoretical resources that, if they don’t exactly have Asia-Pacific origins, at least point to some of the biases of Western historical analysis. Indeed the very idea that an Asia-Pacific ‘perspective’ can easily correct the modes of representation currently dominant in internet studies seems to us just one of the conceptual difficulties involved in approaching these questions.

Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis is an underutilised reference in many fields, including cultural studies, which would be very different without his influence (see some of Ben Highmore’s recent publications–particularly the book Cityscapes–for the most outstanding exceptions to this wider trend). Applied to internet studies, Lefebvre’s work has some fundamental methodological implications.

As Stuart Elden writes in his introduction to the English Continuum edition, Lefebvre tried ‘to get us both to think space and time differently, and to think them together… His understanding of history is not the linear, teleological progression of Hegel or Marx, but closer to a Nietzschean sense of change and cycles’.

Lefebvre acknowledges that ‘the cyclical is perceived rather favourably: it originates in the cosmos, in the worldly, in nature. We can all picture the waves of the sea — a nice image, full of meaning — or sound waves, or circadian or monthly cycles. The linear, though, is depicted only as monotonous, tiring and even intolerable’ (76).

In terms of historiography, the contribution the rhythmanalyst has to make is to reunite the quantitative aspects of experience, ‘which mark time and distinguish moments in it — and qualitative aspects and elements, which link them together, found the unities and result from them’ (8-9). It is to distinguish between ‘repetition and difference; mechanical and organic; discovery and creation; continuous and discontinuous’ in the process of identifying the cyclical and linear, the quantitative and qualitative (Foucauldians and even Deleuzians may see some resonances here).

Lefebvre claims that ‘the majority of analysts of time (or rather of such and such a temporality: physical, social, historical, etc.) have utilised only an often minimal part of the above-listed categories’. Meanwhile non-specialists understand time only by regulating the various competing and discrete rhythms that exist simultaneously at an individual and social level. ‘We contain ourselves by concealing the diversity of our rhythms: to ourselves, body and flesh, we are almost objects.’ (10)

To counter this, the rhythmanalyst must listen:

and first to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms. His body serves him as a metronome. A difficult task and situation: to perceive distinct rhythms distinctly, without disrupting them, without dislocating time (19-20).

I take this quote to be a tiny definition of ethnography, one that helps me imagine how I’d like to study online culture: being able to remain conscious of my own body’s position in the context of what I’m studying, but in such a way as to not let it affect what is going on, with or without my ‘presence’; at the same time learning to perceive the rhythms my own body enacts and indeed ignores in order to stay online at certain times and for certain durations.* (In fact, ‘arrhythmia’ seems to be the most useful concept I’ve yet encountered to make sense of the feelings of overload, anxiety and urgency many of the workers in my study express in relation to email and other online communication obligations.)

Lefebvre is the often unacknowledged precursor to Michel de Certeau in elaborating the significance of ‘the everyday’ or le quotidian in cultural studies. Elden explains the term as conveying both ‘the mundane, the everyday, but also the repetitive, what happens every day’ (ix). Of course, for many of us, internet use is defined by this precise tension, as well as the more pleasurable and even extraordinary encounters it makes possible. It is the quotidian accompaniment to a range of ‘rhythms in interaction’ that Lefebvre lists as ‘need and desire, sleep and wake, work and repose’ (26).

In time, I hope his writing will inspire others to develop a more critical cultural analysis fitting the present and its imminent pasts; to escape the commercial relations of capitalism, and ‘to catch unaware (to grasp) need, desire, reflections and passions in others’ (26).

* Elden’s introduction explains that Lefebvre was greatly influenced by Bachelard’s Dialectic of Duration, which introduces a concept of rhythmanalysis to critique Bergson’s notion of duration (xiii)

It seems important to write something about Tasmania.* I found out early in the day that Paul Lennon had resigned as Premier and just watched the telly footage from the various press conferences. Wow though: the amount of time being devoted to the story says something about the status of my home state in relation to the domestic political agenda–as if I didn’t know already. I’ve had a few friends enjoy themselves on holiday in Tassie recently which still seems extraordinary in many ways but it’s a long way from seeing the state as part of the national conversation.

Except that it is. Beyond the local opinion polls, Lennon’s resignation has to be understood in the context of a number of media campaigns–particularly in relation to environmental issues–largely run by mainlanders and which famously play to an image of what Tasmania should be rather than what it actually is and has always been for those who live and work there. Demographically and geographically it is a very splintered island.

I was briefly excited that The 7.30 Report ran the resignation as its second story before dissecting Clinton, but still, was there really only one Tasmanian academic commentator available to speak today? And without a local accent either?

Knowing almost nothing about the new guy I can only say anyone would have to be better than Lennon at this point. I was even embarrassed to join the bid for a Tassie AFL Team seeing his face on the front page. The new Premier has a background in IT which suggests interesting new possibilities for how the state might define its potential economic strengths. It’s also wonderful to see a lady, Lara Giddings, as Deputy. New blood, new hope?

Of course there was another high-profile resignation today, in the Australian blogosphere. Not being a Melburnian I don’t have much idea of what she did BB (Before Blog), but is Marieke being literal when she signs off with the words “I am richer for the challenge”? There will be more to write about this, but for the moment it is worth paying tribute to one of the first female bloggers in the country to successfully translate her online persona to the elite of portfolio careers I’ve discussed here before. Of course she is but one of many early adopters currently learning how to capitalise on the ‘broadcast impulse’, translating web work into recognised employment rewards. And when a paid job’s demands get in the way of blogging’s insistent temporality, she makes a choice many others have and will, without disowning blogging in future either. Good on her.

Since I last wrote a few big-ish things have happened. I am now planning Brisbane’s best ever engagement party having successfully proposed to my beau, William. Yes. Perhaps I am getting closer to the lifestyle implied in my blog title’s after all. Stay tuned. And after having been a bit grumpy with the state of blogging and internet studies for the past few months I’ve now written a draft of most of my thoughts for Catherine’s amusement or indeed despair. She may never come back to the country, but I will at least see her in Jamaica. We are scheduled to give papers on the panel we’ve organised with our lovely colleagues Kate C and Genevieve B. Finally, as is the way with these things, just after I threw my tanty about A-Listers online a bunch of good friends and colleagues have taken up the blogging mantle much more fervently than I. So it feels much less lonely here now after all.

That’s right people, the lesson for today is together we can beat the Googlearchy. Yes we can.

* This may or may not be related to the fact that I finally joined the Facebook group “RIP the Doghouse, Bav Tav & Round Midnite, c. mid 90’s, Hobart”.

Those of you on Facebook might have noticed that I’ve been helping the UQ Branch of the NTEU expand its online presence. I was motivated to do this after hearing that the Queensland Division was reconsidering the ‘expense’ of having a tent with free food and drink for NTEU members at the Labour Day celebrations because not enough members have been turning up.

Having gone to the event last year I can attest to how few people were there, but I also found it a bit strange that there weren’t more people there my own age. In an election year when the main issue was workplace reform, it seemed just as likely that the NTEU hadn’t been pitching its message in the right places. Now, it’s not as if I think web workers or younger academics are in any way inclined to see themselves in need of labour politics (far from it) but inviting people through a familiar interface does send a wider message of engagement. Anyway, I’ve set up the group as an experiment in seeing what might happen if union membership got a bit of a makeover… so do consider joining if this sounds good to you.

I haven’t been a union member very long, for the same reason a lot of my colleagues offer: when you are a sessional or junior staff member it makes little sense to spend your minimal wages on union membership, especially when you have a HECS debt and no chance of any ongoing relationship with your employer. For some reason I always felt that the union had little cause to advocate on behalf of sessionals either, figuring it already had its work cut out recruiting and representing full time staff under a Howard Government.

But things are changing: this website shows there is growing recognition of the significance of casual labour in the university. Filling out the survey there will help build a case for what’s actually going on in workplaces around the country, and I urge everyone on casual contracts to do it.

Talking to Michael McNally yesterday, he asked me how long I’d been in Brisbane, and whether there was any likelihood of an ongoing job. This is my fifth year at UQ, and even though I have achieved a lot, there is no structure in place which would mean I could be offered an ongoing research job by the university. Teaching seems out of the question given how little turnover there is in Brisbane and how few tenured positions there are in the first place. So unless something else comes up I will have to apply for more federal funding and another contract early next year to start again the year after — maybe in Brisbane, but probably not with an academic partner also on contract and wanting work.

A key problem research careers pose for labour politics is that a lot of the claims are about affective rather than financial security. I get paid well but I have to live with the anxiety of not knowing whether I can come up with a good idea at the right time to keep my job. This leads to the trap of overcommitment (i.e., overwork) as a safety-net against those times (that always seem imminent) that motivation or inspiration won’t strike when they have to. This has the added side effect of normalising a particular rate of output that teaching staff then have to compete against when applying for grants of their own.

All of this seems a genuinely new problem for humanities researchers who, unlike the sciences, don’t work in teams in labs set up by leading professors. Research careers have been rare in this area in the past. And while some of the union’s recent campaigns indicate it is coming to terms with this changing landscape, it has a long way to go. I actually think the ARC has done quite a lot to improve the range of options for academics wanting to pursue research careers — changing the guidelines for Professorial Fellowships to favour younger scholars is the latest example. There is now a clear trajectory from APD, ARF to APF that can genuinely rival the teaching and research path.

Of course, my current study indicates that conventional labour politics must be urgently renovated to take account of online culture. I’ve just been writing to Sydney University academic Brigid Van Wanrooy about her Centre’s submission to the Government’s National Employment Standards exposure draft, which called for a limit to working hours in Australia.

These two graphs, taken from the submission document, show the difference in working hours between countries with regulated hours and those that don’t.

Meanwhile this graph I just love because it shows how working hours have changed since the year I was born!

While the figures make a strong case for regulation, as stark as they are they lack the nuance required to understand workers’ motivations for working long hours (as an earlier paper of Brigid’s, co-written with Shaun Wilson, makes clear.) Further, I’d argue that online technologies are changing our capacity and willingness to report when we are formally working.

For instance, the employees I’m interviewing have the internet at home and will keep reading work email ‘recreationally’ (with a glass of wine, watching TV, in bed) often until they go to sleep. They regularly begin the day checking and writing messages over breakfast or get up earlier to do so before the kids are awake. As I argue in this article, soon to be published in Feminist Media Studies, this kind of ‘flexibility’ is being trumpeted by tech companies as the way to deliver women the freedom to maintain family commitments while still embarking on paid work - which doesn’t do anything to change the workplace culture that demands long hours as a sign of employee loyalty.

But other things my study picks up include how people use social networking sites to develop and maintain contacts and relationships for future work possibilities – what we might call “prospective” work that takes place in addition to their current job. That is when they aren’t spending a “second” or “third” shift promoting their band or some other quasi-professional pursuit through these same online networks. Are they still working in those moments, according to the sort of statistics government policy relies on?

These are some of the things I’m looking forward to talking about this Labour Day. It would be great to know if you’re coming, either here or here.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my call-out for help! I am now very happily assisted and looking forward to the year of work ahead. Except that I’m unlikely to be blogging with any regularity for the time being. On top of the Working From Home project and the online cultural studies book, plans are underway for a couple more - a monograph looking at recent representations of ‘Work on TV’ (I’ll put an outline up about it somewhere soon), and something on Underbelly written in collaboration with Jason Wilson. In light of some of these reflections I’ve also managed to gain approval for a CCCS postgraduate course starting next semester which I’ll be teaching with Graeme Turner and Mark Andrejevic.

These aren’t the only reasons that it feels important right now to step away from the insistent temporality of blogging in preference for some long term thinking, planning and writing. I must admit that the past few months have made me increasingly concerned about the relationships developing between blogging, scholarship, celebrity and elitism (for some stimulating reading on these issues, including insights on why the ‘winner takes all’ economy affects scholarly blogging as much as any other creative industry, take a look at Matthew Hindman’s manuscript, Voice, Equality, and the Internet available here. Among other things, it signals how empirics will slowly build the case against the participatory utopians).

I’m not suggesting that academia has never operated free from elitism or celebrity of various kinds, but I’m also on the record as being committed to self-reflexivity and using institutional power in ways that avoid reinforcing established voices of authority. In that sense, I wonder if this space might be better used by other people to continue discussing issues in academic life. I’m not at all sure it requires me to be the one leading it.

This isn’t a resignation, then - I’m wary of the manifesto imperative blogging itself seems to encourage - more an invitation to offer thoughts in comments, including expressions of interest for more people to become writers for Home Cooked Theory. I have always wanted to believe that blogging held the potential for collaborative, ‘world-building’ experiments, and that’s why I’ve stuck with it this long. But, I have to say that the evidence is looking pretty shaky these days… or maybe it has just felt particularly lonely here lately.

The sense I have now - of a moment being over, of an idea that may have run its course - is similar to the one I had when I passed on the work of facilitating the CSAA-forum. There is only so long anyone can manufacture enthusiasm, optimism and connection when the raw material of mutual will isn’t there. This is about an equation between labour and value that my arms and shoulders tell me I’ve been on the wrong side of for too long. I hope that this space won’t suffer the same fate of becoming an anonymous repository for book announcements and conference notifications. There is more to a career in academia than these things, otherwise we wouldn’t work so hard to try to get one. This blog has been an effort to reflect on those other dimensions that distinguish a vocation and mean more than the triumphs of output: the things that occupy us most of the time, every other day. That was the intention at least, from the beginning. The future is up to you