New Technologies at Work

People, Screens and Social Virtuality

Christina Garsten, Helena Wulff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Information and communication technologies have completely revolutionized our working practices. Career patterns, professional identities, speed of communication, time management, and mobility have been irrevocably changed in an amazingly short period. Drawing on worldwide case studies, this fascinating book explores these transformations and looks to what developments are in store for us in the future. Flexible hours, email, virtual meetings rooms, and working from home are all relatively new additions to our professional lives. The effects of these technological advances have been dramatic and far-reaching. Not only have they helped to connect organizations and institutions in developing countries to the rest of the world, but they also allow people to maintain extensive geographical networks with friends, families, and colleagues. The use of virtual reality and multimedia has had a huge impact on careers ranging from investment banking to molecular biology, and has brought fundamental changes to education and training, the generation of new ideas, and problem solving. This book investigates both the impact of information technology on working practices and, more complexly, how I.T. is bound up in social, political, and economic issues. How are power relations established and maintained through transnational networking? Can the Internet be used as a political tool to manipulate the masses? In what ways has digital technology changed the aesthetics and practices of the Euro-American dance world? What initiatives have been undertaken to ensure people arent excluded from the digital world and have they succeeded? Through answering these and many more questions, this groundbreaking book is an essential guide to the modern day world.

– 1 –
Living with New (Ideals of) Technology

Daniel Miller

Introduction: the Virtual Life of Ideals

It is no coincidence that the fundamental challenge posed by this book turns out to be the problematic reification of ideals of new technology separated out from its practice. After all, this is largely the work of sustained ethnographic encounter, and the result is a remarkably clear and diverse picture of new technologies as the practice of work. As such the authors of this volume do something that is very rare within the writings of practitioners themselves. They try to soberly assess what is actually happening in the day-to-day life of working activity, without using this in order to establish these new practices as some kind of ideal. Most of those who work in the industry are, by contrast, clearly trying to sell something, whether it is the potential commodification of the technology or designs that they have created, or the idea that what they are doing now is inevitably going to become standard practice in the future, since they are aware that belief in this trajectory as inevitable will help ensure its coming to be.

Indeed one of the clearest lessons of the last decade has been that the myths and ideals of new technology have had at least as much an impact as their practice, which is why there has been a premium on abstracting these ideals and focusing upon them. This book highlights the danger in this separation, in this creation of the virtual ideal. It demonstrates at a more mundane level something that has already been made very clear at a macro level in the dot.com fiasco itself. In brief, this consisted of the articulation of new techniques of finance with new forms of technology. Central to modern finance are forms of derivatives and the mechanisms of leverage. These devices capitalize on the assumed potential of some new asset to eventually be worth a considerable amount, and allow that future value to be played with and invested as though it were already realized. Leverage is the extra amount of value that is created by speculating upon the potential of these new developments. The bubble effect of the dot.com episode was entirely dependent upon being able to separate out an ideal or promise of such future developments and fetishize this as though it were a concrete asset and thereby already a form of value.

Within finance this virtualism of the promise of new technology is made explicit and clear. I want to argue that the common theme throughout this book follows the same fundamental logic, but as it can be demonstrated to exist within the actual usage and effects of new technology in the workplace, without the independent effects of finance. In every single one of the chapters in this volume we start with the problem of how an ideal or promise seen to be intrinsic to the new technology reveals this potential for reification – that is, to be abstracted from the practice of people and their labour. This is not necessarily a negative effect. We would be a poorer population if we never sought to construct ideals and then live up to them. But the abstraction of ideals has its inherent dangers. It can become part of what I would call a ‘virtualism’ (Miller 1998) when it loses touch with its source in a practice that people can work with, absorb and relate directly to. This is the virtualism of the ideal. Curiously the concept of virtual as the site of communication technology is probably rather more spurious (see various discussions in Woolgar 2002). Yet ultimately it is not virtual cyberspace but virtual ideals that can become destructive, when potentially positive uses of technology become sacrificed upon the alter of an untenable or in some cases actually less-than-ideal ideal. What this volume offers as a collection is not just the unprecedented insights given by its own close adherence to the observation of practice, but also a wide range of examples. This provides a kind of spectrum that allows us to ask important questions, which a single case study could not answer. In this instance I want to suggest that it allows us to think about the nature of ideals themselves, and to try to come to some kind of formulation of what actually is an ideal ideal.

The chapters of the book may therefore be separated out along such a spectrum. We start with some examples of rather unedifying ideals, that is to say ideals that are anything but ideal since we do not actually desire them (though others do). From there we can move to examples where the ideal is problematic precisely because it has been abstracted so far from any link with ordinary practice and then fetishized as a thing in and of itself to be lived up to that it becomes oppressive even though it is considered to be beneficial and to represent a true ideal. The third stage in this process is to consider ideals which are held as ambivalent because they lie closer to practice and because those involved are thereby more conscious of the negative effects that now appear to be inseparable from the perceived benefits of these new technologies. Interestingly they clearly remain ideals, but they are tempered by experience. Finally we can move to the end of such an investigation by considering whether by exploring all these case studies we have come any closer to what might be termed an ideal ideal.

Unedifying Ideals

The first three chapters concern ideals which are not likely to be shared by anthropologists, partly on political grounds but partly because they seem so narrowly conceived and so far from what we might regard as lessons from history. For this reason the authors of the first two examples are mainly concerned with how the populations they studied thwart or subvert or survive those ideals. The primary ideal is couched largely in a model of the market, one that seems to assert its own inevitability. This rests in turn upon the way it is supported by an abiding myth about new technologies in general. When schoolchildren were taught history at schools in Britain, there was always a rather strange break at the point at which one stopped being taught about kings, queens and politics and started learning about new technologies, devices such as the ‘Spinning Jenny’ and ‘Arkwright’s Mule’. These were the harbingers of the industrial revolution and it is instructive that rather than being explicitly about the development of capitalism, it is the technology itself that was foregrounded. It was new machines that industrialized cotton-cloth production, from which somehow all sorts of elements of modern life ‘naturally’ followed.

As taught in schools, new technologies caused the industrial revolution and that in turn caused capitalism, under which people become subject to the determinants of commerce and capital as in effect commodified wage labour. There is a direct line between this mythic origin of modern life and the dot.com bubble. Our most recent fiasco was quite dependent upon a continued adherence to this myth of origin. It too presupposed that technological development would in and of itself move industrial capitalism forward to a distinctive new phase. Essentially it had to suppose that new technologies create new ways of controlling the world, and that includes the control of people through work and the creation of value through new forms of capitalism. The implication always seems to be that this is the intrinsic quality of the technology itself. The effect would be greater profitability that could be turned through instruments of finance into speculative investments. New technology was thus a boost to the economy that could be leveraged as the share value of the firms that were associated with it. Downstream from this was the belief by the public and by governments that we would all become new kinds of workers – ‘information workers’. We must learn the new skills and knowledges that would allow us to keep up with a history that has accelerated on the back of this new technology.

In different ways Rapport and Green focus upon people and institutions that are potentially oppressed by this myth and the idealized and simplified concept of economy that develops in its wake. In both cases they start with institutions of government that turn this myth into an ideal of new technology creating a more successful economy through this same sequence by which labour is increasingly commodified. Instructively, Rapport shows that hospital managers assume that all new technologies have this capacity, legitimated by this origin myth of modern life. The telephone and the computer are part of the hospital regime, that which makes it work efficiently and cost effectively. The purpose of the porter is to be a cog in that machine, which reduces to their function as wage labour. As such the development of technology is the development of their commoditization as labour. But by starting his chapter with the telephone rather than the computer, Rapport effectively reveals what is evident to the porters themselves. A technology that can be used as an instrument of control is just as easily used as part of their everyday lives at home where it is an instrument of communication and leisure. The telephone thereby provides their route to the colonization of the computer, since having seen the absurdity and blinkered way the telephone is presented to them at work, it doesn’t take much of an analogy to see the same potential for the computer – and they clearly do follow this analogy. So although the computer is first introduced as a machine which is going to pinpoint their exact position at any time and thus control them, they quickly see all sorts of other possibilities for subverting this process which would otherwise reduce them to mere commodity forms.

My favourite image from Rapport’s Chapter 2 is of the individual who is a porter at work, but a football ‘manager’ thanks to his console at home. But the most telling materials are the various strategies by which we start with a machine that is supposed to turn porters into a commodity, and end up with porters who find ways to turn the machine back into a commodity for their own purposes. This includes making copies of CDs, buying and selling consoles from notice boards, or ultimately by stealing and then selling the machines themselves. In all these ways the porters effectively reverse the original logic of the origin myth.

This is very familiar to me from Trinidad (Miller and Slater 2000). Albert, for example, has an attitude that in Trinidad is not peripheral but mainstream. The first thing one looks for in any new technology is based upon what it enables you to get for free that you couldn’t get for free before. In one of the first cybercafés that Don Slater and I went into, the main notice on the wall was a list of everything one could get for free. Indeed from the point of view of this perspective the very logic of their masters is reversed. Trinidadians feel that other people are stupid, precisely because they don’t see that this search for free stuff is the first use of a technology. For them, as probably for Albert, this is blindingly obvious as the proper attitude for an intelligent person to take. Their distance from the others allows them to create their own world as inverse. It is not a world without its own order. They may look like the extreme opposite of the order that would impose itself upon them, but as Rapport makes clear even their use of pornography has its own morality and codes, something that emerges clearly from Slater’s work (Slater 1998, 2000).

It is not that they don’t know the dominant discourse or its power. They too believe that if they want to progress to a better job they have to rethink these things as skills for which they gain qualifications. But what they cannot do is be in the state of ‘denial’ where the fact that a phone is something you used to ask a woman to go out on a date with is completely excluded when the phone is presented to you in the workplace. At one level, then, the porters simply occupy a reality, obvious to them but denied by a dominant discourse true to its own origin myth about the role of new technologies.

What emerges from Green’s Chapter 3, and indeed from most of the chapters in this volume, is the extent to which the discourse created by this myth of origin is itself what determines the history of institutions. The problem that her chapter outlines is that the British government does have some sense of the wider potential of computing, and even manages to conceive of it in relation to social welfare and the reduction of inequalities. But it can only imagine this happening in one way – that is, by skilling the workforce and thus developing the economy. ‘It seems appropriate that the Internet should be used to address the perceived need for “lifelong learning”: a need to generate a flexible workforce able to continually absorb new information and develop new skills to go with the flexible (information-based) economy with which we now live.’ Actually we should be very concerned with the narrowness of the government’s conception of what is going on. If life-long learning is only there to create skills for the workplace, then it follows that the government has lost any rationalization of its own purposes, compatible with an ideal that values lifelong learning in its own right. It implies once again that all of us who work in education do so ultimately only to somehow enhance shareholder value.

Smaller organizations, however, being often marginal to the state, may have a rather broader view. For example, the sense of empowerment of women’s groups may not be limited to the idea that one has to be skilled for purely entrepreneurial purposes. The dot.com fiasco allowed this contradiction to be avoided for a while. This was because it seemed as though giving money for general education was assumed to be a vital part of creating an information-technology-savvy population. As such this investment in people’s welfare would one day ‘pay dividends’ (pun intended). Later on as the dot.com bubble starts to burst, Green makes clear that the contradictions in legitimacy come to the fore. ‘What this experience makes clear is that despite the apparent commitment to “social exclusion” in public funding for ICTs, the message voluntary organizations were getting was that commitment was not guided by a commitment to social welfare, but by a determination to get people “on-line” so that they could remove their own “social exclusion” through the economic opportunities offered by ICTs. The skills required were “business” skills; and the world in which these skills would be used was a different one from that in which the earlier voluntary organizations had been formed.’ What Green’s discussion makes frighteningly clear is that notwithstanding all the evidence for what computers actually can do, the government simply has no language, no means for expressing the legitimacy of these advances, other than that of business, and skills for business. Government even when it ‘sort of’ knows it is there to enhance the welfare of the population that voted for it, has lost its voice, and this is partly because of the origin myth that technology has only one aim and consequence, and that social evolution passes through this alone.

The irony that the anthropology of business constantly exposes is that this pure notion of how business creates profits is one held far more strongly by government and the public sector than it is within the private sector of business itself, where a greater realism about the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of commerce cannot be ignored. So the contradictions that Green points out with respect to government are equally apparent within the world of finance itself, as demonstrated by Hasselström in Chapter 4. Most of the popular – in the sense of journalistic – books about how capitalism actually works, books such as Liar’s Poker (Lewis 1989) or Barbarians at the Gate (Burrough and Helyar 1990), show how much social networks and competition and culture intersect with the effects of technology, or of new financial instruments.

At one level it is easy to see high finance as a screen-based workplace in which information can be simultaneous, in a global sense, and thus timeless and placeless. So at this level technology dominates the flow of information. But there is a critical factor here that contextualizes this and negates its apparent effects. The people who work in this sector are in competition with each other. They only make money if they can offer something before or beyond what their competitors can. So the irony is that all this screen information, by virtue of the fact that it is global and simultaneous, is in and of itself worthless as a means to make money. Of course you have to be able to afford it and become part of the exclusive group that does so. But once you are perched at this level you are all equal. So what becomes clear in Hasselström’s Chapter 4 is that it is precisely the other kinds of information that come to have the potential to create financial value. That is to say, the more that new technology creates a sameness the greater is the premium upon difference. The brokers are constantly going back to various forms of social interaction, in the hope that they will hear something different or first (See also Leyshon and Thrift 1997 on the City of London). As they keep saying quite explicitly, only information that they can’t get on the screen or that they get before the other brokers actually ‘adds value’ since value here is always defined by their competition with others.

So the paradox is that the more information arrives by the screen the more valuable it makes other information that does not, since screen information cannot give competitive advantage. Only with placed and timed contextualization, combined with well-informed interpreters that have been specifically cultivated as friends for that purpose, can one turn the sameness of this information into difference. So once again, though for different reasons, control by the machine and commodification by the ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: From People of the Book to People of the Screen
• 1. Living with New (Ideals of) Technology
• 2. The Computer as a Focus of Inattention: Five Scenarios concerning Hospital Porters
• 3. Digital Ditches: Working in the Virtual Grass Roots
• 4. Real-time, Real-place Market: Transnational Connections and Disconnections in Financial Markets
• 5. Mobile Workplacing: Office Design, Space and Technology
• 6. Claiming the Future: Speed, Business Rhetoric and Computer Practice
• 7. Networking as a Form of Life: The Transnational Movement of Internet Pioneers
• 8. Mainstream Rebels: Informalization and Regulation in a Virtual World
• 9. Steps on Screen: Technoscapes, Visualization and Globalization in Dance
• 10. Screening the Classroom: Students, Teachers and Computers in an Urban American School
• 11. Open-Source Software Development as Gift Culture: Work and Identity Formation in an Internet Community
• Index