Week 4 - Global Media Businesses and Immaterial Production

The transformation from industrial society to network society in one respect seems quite adhoc, but I wonder what longer term cultural forces have been at work to produce these changes.

The Melissa Gregg reading discussed the shortfall in 'communication processing' labour whereby the immaterial labour of checking and processing emails for example, became an additional and unpaid task willingly taken on by workers.  Gregg states that communication processing was taken on in 'addition' to the usual material tasks and that the material tasks didn't reduce in any way.  Further, this 'additional' work 'eats' into leisure time.  Gregg states that there are no 'official' guidelines on how the deluge of additional information processing is to be handled by the workplace or the economy.  Nothing has been set in place by Law, Government, Corporation owners or Managers to address this issue and for the time being workers are absorbing the shortfall by taking on extra work by playing the role of available, willing and flexible team player (Gregg 2009).

This is interesting that the economy is apparently demanding increased levels of voluntary labour in the network society.  In the recent past, women were seen as exercising a form of voluntary labour by raising and supporting home and family (Van Krieken et al. 2006, p312).  Effectively, with the development of new media we are working longer hours but it is framed as autonomy and choice rather than being systemically imposed upon us (Gregg 2009).  Traditionally, responsibility and autonomy seemed to work together in white collar work environments, but it seems that with the emergence of new media we are taking on more responsibility while systematically losing our ability to experience the accompanying freedom because in many instances rather we become enslaved to the affordances that the technology enables.  The 'feedback loop' discussed in lecture also can be seen to 'sell' local input and 'produser' activity as autonomy, but again, a function or purpose is served and for what ends and for whom does it benefit?

It depends though on how you define freedom.  The French have two definitions of freedom; Gratis and Libre.  Are there any other types of freedom I wonder, perhaps a combination of both political freedom and individual freedom???  Or perhaps there are two types of political freedom, one surrounding traditional notions of democracy as collectivity, and one which focuses more on liberty.  Is it possible that the latter is a type of democracy that we haven't witnessed in a long time?  It seems that somehow with the invention of the telegraph and subsequent split of mind and body (although Philosophers trace this back to Descartes) that, as a civilisation, we have drifted into some kind of 'altered reality'.  Is neo-liberalism an intended and political reflexive action to bring us back to political centre, but rather in a liberty form?  A seemingly extreme action required to counter how out of balance and off-centre we had become?  Socrates and Plato anticipated our instinct for survival and knew of our drive to undermine our civility, and hence our own freedom.  They understood that we would willingly trade Gratis for Libre.  Was neo-liberalism strategically devised?  Was it intended for the long term common good?  Was post-modernism a device to draw people out of this 'altered reality'?  Or were there unintended and unanticipated consequences?  Have we somehow broken the mechanism of the political system or is this just business as usual?  Have we now moved out of politics and into economy???  So many questions!!!

References

M Gregg, 2009, Function Creep: Communication technologies and anticipator labour in the information workplace, accessed 13/8/2011, http://homecookedtheory.com/wp-content/uploads/functioncreepnms.doc

Van Krieken, R Habibis, D Smith, P Hutchins, B Haralambos, M Hoborn, M 2006, Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 3^rd Edition, Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest