Barney & Andrejevic

Barney argues that, despite claims that technology eventually results in increased employment opportunities, the focus should be on how the individual is affected when their job title is made obsolete, ""...it is less important to determine how many jobs are created relative to those eliminated than it is to understand the manner in which existing jobs vanish at such an alarming rate" (135). Barney refuses to believe that while one sector may lose some jobs, these jobs can be taken up by a different industry because technology is universal. Technological growth isn't limited to one sector of the work-industry, therefore, inevitably all sections will eventually experience the same job loss to machines or automated systems, "Indeed, it is true that some job growth has occurred in high-technology service areas...However, these gains tend to be offset by massive employment reduction in other service areas...Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the technological innovations eliminating employment in the manufacturing sector are simultaneously being deployed in the service sector, compromising the latter's ability to simply absorb the losses experienced in the former"(138). He doesn't appear to be particularly impressed with call centers outside of the country, another way that technology allows workers and jobs to be displaced (or replaced) for a fraction of the cost. Barney also discusses the telework market at some length, describing it as a rapidly growing practice for people to perform their work at a place other than the 'traditional' workplace. Although this idea of working from home sounds nice, Barney writes, "most people for whom telework is their only work are employed in either low-level administrative/managerial tasks, or clerical, sales and service occupations. Of this second category - the workers most vulnerable to the various pathologies of teleworking - the majority are women, trapped in a homeworking situation that has been described as a 'female-dominated work ghetto'" (145). People in the teleworking business can often be cheated out of fair wages or work much longer hours than they would if they were working in a traditional office space. Therefore, while this 'working from home' may sound nice and convenient, Barney writes that it is actually detrimental to the worker itself, though it may benefit the company itself financially.

In answer to this week's prompt, I would say that Barney thinks that the optimists are merely ignoring the obvious downsides to technology entering the workplace. For example, instead of thinking about how technology causes jobs to be lost in all job markets, the optimist might simply focus on how technology lowers costs and creates jobs elsewhere. Similarly, the teleworking concept might seem like a very flexible and convenient way to work, but the optimist might not think about how they are unfairly compensated for their long hours, etc. I thought his comments about how having a working knowledge about computers no longer counts as any kind of skill and won't advance in the workplace if they remain at this 'unskilled' level. Those who don't possess any computer skills are not merely unskilled, they are the people that will remain unemployed.

Andrejevic begins his book with a discussion of contextual ads and how Google uses information from its search engine an email service in order to target specific ads to its users. His idea of an enclosure, a space where actions generate information about itself, questions ideas of surveillance, "...when we go online, we generate increasingly detailed forms of transactional information that become secondary information commodities: information that may eventually be sold to third parties or used by marketing for targeted advertising campaigns" (2). Just as physical enclosure eventually began to separate people into different classes, those involved with production and those who sell their lands in order to facilitate the production, digital enclosure also creates boundaries between people. He separates them into those that control private interactive spaces and the people who agree to certain infringements on freedoms or other conditions in order to gain access to goods and services, aka the average user. Andrejevic writes that the more people depend on technology in order to communicate or shop or educate ourselves, the more people have to enter privately owned spaces or 'enclosures' (4). He also goes on to describe the unequal access to privacy between the user and the controller. While the user must continually give up certain private information, it is almost impossible to know anything about the controller or what they decide to do with the information that they can get from the user.

One example that Andrejevic describes at some length is TiVo, he describes this as another way that people are being manipulated into giving up information about themselves. He writes, "The defining irony of the interactive economy is that the labor of detailed information is being offloaded onto consumers in the name of their own empowerment...we are invited to actively participate in staging the scene of our own passive submission - and to view such participation as a form of power sharing" (15). I think that Andrejevic would say that the optimist is just oblivious to the obvious duplicity of the controlling corporations. The user willingly submits to giving up somewhat (or very) private information, but only in exchange for specific goods or services. Andrejevic's ideas about the digital enclosure are pretty interesting and seem pretty well-grounded in evidence, however, I just have a difficult time looking at transactions on the internet so skeptically or pessimistically. I will be interested in hearing everyone's thoughts about his theories on Monday and/or Wednesday.