Prepublication draft; published in Gerard Goggin and Melissa Gregg (eds)
Media International Australia Special Issue on Wireless Technologies and Cultures November 2007
Freedom to work: The impact of wireless on labour politics
Abstract
As the use of wireless communication technologies begins to settle into particular patterns,this essay considers the impact of such devices on workplace culture—particularly that of the professional middle class engaged in information work. While the study of workplace culture is usually the domain of sociology, management theory or organisational behaviour, media and cultural studies methods such as semiotic and discourse analysis, media consumption and theories of everyday life have a useful role to play in understanding how technology is marketed and subsequently used in and outside work contexts. As a starting point for this kind of approach,the paper combines an account of recent wireless advertising in Australia with research that is developing in ‘production-side cultural studies’ (Liu 2004, Du Gay 1997).In recognising the significance of new media technologies in contemporary labour practice and politics, it aims to move discussions beyond the notion of ‘work-life balance’ as a research endpoint to allowmore variegatednotions of freedom and flexibility for the workplaces of the present and near future.
We feel free only because we lack the language to describe our unfreedom.
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
The catchcry of much wireless advertising to date has been that it enables the freedom to ‘work where you want’: wireless-enabled laptops and the growing network coverage for mobile phones and PDAs collapse the distance between clients and colleagues, providing reliable communication from any location. In these formulations, a middle-class, office-based professional appears to be the desired audience, with wireless technology the conduit for and answer to various competing demands. Wireless is the solution to pressures on working people to keep pace with job expectations when outside work commitments impinge on this capacity. For women in particular, such advertising depictions have helped to consecrate a form of postfeminist subjectivity compliant with neoliberal economics—women can ‘have it all’ by using new media technologies to participate in the paid labour force while also attending to unpaid child rearing and home-based activities (Gregg 2008, see also McRobbie 2007). In the words of Margaret Lomas, the Destiny Financial Solutions Telstra NSW Business Woman of the Year quoted in a 2007 Telstra campaign: ‘I can be at a business conference in Perth, and still see my kids swim in Sydney’, all because of the convenience of Telstra’s NextG network.
In these ways, wireless technology is often shown to be making life easier by liberating people from place-bound physical presence. It frees them from the artificiality of a banal office culture and allows their skills and creativity to flourish naturally wherever they may be. Yet to think that these representations pose a challenge to the existing culture of the workplace would be a mistake. Indeed, the extent to which liberatory images appear so regularly in advertising for wireless devices also seems testimony of how much effort is required to efface the number of ways that technology clearly contributes to the number of hours worked in a day and curtails certain freedoms that were once assured (Duxbury 2006). It is these new forms of imposition, surveillance and chronic availability inherent to wireless technologies that require further elaboration.
It has really only been since the rise of the dotcom-fuelled New Economy that media and cultural studies scholars have grown especially interested in middle-class workplace culture.[1] While probabilities about wireless use were tied up in the visions emanating from the high-tech industry research campuses of Silicon Valley, the dotcom crash and the resultant layoffs in new media industries have since questioned the utopianism surrounding new media technologies in general and the radical possibilities of the internet in particular (Henwood 2003, Lovink 2003, Butt and Rossiter 2002). A growing body of literature now documents the particular culture of internet and web work, with findings relevant for so-called ‘precarious’ labour in other industries (Gill 2006 cogently summarises these trends). Still, relatively little attention is currently devoted to the large numbers of workers engaged in more mainstream salaried occupations, whether this is in public service or corporate offices, advertising and promotion, cultural organisations or even universities. New media technology also affects the lives of this significant proportion of workers who remain in jobs that do not fit the archetype of the ‘creative class’ (Florida 2005; 2002) even though they provide much of the crucial infrastructure that allows for it.
In his pioneering book The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, Alan Liu (2004) argues that humanities scholarship has been slow to acknowledge ‘the greatest habit of postindustrial life—work’ (Liu, 2004: 42). He suggests that studies of the workplace cultures emerging in conjunction with the global knowledge economy are sorely needed because middle-class professionals in the English-speaking West have played such a pivotal role in normalising technology use, whether of the photocopier, the fax, the virtual desktop interface or emerging etiquette around e-mail (see also Nunes 2006). In this sense, what follows can be read as a response to this growing historical realisation that whatever effects new media technologies will have on society as a whole are likely to hit the middle ranks of the knowledge class first (Streeter, 2005: 765).
Cultural studies of work are furtherdesirable because of the way in which advertising and promotional discourses have contributed to an aestheticisation of the dotcom lifestyle—what I have elsewhere termed a ‘workstyle’ (Gregg 2008).While other disciplines are well placed to offer empirical studies of howworkers’ and managementpractices change in the wake oftechnology uptake, cultural studies tools can identify the discursive meanings that surround the devices themselves prior to entering the work setting as a result of dominant forms of representation in media and popular culture. In the case of wireless technology, the framework for discussion in work-related contexts currently veers between two key interest groups. On the one hand, as we are about to see, telecommunications providers disseminate images of wireless users who appear overwhelmingly empowered byvirtue of being able to work wherever they like. Alternatively, the literature on work-life balance paints these same users asalmost pathologically addicted to their wireless devices precisely because of this flexibility in location (hence the widespread uptake of the term ‘Crackberry’).[2]In both instances, the same discourse of freedom versus constraint underwrites efforts to think about the affordances of the technology. Users are encouraged to make connections between their work, identity and technology in ways which may or may not accord with their actual experiences or desires. My focus on advertising is therefore a concerted effort to develop a position between these extremes. It draws attention to the role of work in securing self-esteem, status and identity while also questioning whether long hours on call is the most sustainable or effective demonstrationof employee loyalty in the long term. Advertising operates at the intersection of the same anxieties and dreams that wireless technologies are claimed to assuage or provide. Yet it is these affective and emotional dimensions to workers’ experience that empirical studies of workplace culture have so far struggled to register, let alone interpret into a recognisable labour politics long overdue for the burgeoning ranks of the knowledge class (Liu 2004).
Typologies of wireless use
1. Frequent Flyers
If media and cultural studies have been slow to catch on to the significance of workplace culture as a research topic, advertisers have been quite the opposite. Corporate office culture is the dominant in advertising for wireless technologies, or to be even more accurate, it is the workplace culture that is taken for granted as the backdrop for the jetsetting, corporate consultant demographic to whom most advertisements appear designed to appeal. In considering recent representations of wireless technology in work settings a number of recurring images become evident. Initially, advertising strategists pitched wireless technologies to those users whose work day is most noticeably enhanced and enabled through such devices: the ‘frequent flyers’ who clearly benefit from the convenience of taking the office anywhere. Encouragement to ‘Pick up your connection as soon as you arrive with Telstra Flexible Networking’ accompanied pictures of besuited gentlemen arriving in generic airline lounges with Blackberries at the ready, while Vodafone’s ‘Now’ campaign also depicted a well groomed young woman connectingto mobile broadband from her laptop at a departure gate in line with the slogan: ‘Check out your email after check in’. In these images wireless technology allows individuals to be contactable without being literally present at the office. The technology supplied by the company or invested in by the actual worker becomes reflective of one’s status within the workplace hierarchy while also demonstrating commitment to the job. This form of advertising responds to the increased mobility of work and workers with affordable air travel, and to many people, wireless technologies are an immense convenience to cope with the ‘down time’ and the isolation that comes with the transit experience. As these advertisements have developed over time, however, the tone of their appeals has become increasingly insistent.At taxi ranks in capital city airports, billboards now line up to remind visiting executives that they can ‘get to work before the taxi does’, or ‘get back to clients from the back seat of the cab’. The sheer number of interpellations a business traveller encounters in transit could be said to promote a sense of obligation: the desire to not be in contact, to actually enjoy the ‘freedom’ of being away from the office and have time to appreciate the different surroundings of a foreign city appear as unlikely imaginary possibilities.The temporality of the capital city commute is a day when every minute counts.
That Vodafone’s ‘Now’ campaign initially ran despite its fine print admitting that the service was only available in ‘Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra metros’ indicates both the concentration and the limitations of access for these services, as does the decision by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in August 2007 forcing Telstra to change deceptive television advertising for its NextG network which was claiming to provide coverage ‘everywhere you need it’. Such factors arenonetheless evidence that the user demographic presumedinboth campaignsis considered worthy of mounting nation-wide marketing ventures due to theamount of money high-profile workers pour in to their business plans with established telco providers. The globetrotting wireless user occupies a position of control in these representations, navigating both physical territory and cyberspace with simultaneous ease (Nunes, 2006: 30-1). The places visited by the business traveller ‘become “smart” by virtue of my presence’ (Barnet 2005: np). In this sense, the capacity to be present and contactable has delivered a form of Utopia: ‘a future where important messages may yet arrive, and where we will not miss the arrival’ (ibid.). But as Barnet also admits, ‘Like any promise, there is an expectation that this will take place, and an attendant anxiety that it will not take place’ (ibid.). As I will argue in more detail shortly, the psychological effects of the former are still to be fully reckoned with, whereas for the latter, there is no surer indication of one’s lack of importance in the workplace than a silent phone.
Building on these initial depictions of the frequent flyer lifestyle, telcos and hardware providers alike have been keen to illustrate the many locations where work can be performed using wireless technologies before one gets to the office: from a bus stop (Telstra), from the bus itself (Vodafone), from a cliff face (Sony), from a park (Bigpond), from a cafe (Telstra), from a hairdresser (Telstra –again courting the Lady Executive); even nude (Vodafone’s Blackberry Mobile Email bundle). In this proliferating genre of advertising, the mobile office worker makes use of wireless technologies in an ever growing number of locations deemed as ‘down time’ or transit. By the time one leaves the house, the workday has already begun. The commute is no longer wasted on daydreaming or planning after work activities but rather provides a valuable opportunity to catch up on, or get ahead of,a constant stream of work. Of course, this is assuming that the workday hasn’t already begun before leaving home: Toshiba’s 2005 flexible working campaign (the result of its 2004 research report, ‘Mobility and Mistrust’) encouraged employees to check e-mail at home to avoid peak hour and capitalise on the most productive part of the day,[3] whereas advertising for the Nokia N70 simply showed the phone next to a cup of coffee with the accompanying text: ‘Have you emails delivered espresso’.
2. Aspirational workers
While these ads are likely to address a particular type of already existing knowledge worker, we could also speculate that they attempt to appeal to those aspiring towards the presumed luxury of the frequent flyer lifestyle. Those that, although not yet operating at an executive level, and hence aren’t quite high enough in the workplace hierarchy to be flown around the country for top-level meetings, nonetheless rely on wireless technology to facilitate the very transactions that will allow them to climb the corporate ladder. Telstra’s NextG campaign has been exemplary of this trend, trumpeting the quality of its wireless connection in these terms: ‘Say goodbye to constantly losing calls. Say hello to more opportunities… Go to the next level with unlimited e-mail’. In this formulation, assisted by the pictorial representation of a male worker using a mobile phone in an elevator, unlimited e-mail is explicitly equated with unlimited business opportunity and moving up the company hierarchy. The network ensures that the consultant will always be available to act on promising developments as they arise. Without the prescience to know in advance what will in fact turn out to be a promising development, the user is encouraged to have the wireless device present and connected at all times of the day. As such, workers must become adept at managing a new form of omnipresent, low-key anticipation that is the constant potentialfor opportunity.
The most extreme example of this genre to date has been Vodafone’s mobile office campaign of 2006. The image featured a forlorn Ford sedan sitting in the parking space reserved for the company ‘Sales Manager’—tellingly positioned right next to ‘General Manager’—its car windows, windscreen wipers and rear vision mirrors all smashed to pieces with a baseball bat still lying next to the vehicle. A spray can lingering at the scene had been used to write client grievances all over the remainder of the car: ‘Why are you never at your desk when I call?! Rot in hell! From your client’. The Vodafone caption read: ‘What’s your landline really costing your business? Furious clients. Frustrated colleagues. Lost opportunities. Why risk it?’ Finally, the ad warns:‘Don’t become a landline victim. Make the most of now’.
Equally outrageous and amusing, Vodafone’s campaign only makes sense if we have a degree of empathy for the sales rep’s dilemma, if we recognise the anxiety caused by the missed call as that which the wireless device serves to alleviate. For the employee, apparently dependent on the vicissitudes of the lost phone call for continuing employment, the fate of the business lies squarely in his or her hand (or preferably for the advertiser, the handheld device). The implication of the imagery is that every minute out of the office is a potential loss, even though it is hardly the case that physical presence at the office is unaffected by interruptions of various kinds: network outages, missed or misunderstood communication (often because of the tonelessness of email and other text-based formatstypical of wireless technologies), exhaustion from back-to-back, face-to-face meetings—all of which come punctuatedwith notifications of other conflicting demands from Blackberries, pagers and mobile phoneSMS. The ad helps to set the unrealistic expectation that, given the opportunity, people will always be available whenever the phone rings. The security of the wireless network is that it provides a form ofattention and presence beyond that which is humanly possible.
Always on: Unlimited work
Such advertising for wireless technology inaugurates the conditions for an always-on worker subjectivity. In their redeployment of spaces previously synonymous with ‘down time’, the portrayals neatly efface the ramifications of communication technologies’ capacity to make any space a site for labour. Moreover, their regularity signals that the dominant utopian image in popular culture is no longer freedom from work but freedom to work, in more places and more often, albeit in more flexible, autonomous ways. This is the neoliberal trade-off for the freedom and responsibility bestowed by the modern workplace: labour politics can only be understood within the unique horizon of the individual worker. This privileging of convenience and choice effectively thwarts the potential for any wide-scale return to the notion of worker solidarity as the basis for labour politics,[4] a situation I will return to in conclusion.