Questions and Concerns: Technology, Work, Family, Life

Some reflections in progress about probably far too many things... Feel free to leave comments, questions, etc..

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Initial Questions about Mobile ICTs

A few months ago, I thought my project was about smartphones -- or at least mobile ICTs. Fieldwork-wise, I've already spent time with 3 families in SoCal (2 families x 4 visits in a week; 1 family x 14 visits over 6 weeks), and corporate professionals in an organizational context (~30 interviews + ~10 days of workplace observations over 4 months). I have been planning a (hopefully) complementary study of mobile ICT use with a different population — long-distance hikers. In shifting my attention to (unemployed) hikers, I would hope to open up some of the concepts from previous smartphone research that has focused primarily on working professionals.

At that point, I had a whole set of questions arranged around themes, something like this:

“Connectivity”

What does it mean to be ‘connected’? To who? To what? Via who/what? [Likewise for ‘dis-connection,’ ‘unplugging.’ Since that is so popular these days.]

“Capture”

More than just tools for communication, smartphones are also tools of capture: of pictures, knowledge, data about the self (think personal wellness apps). (How) do smartphones play a role in creating memories of a once-in-a-lifetime event?

“Nature”

How do people articulate boundaries: What is natural or not? Is nature something a person can be part of? An object? What kinds of objects? Etc…

“Ubiquity”

In HCI, “naturalness” is often a tool for creating ubiquitous computing, and a measure of whether an object is ubiquitous. What kinds of things are ubiquitous for hikers? What does it mean for a device to be “ubiquitous”? What are the markers and stakes of “ubiquity? (How) does this relate to “naturalness”?

Intimacy, boundaries, technology as self/other

This comes up a lot with professionals. When/how is the smartphone articulated as intimate & personal, part of or aligned with the self? When do people move to distance it as other? Technologies (gear) is super important for hiking & super-personal (carried for 5 months!). How do ICTs fit in?

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Discussion

I see you're using Melissa Gregg's book, which draws on several conversations, including a marxist-feminist debate about labour, as well as feminist and psychoanalytic writing about affect. You could, of course, trace this back as fas as you like (eg to Marx and Keynes; to Heidi Hartmann, Rosemary Hennessy, and recent materialist feminisms).

1) Consider this much-quoted passage from The German Ideology:

"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."

2) Think about models of self (and other). I think your work/life questions map in some obvious ways onto the long history of private/public constructions, and the related constructions of labour. In addition, there are models of self in specific historical contexts that beg to be picked up for discussion here. Look at work on the clock and models of temporality and self-management; and later "industrial" constructions of self (eg The Human Motor, Anson Rabinbach) and Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines.