Freedom to Work: The Impact of Wireless on Labour Politics
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 allow more variegated notions 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 Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real