One of the most elaborate and crystallized portrayals of the digerati in Wired can be found in “Microserfs” (Coupland 1994), a fictional story about seven Microsoft employees told in the first person by one of them. This literary piece (written by novelist Douglas Coupland, a leading voice in the digital culture, and later published as a book with the same title in 1995) encapsulates the “essence” of the digerati as a new social category, specifically, as a new type of worker. Let us follow the subjective experiences of the informational worker as represented in “Microserfs,” as well as a few other articles in the magazine.
The Blurred Boundaries between Work and Leisure
According to the digital discourse, network technology facilitates the blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, between productive time and free time, between office space and home space. This means that work is ever present and can be performed everywhere, but it also entails the infusion of creativity, joy, and personal expression into work and, in turn, the dealienation of work. The digerati is a new subjectivity that embodies a profound transformation in the notion of work from the Fordist to the post-Fordist workplace. It is no longer the image of the worker going from his home space to his work space in order to labor, only to retreat afterward to his leisure activities. The distinction between work and leisure is thus blurred.
This blurring is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this blurring commonly entails the colonization of leisure by work to the extent that work seems to define and structure the digerati’s personal lives.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age