Hence, the blurring of the distinction between work time and leisure time, and workspace and leisure space means that more and more time— at home, on the way to and from work, and on vacation—can be consumed by work. At the same time, this also means that work itself is no longer construed as the negation of leisure and freedom. This narrative comes out of a two-page advertisement for T-Mobile (2004). Here, too, the subtext seems to reveal a dialectic that the surface visual and textual presentation attempts to plaster. The left-hand page of the advertisement shows a gloomy, florescent-lit office with two rows of identical cubicles and office chairs along opposite sides of the office space. The opposite page uses an identical visual composition, only this time the chairs are substituted by two rows of trees, with a group of bikers riding on a scenic road amid a beautiful green landscape. The text reads, “Out. Brought to you by T-Mobile.”
The advertisement suggests that, thanks to mobile technology, the digerati are not anchored to the locality of the workplace and are therefore liberated from the drudgery of a bureaucratic nightmare: free from office hours and office space, from supervisors and routine, from the process of mass production, they are cogs liberated from the machine. These grievances are, of course, at the heart of the humanist critique regarding the alienating ramifications of industrial work to which the digerati’s spirit of network responds. But further contemplation reveals once again the dialectical meaning of this liberation: with network technology, it is also work itself that is now liberated from space, rendering all spaces workspaces. The blurring of the differences between the enclosed office, on the one hand, and “out,” on the other hand, also entails the surrender of personal time to corporate time—the surrender of “out” to the rationale of “in.” So it is true that one can work while enjoying the outdoors and keep a tab on business while going on vacation. But, at the same time, the very essence of what it means to be “outdoors” and “on vacation” is transformed completely.
The freedom brought about by mobility entails not only the intermingling of work time and playtime but also the freedom of work time to colonize (symbolically and practically) playtime. The advertisement initially seems to suggest that liberty from workspace also implies liberty from work itself; laying the two contrasting visual images next to each other implies that mobile technology transfers us from the world of work (represented in the left image) to the world of leisure (represented in the right image). Again, the dialectical nature of this transfer does not evade the story that the advertisement is telling: the whole point of the plot in the advertisement is that while one is away from work, work does not need to be away from one or that the opposite of “working indoors” is “working outdoors” (rather than not working at all). In that formulation, even though the two worlds—that of work and that of leisure, the indoor and the outdoor—are presented as a mirror image in the ad, they become functionally the same space: that of production. This narrative is reiterated in a myriad of other advertisements, all of which extol network technology as the centerpiece of a more mobile, flexible worker, emancipated from the constraints of time, space, and structure emblematic of the oppressive industrial, bureaucratic organization.
Network Work
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