[-empyre-] social media as revolutionary technology?

[Cara Wallis]

I’m trying to formulate a coherent response with so many interesting
threads intersecting in recent conversations. To answer Johannes’ question
specifically about the rural and the urban discourses, I should first say
clarify that while some of the usages of mobile phones that I observed
weren’t unique, what was unique was the particular context from which they
emerged. I look at the different articulations of technology through what I
like to call socio-techno practices, or how technology is integrated into
prior social and cultural practices and at the same time creates new spaces
or possibilities for their enactment within the specific social world and
material conditions of users. This way of viewing technology aligns with
many who view technology not as sweeping in and changing everything, but
rather as being integrated into prior communication practices and ways of
life. So, yes, the modes of social networking that I observed are based in
prior histories, experiences, gendered structures, and so on.



In terms of more political uses, among the young women working in service
jobs I didn’t witness anything “spectacular” like the collective labor
resistance by migrant workers in factories such as Foxconn and Honda in
China in the spring and summer of 2010. Those factory workers effectively
used mobile phones and the Internet to transmit information (text and
images) and to organize themselves. There are several reasons I can offer
for why the situation between the women I was doing research among and
these factory workers was so different. The factory workers live in what
Pun Ngai has called a “dormitory labor regime,” in other words, 100s if not
1000s of them live together and work together and this means a worker
movement is more likely to happen. Also, it’s important to note that the
strikes occurred at foreign-owned, not domestic, factories. China has had a
labor shortage in recent years, especially in the south, so these workers
know that they are in higher demand and this has forced employers to raise
wages and improve work conditions. So again, a crucial factor that must be
emphasized in such resistance is context. With such a large workforce,
among those share the experience of life in the “dormitory labor regime,”
and whose sheer numbers mean that when they “vote with their feet” by
either leaving their jobs or going on strike, the impact will be felt by
management, the media will have a focal point for a story, and the
affordances of text messaging and Internet worker forums can be fully
exploited. In contrast, the women in my fieldwork all worked at small
enterprises – often they had one or two colleagues; some might have had 12
or so, and at most 15 - 20. Some of them did chose to “vote with their
feet” and find another job, but their resistance was much more individual.



Btw, to get back to the Arab Spring, when I read about “revolutionary”
technologies and how, to some, things like Facebook and mobile phones
“created” the Arab Spring, I’m very skeptical. Not that new media didn’t
matter, but when Egyptian government cut off the Internet, the protests
still continued, using “old fashioned” social networking tools.
cw


On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

>
> PS.
> I think i was not entirely evocative enough in the street dialectics i
> wanted to bring in,
> away from the hi-tech concepts floated here on "design" of public
> interactives, or the
> metropolitan spectacle of BIG SCREENS.
> Jon Winet thinks of these "screens as collective and individually
> electronically-mediated
> experiences".
>
> Maybe I misunderstood. But I don't think so.  Big Screens have not
> propelled me in my life, ever.
>
>
> Yes,  where is the low  streetlife?   (Dale asked this.
> <<Our use of mobile devices was very much to enhance the discovery of a
> place and to some extent the place's discovery of you>>)
>
> when and how does it discover you?
>
> and all those rural roads?
>
> regards
> Johannes
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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