Week 10: Information labor and digital divides

LECTURE ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 05

Apple, Foxconn, and controversy over different meanings of work and the varying conditions for different information workers across the globe.

Karen Chapple, "Foot in the door, mouse in hand: Low-income women, short-term job training programs, and IT careers," in J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray, eds., Women and Information Technology: Research on Underrepresentation (2006).
Greg Downey, "Making media work: Time, Space, Identity, and Labor in the Analysis of Information and Communication Infrastructures," in Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot, eds., Media Technologies (forthcoming, 2014).

If it's your turn to write a 500-word article critique, you must post this to your section blog before your section meets.
If it's your week to give a speech, prepare and practice! Otherwise, prepare for a possible extemporaneous speech response.
Finish your final draft of paper #2!

First five minutes: Pop quiz? Maybe!
Two student presentations (#15 and #16) on the readings (and two student extemporaneous responses).
Discuss this week's lecture and required readings.
Turn in printed final version of paper #2.
Discuss your final multimedia project ("skeleton" file for Ignite presentation due on wiki next week)

This weekend you will explore the presence of casualized labor on the Interent -- and in real communities.

Manpower Inc. is the world's largest temporary employment firm: "Manpower's worldwide network of 4,500 offices in 80 countries and territories enables the company to meet the needs of its 400,000 clients per year, including small and medium size enterprises in all industry sectors, as well as the world's largest multinational corporations." Explore their web site a bit to get a sense of what this firm does. (They even have a branch on Second Life ...)
Now go to the US site for Manpower and do a job search in three different areas: (1) Madison, WI; (2) your hometown (or the city closest to your hometown); (2) a town or city you might like to someday live in.
(Hint: Leave the "Keyword(s)" field on the search page empty, but choose a specific state from the drop-down menu, click on a specific town in the "locations" list, and then click the ">" button to move that town into the search box. Finally, click "Search.")
What kind of technology skills do these jobs demand? How many temporary vs. permanent jobs are listed? Do these look like good jobs to you?
Write up a report of your findings, comparing the three places you investigated, for your discussion section blog.
Comment on at least one other student's posting.
You must finish this online activity before next week's lecture.

Mark Deuze, "Creative industries, convergence culture, and media work," Media Work (2007).
Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, "Human costs are built into an iPad," New York Times (January 25, 2012).
Virginia Eubanks, "Drowning in the sink or swim economy," Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age(2011).
Thomas Haigh, "Remembering the office of the future: The origins of word processing and office automation," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (2006).
Karen Hossfeld, "'Their logic against them': Contradictions in sex, race, and class in Silicon Valley" (1990), in A. Nelson et al eds.,Technicolor: Race, technology, and everyday life (2001).
Amitava Kumar, "Temporary access: The Indian H-1B worker in the United States" (2001), in A. Nelson et al eds., Technicolor: Race, technology, and everyday life (2001).
Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, "How computers change work and play," in The new division of labor: How computers are creating the next job market (2004).
Andrew Marantz, "My summer at an Indian call center," Mother Jones (2011-07).
Hanna Rosin, "The end of men," The Atlantic (2010).
Janet W. Salaff, "Where home is the office: The new form of flexible work," in Barry Wellman and Caroline Haythornthwaite, eds., The internet in everyday life (2002).