Hello All,
While the title for my post may be a bit of an overstatement, it illustrates an important point about my perception of the symbolic-analytical work that is talked about extensively in this week’s reading. For years I have had discussions with my best friend regarding the peculiar skills were developing while doing our undergraduate work in history. We could understand complex ideas, put them together, and could pick out the intellectual currents that ran through a particular text. Essentially we were engaging in symbolic-analytical work. While these skills were useful in an academic context, I always wondered whether these skills would correspond to a work environment. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work by Johndan (that’s a cool name) Johnson-Eilola deals with this topic.
Johnson-Eilola explains that this shift toward symbolic-analytic work is really a development contingent on several factors. The most important change is our economy’s move away from an industrial one towards an information one. Instead of producing material goods, many workers, primarily in the service industry, deal with theoretical goods. Another development is the profound impact of the computer. With the computer doing the “heavy lifting” regarding complex calculations, this frees the worker’s mind to deal with the bigger problems.
The author made one observation that I found pretty interesting regarding workspaces. He says the typical construction of a workspace says a lot about the designer (or benefactor’s) view of how work is to be done. He points to the lay-out of typical computer lab, and then contrasts that with people that do complex symbolic analytical work. Johnson-Eilola says that the layout of the computer lab, with the screen being the focal point of the work indicates the vaulted place that people hold the computer, to the detriment of the user. If this work is as complex as Johnson-Eilola is arguing, and most of us would agree that it is, steps should be taken to straighten this out. I can see this being a problem with my own work. When doing research, I often flip through many texts, notebooks, and online sources. However, almost every computer space I have ever used has been extremely cramped, and thus does not allow the user to do his or her work as efficiently as one would be able to do with a more open environment. To this end, I am working on ways to reconstitute my workspace to make it more efficient. The author has brought up a problem that I believe plagues me as well. Maybe I can follow his lead, and possibly reconstitute my workspace in a way that allows the complex kinds of work I do to be done, and to be done more effectively.
