In the examples Katz quotes the author as citing, he's absolutely correct. However, those examples are almost completely irrelevant.
And more irritatingly, there's all this red-herring crap about whether or not technology is accessible to which people. Look: a community of rich, privileged people is still a community. "Community", which has been often and is here being used as a catch-all feel-good word, is ANTITHETICAL to inclusivity. The experience of community arises among people who have a higher-than-default sense of connection with one another, and a correllary to that is that in comparison, they have less sense of connection to the people outside the group. That "sense of connection gradient" basically defines a social wall between "us" and "them", whether in a village or a chat room.
And a quick review of any basic anthropology text will reveal that a sense of community has little to nothing to do with democracy or liberty. Also irritating about this essay (at least as reported by Katz) is that the people who wrote most rapsodically about the experience of community available on line (Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace"; Reingold, "Virtual Community") were not arguing that community would bring democracy, or any other political system, to the world. They were putting forth the argument from observation that the experience of community -- a sense of belonging, an on-going densely connected graph of interpersonal relationships, the evolution of a distinct (sub)culture -- could happen in a virtual environment.
We take this for granted now, but once upon a time not so long ago, sociologists wrote, and I kid you not, that the idea that geographically distributed people might be able to form "community" (an idea first broached when air travel became cheap and readily available to certain classes of the 1st world society) was impossible.
Yes, it is disgusting how corporate interests have tried to appropriate the term "community" to apply to their feeble, sterile websites, and try to sell people a concept of community which is no more community that a listening audience is a "family". But that was never what any of us who were interested in this topic were talking about.
And basically, it sounds like either this author is a jerk who knows nothing about what he's talking about, or a jerk who has an ax to grind. The first is the case if he really fails to understand he just told many thousands of people "your subjective emotional experience didn't happen, your experience and voice is invalid, this social-emotional relationship you are in has no value" -- of COURSE those people would be insulted and feel attacked. The second is the case if he knows that, and still wants to tell many thousands of people "you're wrong about what you experience" -- the term "community" is a politically charged word, and it looks like he is trying to wrest control of it.
It means that the test was unable to discern what you are. It may mean the test is broken, or that you are broken, or that you are "undifferentiated" (which is a fancy Jungian word for "immature".:)
The test, relying as it does on self-reporting, is not terribly robust. It is often thwarted and comes up with wrong or inconclusive answers.
If you are interested in understanding yourself from a MB Type perspective, I recommend reading Type profiles and/or getting skilled help. When a professional councillor does a Typing, they do not rely on the test alone: they have the subject read the associated profile to validate whether or not it's them. And it's reasonable common for someone to say "No, that's not me, try again."
Alright, all you history geeks can come out of the closet now. Who all had a sudden mental image of a nerd in profile, poised on one foot, other leg lifted and arms raised as if he were climbing an invisible ladder?
Amen. I worked for 8mos as a temp at a major consulting company which shall remain nameless. The job description they came up with for my position (when I announced I was leaving) I was not qualified to meet -- and they'd been thrilled with my work and offered me the position at a competitive rate of pay.
I pointed this out to the PHB to whom I reported, and he'd have none of it. Nope, they were going to require 20yrs Javascript experience, 30 years Java, and the ability to spin straw into dilithium crystals.
People
think in pretty much the same way today as they did when the Ice Age finished
You say that as a fact, and yet it remains an open question to this day and has been fiercely debated for centuries. That's one of the reasons people study the history of culture, literature, art, technology, etc.: to try to get glimpses into how people used to think and feel, to try to take their measure as humans.
While it is possible to assert (as people do) that "we're as we have always been", or "we are more advanced than our ancestors", or "we are degenerate", there simply isn't enough extant evidence to propose a conclusive proof one way or the other.
Funny you should mention "hacking Chaucer" and the Wife of Bath's tale.
At a symposium on "The Transformation of the Book" (which directly pertains to this conversation) at MIT, a Chaucer scholar presented the work of his group. There are some ~50 (IIRC) extant source manuscripts containing the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and these blokes put together a massively hypertextual comparative edition (on CD).
This was immediately followed by a presentation on the Perseus project in classical literature at Tufts. It was at well over a million (hand coded!) links at the time of the presentation.
The point of this is three-fold:
The boundary of book and program can blur pretty dramatically. When a "book" is a site or a CD, then the laws which pertain to programs may be well applied.
The idea that a book is, as you say, "an artistic expression, not a tool", is clearly incorrect in these quite legitimate cases, and in the case (textbooks) presented in the cited paper. No one was suggesting open sourcing novels, they were talking about reference and teaching works.
The second of the two cases above seems to me to clearly be open source: you can (if you have great bandwidth and are really, really patient) download the thing for yourself and edit it to your heart's content. If you want to submit a "patch" (i.e. a bit of relevant ancient greek trivia), they'd probably be delighted to receive it and would incorporate it into their main edition.
Clearly, in light of, e.g., the Overlap Case, MIT was thinking
"Oh, thank god! Another Supreme Court case! We'll finally get some alumni donations again!"
The Real Problem with Books Like This....
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You know, the real problem with books (and theories, and newspaper articles) which "address" the social ramifications of the 'net is that they usually try to compress multiple orthagonal axes into one simple either/or statement.
Consider:
Techno-philic vs. Techno-phobic
Whether or not you are inclined to use the tech. An issue of psychology.
Net using vs. non Net-using
Whether you have access, or not. This is a financial issue.
Introvert vs. Extrovert
Whether you need more solitude or more socializing. Both are equally healthy and valid psychological make ups.
Community member vs. non-affiliated
Whether you're in one or not, independent of how you feel about them. An issue of fact, not opinion.
Relationship rich vs. relationship poor
Whether you're getting your personal quota of relationships in your life. An issue of personal opinion.
Socially active in real.life vs. not
Whether you are socializing in the meat world. A subjective judgement of quantity.
Socially adept vs. socially inept
Whether or not you are any good at it. A subjective judgement of quality.
Willing to socialize at work vs. not willing to socialize at work
A personal policy decision.
All of these are completely distinct. But pundits keep trying to squash them into a single dichotomy. That's where we get absurdities like "Does net use make people more socially isolated?"
to which the answer can only be "mu!"
Where do I fit into their little equation? An introvert (needs little socialization) who is technophilic (likes computers) and net-using (a technology-have), a community member (strong sense of belonging), relationship rich (not needy of more relationships), and highly socially active and adept in meat space (out with people most nights of the week), and unwilling to socialize at work (a cultural choice)?
What of the smart but extroverted coder who has the misfortune to live in a technical backwater, where most of the other geeks have moved away; hungry for more socialization, but unable to meet physicially with peers or find an accepting community in the real world, and unable to fit-in at work but gives it a shot?
What of the technophobic deaf person using a borrowed computer to connect to the net at 14.4baud, because, despite not wanting to have to deal with the technology, it is the only way to really interact on an equal footing with the hearies?
There is no room in their impoverished models for our personal realities, which is why those models so piss us off.
In my arrogant opinion, it only works with those firmly
under the middle of the bell curve.
I wish that were true. Unfortunately, some corps have people clever enough to come up with things which appeal to geeks, and, unfortunately, there are pleanty of emotionally vulnerable geeks. It's just like a cult.
The temptation for many geeks (in those work environments which manage to forgo the geek-repelling activities for the geek-attracting) is a ready-made social life. You don't have to deal with the effort of initiating social interactions or maintaining relationships. You never have to pick up a phone and call someone, never risk getting an email say "sorry, I'm busy", never have to make the first move with strangers. All you have to do is show up, and *poof*, you've got drinking buddies. ---------------------------------------- ------
Corporations do not DESERVE to be our communities
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Excuse me: American corporations do not DESERVE to be our communities.
All human beings have to a greater or lesser extent a hunger for community. It is an itch we all need to scratch, regardless of whether we are introverts or extroverts.
But just because we desire and enjoy and possibly even need it, does not make us stupid.
And just as, even though thirsty we are smart enough not to drink poisoned water, many of us are clever enough not to try to sate our appetite for human connection on the poisonous pseudo-culture in the workplace!
In Western culture, there is this idea of not mixing business and pleasure. This isn't just some archaic uptightness -- it's a self-defense mechanism for employees. (See Miss Manners, of all authors, for technical explication.)
Community exterts tremendous power over its members. Your employer already controls your entire financial situation (and possibly your relationship with your doctor, and day care for your kids, etc.) The business/pleasure dichotomy keeps the business world from seizing the power of community, too.
Or put it another way, if the time you could have spent growing friendships outside of your place of employment you spend socializing with your co-workers.... if you try to leave that job, precisely whom do you know to network with to get a job somewhere else? If pissing off the boss means everyone you hang out with no longer wants to risk being seen with you, how often will you stick your neck out?
Of course corporations want more community in the work place -- they'd love for every time an employee thinks about quitting, they also think "but then I'd have to leave all my friends!" They want hostages!
And trust them (and apparently the author of this book) to deliberately confuse community with communications. Communications, boy-os, is something that starts from the top, and implies little about emotional interactions. Yah don't have to like each other to talk to each other about work. (That's called "Professionalism", BTW.) Community is completely about emotional relationships.
Yeah, corporate america keeps looking for ways to manipulate its workers into submission.
Now it's community. Last year it was "family", and, get this, religion.
Companies don't deserve that kind of power over us. And we are not defective for refusing to grant it them! ------------------------------------------- ---
Re:Is he talking about introverts?
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I play music. I have for more than half my life. (I'm 25) When 5pm hits, I'm out the door. I go practice or I go record
something, or I go to a club.
Heh, you think you're annoyed by the article... My situation is similar but even more extreme/ironic. I temp in large part because I want to stand exempt from any corporation's culture, because.... I'm a musician (25 years). However, unlike you I'm not rushing off from work to do solo work. I rush off to practice or gig with my 10+ member dance band and the 10+ member a cappella singing group. To refer to me as an "isolate" is hysterical.
If I'm so freeken "isolate" WTF do I spend all my spare time dealing with large groups of people?
Katz, don't confuse a healthy sense of alienation with being "isolated". ----------------------------------------------
Legal threats? In the US, sure. Satire is well protected by both the first amendment and lots of supreme court precident.
But the financial threat of being sued by an irate corp can't be removed. They can sue you without good reason. Even if they don't win, they can cost you so much in lawyers's fees you'll have to give up before you ever get your day in court.
However, there is a tact no one else seems to have taken. I might consider the following: Draft (or hire someone to draft for me) an extremely professional letter explaning...
We all know that parody is protected by the first amendment and there isn't a court in the country which would find for the plaintiff in such a case.
We all know that the would-be plaintiff has bag of money and hungry lawyers straining at their leashes, while their poor target could barely mount a legal defense.
However, it has come to the author's attention that the N.Y. Times, Washington Post, and CNN, among others, adore these "big corp sues poor schmuck because big corp has no sense of humor" stories. Indeed, if they were to pick up the story, quite literally hundreds of thousands more people would see the work of parody in question.
Therefore I have cc'd your head of Public Relations on this letter. I'm sure they'd be happy to explain to you quite what such a lawsuit could do to your brand.
And then I'd have it ready for any cease-and-desist letters which show up. --------------------------------------------- -
I've seen examples where salaried, full-time employees make roughly half of their contracted
counterparts. Granted there are no benefits, but double the salary is hard to ignore.
Let's take a look at the real pay difference. One of the real issues here is that temps/contractors/freelancers are all paid by the hour, while direct employed techs are almost always salaried and overtime exempt.
Let's compare Curt the Contractor and Denis the Directly employed who work side by side on the same job, with the same responsibilities, for BigCo.
Curt is paid $40/hr. This means if BigCo. has Curt there for a year, 40hrs/week, Curt will be paid (40$/hr)x(40hrs/week)x(52weeks), or $83.2k per annum. Of course, this might not happen: Curt doesn't get paid for all company holidays (only the 6 federal ones), and he might want vacation time off. On the other hand, he might work for one of the many agencies which does have vacation pay, might work federal holidays, etc.
So let's say Denis is getting $83.2k per annum salary, the same as Curt would make for working "full time" for a year on the same job as a temp. But Denis is a salaried employee, even though he's not considered a manager, and he's over-time exempt. He regularly winds up having to work 45hrs/week. At first glance, that's (83.2k$/year)/(52w/yr)/(45hrs/wk) = $35.56/hr. But that's not right. If Denis were a wage employee (like Curt), he'd get time-and-a-half for those 5 extra hours -- money he's not getting because he's salaried. So, really, the equation is (83.2k$/year)/(52w/yr)/((40 + (5*1.5))hrs/wk). That comes to $33.68/hr.
Oops, did I say 45hrs? No, poor Denis is regularly working 10hr days, so it's really 50hr weeks. So he's really only making the same as a temp at $29.09/hr.
Let's take a look at one particularly bad week. Denis spent 60hrs on the job. He didn't get paid extra, and his actual wage for that week was $22.86.
And then there was that time Denis had to come in on the weekend, too, to deal with those pesky servers. He logged 65hrs that week. His wage was $20/hr.
If his coworker Curt had worked 65hrs, Curt would have been paid $1600 more than Denis. And remember, the premise of this exercise was that Curt's wage and Denis' salary were set to be equivalent.
Of course you don't like temps. You're an employer. Temps you have to pay for every single hour they work -- and time-and-a-half over 40hrs, double-time at 60hrs. Salaried employees you can work like slaves, and never pay them an extra dime. Piss off a temp, and they walk. You can piss all over regular employees and they know they have to suck it up or get a black mark on their resume.
As I've learned when talking with other employers, some people (potential employees) have caught on to this and have
started leaving "gaps" in their resumes to hide it. Either way, their resume immediately gets tossed. If they do make it into
an interview, they are grilled about the "missing" time. Ususally, it is some bullsh*t like, "Oh, I took a vacation for three
months."
Maybe in your reality. Here in Boston, MA, USA, Earth, Sol System, contracting is considered valuable experience, and indicitive of initiative, self-discipline and willingness to take risks. "Stability and level-headedness" are, frankly, not much in demand. The idea of hiding contracting experience is as ludicrous as failing to mention your most important job responsibilities.
And, by the way, I have taken 3 month vacations. It's good to be a temp.:) ----------------------------------------------
And if you want to be one of those, well, I've got a word of warning: There are still DOS programmers out there
today. They don't earn much.
There are still COBOL programmers out there today. They are laughing all the way to the banks which employ them for obscene hourly rates.
Oh, I agree with your general premise, don't get me wrong. But there is always an element of crap shoot in pursuing any skill. There are less chancy heuristics, but it's still gambling. There are no guarantees. ------------------------------------- ---------
You haven't temped, have you?
on
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I've been a temp/contractor/freelancer for 10 years.
Temping/contracting is not the same thing as hopping between direct-employment jobs. Many of your concerns above just don't pertain; for instance the travel consideration. Not only do I not have move for jobs, I haven't even had to have a car. This trick, obviously, only works in dense urban areas, but then, that's where this kind of work is most pervalent.
In fact, I find it terribly ironic that you should hold up location and hours as reasons one would prefer permanent direct employment to temping. That's precisely backwards. As a temp, I can negotiate my hours -- I haven't had to show up anywhere before 10am in 4 years and ~15 clients, and I don't work more than 40 hrs in a week unless I want to -- and I'll never be relocated by my employer (you remember relocations, don't you? Back when jobs were scarce, if your boss told you "you're moving to Bismark, ND", you were moving to Bismark, ND?)
My agency offers 401(k), vacation pay and health insurance; they also offer a special program for temps who want to work as close to full-time as possible without going permanent in one job; there's some traing/education bene I've never looked into. It's just like a real job.
The only real concern is the irregularity of cash flow. That puts temps on exactly the same footing as anyone self-employed, from doctors in private practice to your neighborhood plumber.
You don't hear people lamenting that starting a business or striking up a private law practice is a terrible thing to do to your youth, now do you?
Like many career temps, I do so for life-style choices, not for big bux. It allows me much more time off (I only work half to 3/4th time over the course of the year) to pursue my art, travel and studies. I'm not getting rich doing this, but I am getting ahead. And I'm having a lot of fun.
As I am not supporting kids or spouse or (yet) mortgage or car payments, I can afford to do this.
You may have or desire those such things -- but that is your life-style choice. And, indeed, those things are expensive enough to force various other life-style choices, such as how one shall work.
But see that for what it is: trade-offs. And the trade-offs each of us should make are dictated by our personal goals and values and circumstances.
Frankly, your advice is fine for the acquisitive soul who wants all the trappings of middle-class success, but for those of us "free spirits" who have other more esoteric goals, from a higher quality of life (I don't want to ever have to work full time) to more self-determination, temping can be an excellent avenue to what we want. ------------------------------------------- ---
When they fire the perms, they hire temps
on
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I've been a temp for the last 10 years. That includes right through the recession of 1993 (remember that?).
Frankly, economic down-turns can be great times for temps. Nobody wants to hire permanently, so temps get lots of work. Similarly at the peak of the wave (like now) there's lots of work. It was when things were ramping up (1998 sucked for work as a temp coder in Boston) that there was no work for temps, because if you weren't willing to go permanent, they didn't want to talk to you. -------------------------------------------- --
Ah, the embarrassment argument. It hinges on the premise that kids wouldn't be embarrassed to ask some random authority-figure adult for permission to legitimate topics. However legitimate topic include information about birth control, abortion, or sexually transmitted disease.
If you
came up against a block, you could simply call up someone (or call a library aid in the room or something), and say
you needed to look at the URL. Give your name and the reason.
Oh, yeah, right. I can just see some 13yr-old junior high school student telling his librarian "I need to check out this site on gonorrhea, 'cause, um, I have this itch...."
Or, for that matter, a 14yr-old telling a librarian's aid "I need to access this site about Ecstacy side effects, because I think I had this weird reaction."
Or, for that matter, a 15yr-old telling a librarian "I want to access this site which is a support network for homosexuals because I think I might be gay."
The problem is that the people who want to keep kids from certain information also want to keep certain information from kids. It's not just that they don't want kids to accidentally see naked ladies. It's that they don't want their kids to know about sex, drugs, and differing religions/moralities/etc.
The moment you start allowing some filtering, those parents will demand that you start filtering to keep information from kids -- demand that you do their dirty work for them. The only way not to get stuck with that job is to refuse to do any filtering for them at all. -------------------------------------------- --
When I was a child, there was this idea that if your parents didn't want you to read X, they told you "You're forbidden to read X", or "I don't want to catch you reading any of that skanky X, you hear me?", or "Our kind of people don't read X" or whatever.
Now putting aside the issue of whether or not these things are effective, there was this idea that parents were responsible for their kids.
Everyone keeps acting like this whole internet filtering thing is about protecting children from being inadvertantly exposed to, er, whatever it is that would be so dreadful for them to be exposed to. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's about keeping kids from seeing what their parents don't want them to see. It's about making libraries, schools, the government and general passers-by on the streets responsible for enforcing some parents' rules for their kids.
Quite aside from the very legitimate and excellent first amendment concerns, I'm getting pretty cheesed off about me and my tax money being expected to contribute to raising some slacker's brat, just because the loser is such a tinhat dictator they've lost all respect of their spawn.
Look, 'rents: it's not the public library's job to enforce your bloody rules. Instilling moral behavior in your kids is your job, and either you feel you've done a sufficiently good job that you can trust them to surf the net alone, or you don't. If you don't, then don't let them go to the library. ---------------------------------------- ------
The odds that the ultimate premise of a 399 page accademic treatise is merely "this stuff ain't new" are so slim, that I surmise that Jon Katz was in over his head.
I would expect the premise of such a book to be much more specific. Until I actually know what the book has to say, ideally through reading it myself, I have no idea if it has merit or not.
In light of this, I certainly don't feel inclined to accept Katz' summary as authoritative. ----------------------------------------------
You are confusing what the metaphor is. The Cathedral vs. Bazaar metaphor (at least as the author of the paper in question is using it) is between the method of their being constructed, not the final constructions.
I confess this entire metaphor has irritated me for some time. It betrays a lack of understanding how actual cathedrals were actually built. In the days when they were popping up like toadstools (i.e. ~12th century), the "architects" were an exalted flavor of stone masons, and as such shared a technical vocabulary and culture with the skilled craftsmen (implementors) who worked for them.
It irritates me that these medieval engineers (such as Villard de Honnecourt who was the Geeks' Geek of his age) are being lumped in with PHBs and the skilled workers who dressed the stone and raised the arches are being characterized as peasant grunts -- both are thereby slandered.
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Actually, I know a bunch of research librarians who have been snapped up by a new company out on Rt128 which sells their services for doing web hunts....
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Slashdot Mirror
*sigh*
In the examples Katz quotes the author as citing, he's absolutely correct. However, those examples are almost completely irrelevant.
And more irritatingly, there's all this red-herring crap about whether or not technology is accessible to which people. Look: a community of rich, privileged people is still a community. "Community", which has been often and is here being used as a catch-all feel-good word, is ANTITHETICAL to inclusivity. The experience of community arises among people who have a higher-than-default sense of connection with one another, and a correllary to that is that in comparison, they have less sense of connection to the people outside the group. That "sense of connection gradient" basically defines a social wall between "us" and "them", whether in a village or a chat room.
And a quick review of any basic anthropology text will reveal that a sense of community has little to nothing to do with democracy or liberty. Also irritating about this essay (at least as reported by Katz) is that the people who wrote most rapsodically about the experience of community available on line (Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace"; Reingold, "Virtual Community") were not arguing that community would bring democracy, or any other political system, to the world. They were putting forth the argument from observation that the experience of community -- a sense of belonging, an on-going densely connected graph of interpersonal relationships, the evolution of a distinct (sub)culture -- could happen in a virtual environment.
We take this for granted now, but once upon a time not so long ago, sociologists wrote, and I kid you not, that the idea that geographically distributed people might be able to form "community" (an idea first broached when air travel became cheap and readily available to certain classes of the 1st world society) was impossible.
Yes, it is disgusting how corporate interests have tried to appropriate the term "community" to apply to their feeble, sterile websites, and try to sell people a concept of community which is no more community that a listening audience is a "family". But that was never what any of us who were interested in this topic were talking about.
And basically, it sounds like either this author is a jerk who knows nothing about what he's talking about, or a jerk who has an ax to grind. The first is the case if he really fails to understand he just told many thousands of people "your subjective emotional experience didn't happen, your experience and voice is invalid, this social-emotional relationship you are in has no value" -- of COURSE those people would be insulted and feel attacked. The second is the case if he knows that, and still wants to tell many thousands of people "you're wrong about what you experience" -- the term "community" is a politically charged word, and it looks like he is trying to wrest control of it.
Yes. *yawn*.
It means that the test was unable to discern what you are. It may mean the test is broken, or that you are broken, or that you are "undifferentiated" (which is a fancy Jungian word for "immature". :)
The test, relying as it does on self-reporting, is not terribly robust. It is often thwarted and comes up with wrong or inconclusive answers.
If you are interested in understanding yourself from a MB Type perspective, I recommend reading Type profiles and/or getting skilled help. When a professional councillor does a Typing, they do not rely on the test alone: they have the subject read the associated profile to validate whether or not it's them. And it's reasonable common for someone to say "No, that's not me, try again."
Alright, all you history geeks can come out of the closet now. Who all had a sudden mental image of a nerd in profile, poised on one foot, other leg lifted and arms raised as if he were climbing an invisible ladder?
Amen. I worked for 8mos as a temp at a major consulting company which shall remain nameless. The job description they came up with for my position (when I announced I was leaving) I was not qualified to meet -- and they'd been thrilled with my work and offered me the position at a competitive rate of pay.
I pointed this out to the PHB to whom I reported, and he'd have none of it. Nope, they were going to require 20yrs Javascript experience, 30 years Java, and the ability to spin straw into dilithium crystals.
You say that as a fact, and yet it remains an open question to this day and has been fiercely debated for centuries. That's one of the reasons people study the history of culture, literature, art, technology, etc.: to try to get glimpses into how people used to think and feel, to try to take their measure as humans.
While it is possible to assert (as people do) that "we're as we have always been", or "we are more advanced than our ancestors", or "we are degenerate", there simply isn't enough extant evidence to propose a conclusive proof one way or the other.
Funny you should mention "hacking Chaucer" and the Wife of Bath's tale.
At a symposium on "The Transformation of the Book" (which directly pertains to this conversation) at MIT, a Chaucer scholar presented the work of his group. There are some ~50 (IIRC) extant source manuscripts containing the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and these blokes put together a massively hypertextual comparative edition (on CD).
This was immediately followed by a presentation on the Perseus project in classical literature at Tufts. It was at well over a million (hand coded!) links at the time of the presentation.
The point of this is three-fold:
Clearly, in light of, e.g., the Overlap Case, MIT was thinking
"Oh, thank god! Another Supreme Court case! We'll finally get some alumni donations again!"
You know, the real problem with books (and theories, and newspaper articles) which "address" the social ramifications of the 'net is that they usually try to compress multiple orthagonal axes into one simple either/or statement.
Consider:
Techno-philic vs. Techno-phobic
Whether or not you are inclined to use the tech. An issue of psychology.
Whether you have access, or not. This is a financial issue.
Whether you need more solitude or more socializing. Both are equally healthy and valid psychological make ups.
Whether you're in one or not, independent of how you feel about them. An issue of fact, not opinion.
Whether you're getting your personal quota of relationships in your life. An issue of personal opinion.
Whether you are socializing in the meat world. A subjective judgement of quantity.
Whether or not you are any good at it. A subjective judgement of quality.
A personal policy decision.
All of these are completely distinct. But pundits keep trying to squash them into a single dichotomy. That's where we get absurdities like "Does net use make people more socially isolated?" to which the answer can only be "mu!"
Where do I fit into their little equation? An introvert (needs little socialization) who is technophilic (likes computers) and net-using (a technology-have), a community member (strong sense of belonging), relationship rich (not needy of more relationships), and highly socially active and adept in meat space (out with people most nights of the week), and unwilling to socialize at work (a cultural choice)?
What of the smart but extroverted coder who has the misfortune to live in a technical backwater, where most of the other geeks have moved away; hungry for more socialization, but unable to meet physicially with peers or find an accepting community in the real world, and unable to fit-in at work but gives it a shot?
What of the technophobic deaf person using a borrowed computer to connect to the net at 14.4baud, because, despite not wanting to have to deal with the technology, it is the only way to really interact on an equal footing with the hearies?
There is no room in their impoverished models for our personal realities, which is why those models so piss us off.
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I wish that were true. Unfortunately, some corps have people clever enough to come up with things which appeal to geeks, and, unfortunately, there are pleanty of emotionally vulnerable geeks. It's just like a cult.
The temptation for many geeks (in those work environments which manage to forgo the geek-repelling activities for the geek-attracting) is a ready-made social life. You don't have to deal with the effort of initiating social interactions or maintaining relationships. You never have to pick up a phone and call someone, never risk getting an email say "sorry, I'm busy", never have to make the first move with strangers. All you have to do is show up, and *poof*, you've got drinking buddies.- ------
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Excuse me: American corporations do not DESERVE to be our communities.
All human beings have to a greater or lesser extent a hunger for community. It is an itch we all need to scratch, regardless of whether we are introverts or extroverts.
But just because we desire and enjoy and possibly even need it, does not make us stupid. And just as, even though thirsty we are smart enough not to drink poisoned water, many of us are clever enough not to try to sate our appetite for human connection on the poisonous pseudo-culture in the workplace!
In Western culture, there is this idea of not mixing business and pleasure. This isn't just some archaic uptightness -- it's a self-defense mechanism for employees. (See Miss Manners, of all authors, for technical explication.)
Community exterts tremendous power over its members. Your employer already controls your entire financial situation (and possibly your relationship with your doctor, and day care for your kids, etc.) The business/pleasure dichotomy keeps the business world from seizing the power of community, too.
Or put it another way, if the time you could have spent growing friendships outside of your place of employment you spend socializing with your co-workers.... if you try to leave that job, precisely whom do you know to network with to get a job somewhere else? If pissing off the boss means everyone you hang out with no longer wants to risk being seen with you, how often will you stick your neck out?
Of course corporations want more community in the work place -- they'd love for every time an employee thinks about quitting, they also think "but then I'd have to leave all my friends!" They want hostages!
And trust them (and apparently the author of this book) to deliberately confuse community with communications. Communications, boy-os, is something that starts from the top, and implies little about emotional interactions. Yah don't have to like each other to talk to each other about work. (That's called "Professionalism", BTW.) Community is completely about emotional relationships.
Yeah, corporate america keeps looking for ways to manipulate its workers into submission. Now it's community. Last year it was "family", and, get this, religion.
Companies don't deserve that kind of power over us. And we are not defective for refusing to grant it them!- ---
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Heh, you think you're annoyed by the article... My situation is similar but even more extreme/ironic. I temp in large part because I want to stand exempt from any corporation's culture, because.... I'm a musician (25 years). However, unlike you I'm not rushing off from work to do solo work. I rush off to practice or gig with my 10+ member dance band and the 10+ member a cappella singing group. To refer to me as an "isolate" is hysterical.
If I'm so freeken "isolate" WTF do I spend all my spare time dealing with large groups of people?
Katz, don't confuse a healthy sense of alienation with being "isolated".
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Since Asimov, they've already had Shatner. I think the Good Doctor will glad of the rest.- ---
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Legal threats? In the US, sure. Satire is well protected by both the first amendment and lots of supreme court precident.
But the financial threat of being sued by an irate corp can't be removed. They can sue you without good reason. Even if they don't win, they can cost you so much in lawyers's fees you'll have to give up before you ever get your day in court.
However, there is a tact no one else seems to have taken. I might consider the following: Draft (or hire someone to draft for me) an extremely professional letter explaning...
And then I'd have it ready for any cease-and-desist letters which show up.- -
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... that INS needs to sponsor some H1Bs for foreign, skilled paperwork-pushers. :)-
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Let's take a look at the real pay difference. One of the real issues here is that temps/contractors/freelancers are all paid by the hour, while direct employed techs are almost always salaried and overtime exempt.
Let's compare Curt the Contractor and Denis the Directly employed who work side by side on the same job, with the same responsibilities, for BigCo.
Curt is paid $40/hr. This means if BigCo. has Curt there for a year, 40hrs/week, Curt will be paid (40$/hr)x(40hrs/week)x(52weeks), or $83.2k per annum. Of course, this might not happen: Curt doesn't get paid for all company holidays (only the 6 federal ones), and he might want vacation time off. On the other hand, he might work for one of the many agencies which does have vacation pay, might work federal holidays, etc.
So let's say Denis is getting $83.2k per annum salary, the same as Curt would make for working "full time" for a year on the same job as a temp. But Denis is a salaried employee, even though he's not considered a manager, and he's over-time exempt. He regularly winds up having to work 45hrs/week. At first glance, that's (83.2k$/year)/(52w/yr)/(45hrs/wk) = $35.56/hr. But that's not right. If Denis were a wage employee (like Curt), he'd get time-and-a-half for those 5 extra hours -- money he's not getting because he's salaried. So, really, the equation is (83.2k$/year)/(52w/yr)/((40 + (5*1.5))hrs/wk). That comes to $33.68/hr.
Oops, did I say 45hrs? No, poor Denis is regularly working 10hr days, so it's really 50hr weeks. So he's really only making the same as a temp at $29.09/hr.
Let's take a look at one particularly bad week. Denis spent 60hrs on the job. He didn't get paid extra, and his actual wage for that week was $22.86.
And then there was that time Denis had to come in on the weekend, too, to deal with those pesky servers. He logged 65hrs that week. His wage was $20/hr.
If his coworker Curt had worked 65hrs, Curt would have been paid $1600 more than Denis. And remember, the premise of this exercise was that Curt's wage and Denis' salary were set to be equivalent.
Just something to chew on...
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Of course you don't like temps. You're an employer. Temps you have to pay for every single hour they work -- and time-and-a-half over 40hrs, double-time at 60hrs. Salaried employees you can work like slaves, and never pay them an extra dime. Piss off a temp, and they walk. You can piss all over regular employees and they know they have to suck it up or get a black mark on their resume.
Maybe in your reality. Here in Boston, MA, USA, Earth, Sol System, contracting is considered valuable experience, and indicitive of initiative, self-discipline and willingness to take risks. "Stability and level-headedness" are, frankly, not much in demand. The idea of hiding contracting experience is as ludicrous as failing to mention your most important job responsibilities.
And, by the way, I have taken 3 month vacations. It's good to be a temp. :)-
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There are still COBOL programmers out there today. They are laughing all the way to the banks which employ them for obscene hourly rates.
Oh, I agree with your general premise, don't get me wrong. But there is always an element of crap shoot in pursuing any skill. There are less chancy heuristics, but it's still gambling. There are no guarantees.- ---------
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I've been a temp/contractor/freelancer for 10 years.
Temping/contracting is not the same thing as hopping between direct-employment jobs. Many of your concerns above just don't pertain; for instance the travel consideration. Not only do I not have move for jobs, I haven't even had to have a car. This trick, obviously, only works in dense urban areas, but then, that's where this kind of work is most pervalent.
In fact, I find it terribly ironic that you should hold up location and hours as reasons one would prefer permanent direct employment to temping. That's precisely backwards. As a temp, I can negotiate my hours -- I haven't had to show up anywhere before 10am in 4 years and ~15 clients, and I don't work more than 40 hrs in a week unless I want to -- and I'll never be relocated by my employer (you remember relocations, don't you? Back when jobs were scarce, if your boss told you "you're moving to Bismark, ND", you were moving to Bismark, ND?)
My agency offers 401(k), vacation pay and health insurance; they also offer a special program for temps who want to work as close to full-time as possible without going permanent in one job; there's some traing/education bene I've never looked into. It's just like a real job.
The only real concern is the irregularity of cash flow. That puts temps on exactly the same footing as anyone self-employed, from doctors in private practice to your neighborhood plumber.
You don't hear people lamenting that starting a business or striking up a private law practice is a terrible thing to do to your youth, now do you?
Like many career temps, I do so for life-style choices, not for big bux. It allows me much more time off (I only work half to 3/4th time over the course of the year) to pursue my art, travel and studies. I'm not getting rich doing this, but I am getting ahead. And I'm having a lot of fun.
As I am not supporting kids or spouse or (yet) mortgage or car payments, I can afford to do this. You may have or desire those such things -- but that is your life-style choice. And, indeed, those things are expensive enough to force various other life-style choices, such as how one shall work.
But see that for what it is: trade-offs. And the trade-offs each of us should make are dictated by our personal goals and values and circumstances.
Frankly, your advice is fine for the acquisitive soul who wants all the trappings of middle-class success, but for those of us "free spirits" who have other more esoteric goals, from a higher quality of life (I don't want to ever have to work full time) to more self-determination, temping can be an excellent avenue to what we want.- ---
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I've been a temp for the last 10 years. That includes right through the recession of 1993 (remember that?).
Frankly, economic down-turns can be great times for temps. Nobody wants to hire permanently, so temps get lots of work. Similarly at the peak of the wave (like now) there's lots of work. It was when things were ramping up (1998 sucked for work as a temp coder in Boston) that there was no work for temps, because if you weren't willing to go permanent, they didn't want to talk to you.- --
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Ah, the embarrassment argument. It hinges on the premise that kids wouldn't be embarrassed to ask some random authority-figure adult for permission to legitimate topics. However legitimate topic include information about birth control, abortion, or sexually transmitted disease.
Oh, yeah, right. I can just see some 13yr-old junior high school student telling his librarian "I need to check out this site on gonorrhea, 'cause, um, I have this itch...."
Or, for that matter, a 14yr-old telling a librarian's aid "I need to access this site about Ecstacy side effects, because I think I had this weird reaction."
Or, for that matter, a 15yr-old telling a librarian "I want to access this site which is a support network for homosexuals because I think I might be gay."
The problem is that the people who want to keep kids from certain information also want to keep certain information from kids. It's not just that they don't want kids to accidentally see naked ladies. It's that they don't want their kids to know about sex, drugs, and differing religions/moralities/etc.
The moment you start allowing some filtering, those parents will demand that you start filtering to keep information from kids -- demand that you do their dirty work for them. The only way not to get stuck with that job is to refuse to do any filtering for them at all.- --
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When I was a child, there was this idea that if your parents didn't want you to read X, they told you "You're forbidden to read X", or "I don't want to catch you reading any of that skanky X, you hear me?", or "Our kind of people don't read X" or whatever.
Now putting aside the issue of whether or not these things are effective, there was this idea that parents were responsible for their kids.
Everyone keeps acting like this whole internet filtering thing is about protecting children from being inadvertantly exposed to, er, whatever it is that would be so dreadful for them to be exposed to. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's about keeping kids from seeing what their parents don't want them to see. It's about making libraries, schools, the government and general passers-by on the streets responsible for enforcing some parents' rules for their kids.
Quite aside from the very legitimate and excellent first amendment concerns, I'm getting pretty cheesed off about me and my tax money being expected to contribute to raising some slacker's brat, just because the loser is such a tinhat dictator they've lost all respect of their spawn.
Look, 'rents: it's not the public library's job to enforce your bloody rules. Instilling moral behavior in your kids is your job, and either you feel you've done a sufficiently good job that you can trust them to surf the net alone, or you don't. If you don't, then don't let them go to the library.- ------
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The odds that the ultimate premise of a 399 page accademic treatise is merely "this stuff ain't new" are so slim, that I surmise that Jon Katz was in over his head.
I would expect the premise of such a book to be much more specific. Until I actually know what the book has to say, ideally through reading it myself, I have no idea if it has merit or not.
In light of this, I certainly don't feel inclined to accept Katz' summary as authoritative.
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You are confusing what the metaphor is. The Cathedral vs. Bazaar metaphor (at least as the author of the paper in question is using it) is between the method of their being constructed, not the final constructions.
I confess this entire metaphor has irritated me for some time. It betrays a lack of understanding how actual cathedrals were actually built. In the days when they were popping up like toadstools (i.e. ~12th century), the "architects" were an exalted flavor of stone masons, and as such shared a technical vocabulary and culture with the skilled craftsmen (implementors) who worked for them.
It irritates me that these medieval engineers (such as Villard de Honnecourt who was the Geeks' Geek of his age) are being lumped in with PHBs and the skilled workers who dressed the stone and raised the arches are being characterized as peasant grunts -- both are thereby slandered.
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Actually, I know a bunch of research librarians who have been snapped up by a new company out on Rt128 which sells their services for doing web hunts....
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