Electronic Communication in The Workplace...More, More, More
Opera Ghost’s discussion (http://finalexamrhetoricincyberspace.blogspot.com/2004/12/economy-and-work.html) and Jack B. Nimble’s discussion (http://finalexamrhetoricincyberspace.blogspot.com/2004/12/keeping-granny.html#) both bring up some interesting points about how electronic communication changes the playing field for people on the job. I think the most sweeping change it brings is simply that most people entering the job market today and in the near future will be expected to bring with them a sense of competency regarding the internet, email, and other forms of electronic discourse, and the individual’s competency must constantly grow and adapt to change in technology.Previous communication oriented technological changes in the workplace have centered largely around singular closed systems (i.e., typewriter, telephone, copiers, fax machines), however the emergence of the PC radically changed this. Beyond merely using the PC to access remediated (as SB BS alludes to in http://finalexamrhetoricincyberspace.blogspot.com/2004/12/novelty.html) computer based versions of familiar pen-and-paper tools (i.e., word processing, spread sheets, calculators), PCs (and Macs!!!) offer a portal into a challenging new world, where everyone is expected to constantly learn, constantly adapt, constantly change their ways of working to remain valuable to the employer. While for some this merely means knowing what the internet is and figuring out how to archive old emails without deleting them; for many of us, however, it means remaining up to speed on things outside of our direct community of practice. While I work in marketing and focus on proposal writing, I’m expected to understand graphical design and all the tools our company’s graphic designer uses—even though graphics were not remotely part of my job when hired. Beyond that, people in my age group (mid 20s to younger 30s) are expected to be masters at “simple” PC applications such as Word, PowerPoint, and even relational database programs such as Access. Even my mother, who works in the Defense Department as an auditor, was expected to quickly learn how to write websites a few years so that she could develop a website for a class she was helping to instruct—and she didn’t even have internet access at home. But she knew it was critical for her to show she could adapt to what her employer needed, so what choice did she have but to struggle through it?
I wonder what challenges the next generation will face in the work place. Perhaps they will encounter what Neil Gershenfeld (http://www.media.mit.edu/physics/purpose.html) seems to so fervently wish for: a more elegant and “satisfying” system of electronic tools where the interface is seamless from the application. These tools (i.e., paper based novel, violin), he argues, are superior to the electronic tools we currently use. This also relates to Emily’s PowerPoint on Neal Stephenson’s (http://www.nealstephenson.com/) “In the Beginning…Was the Command Line.” This is one area where Mac computers (and their OS) leave PCs in the dust—not even close. As any Mac user knows, when you purchase new peripheral devices for your Mac, or install new software, the Mac OS typically recognizes the new hardware / software and runs it without issue (although Mac’s are still vulnerable to the black box of death syndrome where the user is simply informed that an error has occurred and the machine needs to reboot). PCs running windows on the other hand, being far more ubiquitous in the workplace, are ALWAYS having issues; even my IT friends that build machines and do coding in their sleep cuss their PCs everyday for developing buggy problems as time goes on, creating the need to periodically reformat hard drives and reinstall Windows to “clean” the machine.
I think that finding simple elegant interfaces and solutions that avoid time-consuming adaptation, learning and maintenance needs will eventually come to be seen as essential in implementing electronic communication devices in the work place.
posted by abullnamedflash @ 5:25 PM
1 Comments:
Regarding your first paragraph about jobs and the competence people need to bring in, it occurred to me that that competence is important now even before we enter the job. Besides newspapers or job agencies, Internet is really the best place where to learn about job openings. Now one can apply for a job via Internet, submitting the resume electronically and communicate with the possible employer via email.
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