TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS IN THE WORKPLACE
"In July 2009 the US electronics chain Best Buy placed an online job advertisement for the position of "Senior Manager: Emerging Media" at its head office in Richfield, Minnesota. Among the selection criteria was the requirement that the applicant have a minimum of 250 followers on the Internet platform Twitter. The successful candidate was needed to lead "Best Buy's mobile, social, and video marketing and media efforts to drive potential in-store and online sales, create sustainable word of mouth evangelists, and new brand loyalists. This is the first declared job to be dependent on the number of Twitter followers of the applicant. Amongst the wake of the economic downturn, this Best Buy fact symbolizes the changing opportunities for work available in a digitally connected era. Across a range of businesses and recruitment media in 2008 and 2009, employees had been encouraged to join social networking sites in order to improve their prospects for job security and success in today's challenging times. This story is proof of evidence that Tweeting and other social media spaces are becoming anything but trivial in today's workplace." (Gregg, 102).
This statement above is indeed proof that social media sites and online technologies are transforming the various members of today's workplace and society into online professionals and enthusiasts, are developing the need for individual membership of an online culture out of modern society, and benefits those who are technologically literate in order for obtaining an added advantage in occupational success, achievement, and job security in today's multifaceted economy and diverse workplace and community. With the need to identify one's self and with others through social networking sites online, a new online trend and social identity is beginning to develop, a new cultural way to connect with others is forming, and thus the workplace is beginning to evolve as well.
"Facebook's mission to "connect people" pivots on the Internet's early novel promise to find ways of communicating with friends, as if no other means of communication existed before the Internet. In doing so, the Internet has consecrated disposition or "habitus" assisting the class consolidation of the knowledge worker. Exisiting networks of privilege are rectified in a very particular combination of textual performance, digital literacy, and useful contacts. Celebrating this in the language of serendipity and democratic progress. Facebook is the latest means by which the aspiring middle class creates distinctive expressions of its own privileged position in social spaces. This is because the command of virtual territories is increasingly crucial to the rewards to be won in society." (Gregg, 101).
However, there seems to be no need for any thought on the implications or consequences for society on such a rapid evolution and change. Society's individuals are becoming convinced because of the advancements in online technologies that there is a need to be perceived as a person with online literacy, and there seems to be a belief that one must be identifying with others via online social media technologies in order for friendships and successful relationships to develop in all facets of life, especially in the workplace and job market.
Besides allowing technologies to make businesses establish more cost effective means of production, new online technologies are now making an online identity a necessity in the workplace. But as we begin to investigate further into this phenomenon, online social networking technologies being a required form of literacy and necessity in the workplace is blurring the line between work and home environments. Essentially, we are becoming a society, as one can see in the United States, and in other various countries around the world, a society obsessed with work, keeping up with the latest technology, and as a result constantly keeping track of one's competition in the job market and constantly being wary towards the stability of job security. The next paragraph from Melissa Gregg's Work's Intimacy will help us understand the need for time and thought outside of the work environment, the need for a renewed and stronger vision of what family is and what a community should be, and the need to find other ways to culturally identify with one's self and with others through more face to face social spaces and even through other online social spaces, but essentially through other social mediums besides the superficial and consumerist environments which what is
becoming now of social networking sites.
"A labor politics of love must fight this corporatization of intimacy. It must look for visions that advance the "production of the common and the production of the social life" and avoid love's foreclosure in the institutions of capital. Hopefully, new media technologies offer some of the most likely avenues for this kind of politics in the future. The proliferation of of online social networks and applications are a key means by which individuals are challenging the corruption of love at the hands of the state, the corporation, and the family. Workers must also be wary of the extent to which employers are allowed to exploit the bleed between personal and professional aspiration, thereby removing the bases for other intimacies." (Gregg, 172).
The video below is of a commercial for Toyota automobiles. This video is placed here on this part of the website to generate some new thinking. It is meant to be interpreted differently according to the individual. What this commercial does is basically make fun of the social media phenomenon, it appeals to a wide base, and relates to the audience in a comical way that is suitable for today's generation and online culture, to the benefit of course however to this company's advertisement. Frankly though this video does shed some light however on social media's affect on the young people of today's generation, and shows the distinction that we see among young people and parents and older adults culturally and socially. It shows how the values and the aspects of life that we cherish, change generationally, and much of those changes that we see in today's young individual are to the large part due to the advancements in social media technologies.
The video below is of a commercial for Toyota automobiles. This video is placed here on this part of the website to generate some new thinking. It is meant to be interpreted differently according to the individual. What this commercial does is basically make fun of the social media phenomenon, it appeals to a wide base, and relates to the audience in a comical way that is suitable for today's generation and online culture, to the benefit of course however to this company's advertisement. Frankly though this video does shed some light however on social media's affect on the young people of today's generation, and shows the distinction that we see among young people and parents and older adults culturally and socially. It shows how the values and the aspects of life that we cherish, change generationally, and much of those changes that we see in today's young individual are to the large part due to the advancements in social media technologies.