I'll get straight to the point on this one. Deuze, although informing, didn't really cut it for me in this week's paper. For the first few pages I was pretty intrigued in what he was trying to say, but for some reason his constant use of too many examples got on my nerve.
"With a divorce rate of roughly 50% in most capitalist economies, a growing recognition of the normalcy of gay and lesbian lifestyles, the exponential increase among city dwellers of predominantly childless peoples like recent immigrants, aging babyboomers, and empty nesters..."
"Media professionals – those employed in journalism, marketing communications, advertising, public relations, game design, television and the movie industry..."
To me, it were as if he threw as many examples as he could think of in there to rack up his word count. Not to mention how verbose the entire paper was, though you'd expect that from academics anyway. Oh, he also referenced himself a few times in his own paper.
Onto the actual content though; like I said before, it was informing, insightful, and a great outline as to how work has changed (and is still changing) between cultures and time periods. Contrary to my dislike of his writing style, Deuze did gain some respect by his identifying of the media "responsible for cookiecutter-style McDonaldization, as well as the main agent in affecting social, technological and economical change". See, to me, this is great expression. Simple yet effective use of words to emphasise the impacts of media on several levels of macro-based interactions.
Moving on to Gregg's reading, I liked his section on the acceleration of work. I found myself thinking 'yes, yes, he's right' as he explained how work has evolved from writing on a blackboard to being overwhelmed with emails or becoming "fixated on the computer screen". What's even better though, is that Gregg was able to pick particular cases where these problems have been handled by those with better time or space management, revealing a nice door of hope to those who think the future of the digital working world is going to mess.
Finally, I'd like to all direct you to the final slide of Ted's prezi slides this week and point out how amazing the mobile workstyle infograph is. Not only because its simple and effective, but enlightening to how mobile work is changing with the swarm of smartphones and tablet devices hitting the streets. I guarantee you will be surprised at least once if you absorb the entire image.
Thanks for the read and I'll see you in a couple of weeks :)
