Instant Messaging, over the last year or so, has begun an inexorable shift from a disruptive, underground technology -- banned at many corporate and academic sites -- into a sanctioned (and much hyped) communication tool. C|Net (among other sites) reports that Microsoft has released specs on their corporate instant messaging platform. Sporting corporate-friendly capabilities like higher security and "management tools", IM is poised to begin bridging the gap between email and telephone.
The rise of IM is in no way a "natural" movement, but it's a common one: disruptive technology emerges, is taken up by users, and flourishes under the radar. IM (and before it, hypertext, web pages, etc.) operate frequently (although not necessarily) as subversive technologies. Or perhaps transversive -- they operate not out of a simple, reactive resistance to corporate structures, but without regard to those structures, sometimes alongside them and sometimes against them, but within the spaces purportedly "owned" by corporations.
The postmodernization of communication in IM -- the breaking down of hierarchy, the insistence on circulation of information -- is seen at first as disruptive. Eventually, though, the technology is articulated as a more efficient tool in a postmodern economy, an easier way to move information about in fluid, deterritorialized spaces. In that recognition, the fluid spaces are reterritorialized, but only in limited ways: information still flows freely, but is now subject to observation, measuring, benchmarking.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. IT happens. Or so the story goes.
The breakdown and loose recombination of spaces mirrors an overall cycle in postmodern capitalism: Fragment organic wholes, then pick up the pieces (or, even better, get the pieces to self-organize in smaller, more fluid structures). The flattening of corporate hierarchies and the corresponding move to "empower" workers brings with it a certain type of freedom: freedom to do work more efficiently. So the carefully controlled breakdown, especially when its results and processes are closely monitored by management, harnesses subversive and transversive power and articulates it in line with existing corporate needs.
Posted by johndan at August 12, 2003 10:21 AM | TrackBack