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ОглавлениеWorkplace-Making among Mobile Freelancers
nadia hakim-fernández
April 19, 2017
11:45 am. Talking to my mobile phone’s camera.
I have news. The cable that connects my computer to the power source is breaking, and the cables are sprouting out of the plastic sleeve,
Figure 4.1: Screencaptures of author. Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
See?
Figure 4.2: Broken cables. Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
I had to put special tape around it, and if I move a lot, it will break apart. Another reminder that I have to buy another computer. But it’s 1200 € and I am not sure if I’ll be able to spend that kind of money now … I have some savings, but I have bills to pay. This is why I’ll have to stay here [at home] for a while, and, you know … speak to myself as I am doing now instead of being in a real workplace with co-workers.
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This is part of my auto-ethnography1 of what it feels like to be a precarious, mobile, freelancer life. Right now, I’m actually—Sorry, I was interrupted by my mobile phone prompting me to download a new operating system.
21 April 2017 12:43
I have been working from home since Monday, so for 4 and a half days in a row, (…) I spoke before about the fact that my laptop cable was breaking apart, and this is how it looks today, I mean, it’s still connecting by some miracle (Figures 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3):
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… so I am just using this connector for its last hours. I feel lucky that my partner realized they had a spare computer at work. It belonged to a postdoc who left Madrid (…) so it was just lying there in a box. I can take it for some weeks, not to Colombia, but for a while here in Madrid.
Last night I began downloading the programs I need to be able to work with this computer. I tried to use the in-built migration program, but it didn’t work, so I am doing it manually. I have my Dropbox now and it’s downloading a ton of files, I have installed my Firefox with all my bookmarks, my Evernote, which doesn’t work, because it needs an upgrade. I need to reinstall the program I am using to write. Making the workplace is not a straightforward thing—every time there’s something new, some different complication. This time, it involves making these borrowed objects mine through a series of technical transformations. Depending on the objects I borrow, this can take many hours—days, even.
These three desktops are workplaces for me at the moment (Figures 4.4, 4.5, and 4.6):
Figure 4.4: Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Figure 4.5: Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Figure 4.6: Source: Photo by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
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internet and mobility
Technology is designed with explicit purposes and then lived and interpreted by its users in many different ways. What follows is part of a larger project on mobile freelancers (Hakim-Fernández, 2017)—people who do creative and/or intellectual, mostly project-based work, change workplaces and employers frequently, and are constantly on the move, physically and psychically. Mobility is at the heart of this study, and it includes both bodily movement and the flows of information that make the internet what it is. Mobile freelancers don’t just “use” the internet and don’t just “move” as a lifestyle; they experience and interpret the internet in specific ways while being mobile. I make sense of their experience through Tim Cresswell’s (2006, 2014) take on mobility, defined as “movement + meaning + power” (2014, p. 108). This entails both flows and frictions, the latter referring to how power structures and the location of people within it hinder free mobility, not stopping flows completely—as there is no such thing as lack of movement—but redirecting it through specific paths. How we experience and articulate the internet—as a tool, as a place, as a way of being—depends on our capacity to move freely, and the meanings that mobility take, both in positive or negative terms.
While travelling for work and working while in movement are not exclusive to mobile freelancing, doing this without a regular office location or a traditional employment contract is. Mobile freelancers like me are responsible for securing our own jobs—often project-based, often several at a time to make ends meet. The work itself, the place of work, and the schedule of work is for most of us unpredictable. This differentiates mobile freelancers from previous iterations of independent workers (i.e. small shopkeepers in Spain), for whom activities were clearer, there was an established place for commerce, and “high” and “low” seasons were more predictable. Mobility, instability, and a constant ‘workplace-making’ make mobile freelancers a specific life condition, and this life condition frames how the internet is lived and understood. As Alvaro, one of my informants, a postdoc and adjunct ←38 | 39→professor at a public University of Barcelona comments: “[i];t is an imposed situation. It’s like a permanent instability, in which stability is instability … a stability that never arrives. I feel I focus my energies on searching a stability that will never come.”
what is the internet for mobile freelancers?
For the freelancers I studied, the internet is the foundation of their jobs, and the mobile phone the core embodiment of the internet. In the following I explore this through their experiences of materiality, workplace-making and (dis)connection.
Materiality
The “essential survival kit” for mobile freelancers consists of a laptop, a mobile phone, an internet connection, and the complements needed—a notepad and pen, adaptors, keys, money, identification documents, a bottle of water and sometimes something to eat. This set is enough to “do everything,” as Constantí notes. However, the most important in this set is still the internet. Markham (2003), building on McLuhan’s ideas about media, emphasized the internet as a prosthesis. It provides “vital tools with which we alter the fundamental processes of getting things done.” (p. 3). “No internet means I can’t do any work. Like when my laptop broke I had to install some backups (…) [from] the internet (…) so really the internet is the most important thing to have.” Loli, a freelancer sociologist and consultant based in Barcelona said “the internet is like electricity to me.”
As a material reality, the internet is associated with a screen, and in this case, the mobile screen of a smartphone or a laptop computer. As Laura puts it, her laptop computer screen is important because: “It is a window to the world.” Interestingly, Nuria, a freelance web-designer also uses this analogy: “To me, the internet is a window to everything, to work, to my friends who live in other cities, (…) to knowledge.” The devices, particularly the screens, are described as the contact points between two worlds. The freelancers use words like “cyberspace” or “virtual world” (“ciberspacio” and “vitual” in Spanish), which could be read to mean they perceive the internet as a place, but it is not the place that is most salient to them, or where they are situated themselves. Instead, they seem to use these terms to describe their sense of distance from a reality that would be invisible if it wasn’t for the computer or mobile screen. So the more meaningful metaphor for them may be the idea that the internet is a prosthesis, a conduit.
For many freelancers, there’s a tension between the obvious materiality of the device and the invisibility of what we do, or what happens “inside” the computer ←39 | 40→or the mobile. As Jason Farman (2012) notes when discussing the ideas of visibility and invisibility in locative mobile technologies, most communication technology is designed to be experienced as invisible, and this explains in part why we think of our mobile phones or laptop computers, together with the internet, as immaterial.
Most of the labor performed by knowledge workers, mobile freelancers no exception, is invisible. Muriel’s parents, who have experienced work as being visible and touchable, cannot “see” the results of their daughter’s work, which gives them a perception of her not having a “real job.” She says: “It’s not as if I was watching YouTube videos all day! I have to work a lot to be able to get a paid job.” Without stacks of papers on desks, and without an office where it’s clearer—in a traditional sense—that work happens, it’s difficult to visualize for others the materiality of our work.
But the materiality of the internet manifest in a variety of frictions (Cresswell, 2006, 2014) in our daily lives. Sometimes the invisible becomes quite materially apparent. Alvaro had to take a trip to a Central-American country, where he was to teach a class. His laptop broke just a week before, so he had to bring an old laptop, which would only turn on when connected to a power source. Alvaro had to worry about not being able to turn it on during security checks at the stop-over airport in the USA. He also couldn’t use the precious flight time to prepare his classes. When technology stops working, frictions appear, and the internet becomes material. Friction do not stop the flows of information, work activities and bodies, but makes the material constraints apparent. When this happens, the worker is cut off from significant parts of their workplace(s).
Mobile freelance work and mobile media also have a bodily dimension: the freelancer has to carry the weight of the basic kit on their bodies. As Álvaro puts it, “you never know where you will end up working, you have to take it all with you just in case,” an experience Loli describes as a “snail with its shell” and Laura as being “one of those carriage horses in the park.” I’m often exhausted by the weight of my workplace. I often find myself staying home just to rest my back. Carrying this equipment is a requirement to get work done, and as I will describe in the next section, to have a workplace we can call our own. The distinction between knowledge/intellectual/creative work and physical work is blurred, when working as a mobile freelancer, and the generally accepted idea about the privileged life conditions entailed by this work type is questioned.
Workplace making
Digital work is often defined as immaterial (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 30) and placeless; done anytime, anyplace, without putting a “personal mark on the ←40 | 41→environment” (Felstead et al., 2005, p. 22). The platforms that organize work are designed to amplify this seeming placelessness (Lehdonvirta, 2016). However, for the mobile freelancers I studied the platforms and software used for, as well as the processes of text processing, design, internet browsing and instant messaging create a sense of a bounded and shared place. For instance, GoogleDocs is a tool frequently used for remote collaborations, and becomes a place where multiple people can be co-present (see chapters by Schreiber and Prieto-Blanco and Raun, this volume). Place and placemaking are relevant for digital labor (Flecker and Schönauer, 2016; Liegl, 2014; Pigg, 2014).
The opening auto-ethnographic vignette showed how different personalizations of our mobile and laptop computers transform standard machines into an intimate place to be alone or with others, to work by oneself or in collaboration. Personalization is accomplished through creative means but also through the affordances of the objects and the platforms and systems within them. Affordance here is understood as “the capacity of an object to help people do something by virtue of its ‘interface’ features—how it invites and facilitates some particular action” (Molotch, 2011, p. 103). I’m most likely to create personalization through changing preferred settings, adding bookmarks, specifying notifications, using color tags, changing the desktop background. Other mobile freelancers do more or less the same.
Transforming our devices helps make them into stable work places, so that when we log on, we are at work. But it also serves a secondary purpose, helping us transform different types of spaces (semi-public—such as coffee shops—or domestic) into our workplaces for intermittent periods of time, while we move. This, together with the “stuff” stored in people’s machines, is similar to the “living space making” Daniel Miller (2011) describes people doing with their households. Work and living place making is influenced by habitus, biography and the material culture available. When Muriel was looking for work, she created a marker system for every museum and gallery in town within her preferred internet browser. Alvaro said “I prefer working on my laptop because I control the programmes. Working on another PC is very uncomfortable. The one I have available at the Uni is a powerful PC, it’s really fast, but my files aren’t there and I refuse to have a copy of my Dropbox there [due to privacy issues].” Personalization is key in workplace making, as it creates a sense of privacy and intimacy, which is particularly important for precarious mobile workers.
My laptop computer and mobile phone are my workplaces and so is the coffee shop I am at in Brussels (Figure 4.7).
Figure 4.7: Brussels, 26 December 2016. Source: Photo courtesy of Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Finding a place that can temporarily be made one’s own is part of the daily work routine for mobile freelancers. It can be extremely time consuming and mentally exhausting. We move with our technologies to find an adaptable place with a wifi, electric sockets and other conditions such as acceptable ambient noise. It is ←41 | 42→of course also important that our activity is welcome. Elena describes her routine of workplace making: “I have two main activities and I do them at different spots of the city. One of them requires writing a lot and being alone, and when I try staying at home, it never works, I cannot concentrate. I’ll just settle down and then the doorbell rings and I have to open the door to the gas guy, etc., and there’s a thousand other interruptions. I have tried going to libraries, but I need to feel free to answer the phone, move around (…) and the opening hours don’t match my schedule. I go to a coffee shop or to my gym that has a big social area, a restaurant, and is very quiet, the coffee is cheaper and I can exercise after work. I normally get up at 8, get my 3-year-old kid ready for school, and I then choose between going to the coffee shop, where we are now, the gym, or returning home. I love home because I can take a nap if I am too tired.”
Mobility combined with workplace making is one of the strategies we have to separate what would be otherwise a collapsed work and personal life. Leaving ←42 | 43→home is important, but maintaining this separation can feel like a struggle. When I was interviewing Constantí at a coffee shop near his home, a phone alert indicated that it was time for him to clean the kitchen. This alert is a reminder for him to stop working and invest some time in his household. He didn’t want to interrupt the interview and preferred to stay a while longer, claiming to be “already late in all my [his] tasks anyway.” Freelancing requires a sustained effort to be able to create workplaces distinct from personal places. In other words, creating a separation between work and not work through movement, or with the help of technological constraints is fragile; it requires a rejection of some of the affordances designed into our technologies and a lot of self-discipline.
(Dis)connection
I disconnect my phone [from the internet] to sleep, and it is an achievement to be able to keep it disconnected until 10:30 am, because you get the feeling that it is getting very late. So the challenge is to wake up and not check the email or whatsapp, but to wake up, exercise a bit, straighten things at home, load the washing machine, and then say OK, now I connect. It’s not a big deal to wait until 11 am, and then it’s like, OK, ‘let the craziness begin’. And you get 40 thousand whatsapps, and mails.
As Alvaro, all of the interviewed mobile freelancers experience the internet and its related digital technologies inevitable and absorbing, even against their will. This feeling of constant connection to the technologies, to the information and the requirements that come with it, becomes too much. “Disconnection” is a word used by many of my respondents. These mobile freelancers yearn to “escape,” to “block” the stream of information and separate work from other aspects of life.
A:It’s that feeling that whether you connect or not, the world changes completely, it’s really crazy.
N:Changes in what sense?
A:There is a feeling of being intruded on. There are always things there demanding your attention. And I feel a bit persecuted.
For many mobile freelancers, disconnection, and connection for that matter, present complicated tensions. We recognize it is a matter of boundaries, but these are negotiated with multiple stakeholders—other people, technological devices, and ourselves. Even when we might handle the first two, and that’s an ongoing challenge, we might not recognize the third, where we battle to balance our own expectations. On the one hand, we expect that being a freelancer has advantages related to having independence from a boss and sense of “freedom” to create a personal life/work project. On the other hand, we experience keen disadvantages, such as feeling the pressure to work all the time to find material security and feeling as if we must be available all the time. As a result, disconnection carries a double edge.
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Disconnection, or more precisely the seemingly constant desire for time and space for oneself, provides compelling evidence for the fact that even if the internet is ubiquitous, it is, for these mobile freelancers, not a seamless way of being. They have a strong object/subject understanding of the internet. It is a tool that moves information, the conduit for that information flow.
This core of feeling that the internet is a tool is evident also in how the freelancers talked about connection and being with others. Of course, the internet provides the freelancer with the necessary, and sometimes only available connection to others. For two hours every week I meet with a colleague sociologist I have only met three times while teaching in Bogotá (see Figure 4.8). We share many interests, and connect just to keep each other company while writing, and to tell each other about our accomplishments or what has been going on during the week.
Figure 4.8: Photo of my setting and sessions with Yenny. Source: Image by Nadia Hakim-Fernández
But these internet-mediated platforms for connection don’t feel like a replacement for face-to-face encounters, for either of us. In fact, for all of the freelancers I studied, the internet mediated connection alone is inadequate for feeling a sense of being with others. Elena says it is still key to her work to meet others in person, and this is also the case for all the mobile freelancers including myself. Some say they love meeting others in person as part of their jobs. For me, meeting with others in person feels rewarding and productive. It helps me to ‘get out of my head’ and develop ideas in an informal way.
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The connection provided by the internet allows us to be in the life of others who are far away and exchange certain types of information, but for the freelancers I studied it does not translate into a feeling of complete co-presence, or satisfy the need to be in physical contact with others. Quite the opposite, being connected through technologies carries a constant feeling of incompleteness and unfulfillment. The feelings of isolation among remote workers has been widely studied; this literature stresses the importance of “networking opportunities” and the use of, for instance, co-working spaces (Avdikos & Kalogeresis, 2016; Gandini, 2016, pp. 27–44, 97–106; Garrett et al., 2017; Spinuzzi, 2012). Many of us share the feeling that we have to be in places physically with others to do our jobs, and we agree that while these connected technologies are useful, they are—no matter how sophisticated—insufficient. It takes losing just some bits of information during a conversation that is supposed to be synchronous, to also lose the sense of connection and mutual presence. This relates to Markham’s critique of the common conflation of information transmission and communication, as if the instrumental means and content of information exchange is the same as meaningful interaction.
conclusion
The metaphors of tool, place, and way of being prove to be useful to analyze mobile freelancer’s understandings of the internet. Objectified understandings of the internet and frictions shape the meaning of the Internet and show its limitations. Even though we all have limited resources in time, money and energy, the way mobile freelancers deal with the materiality of digital technologies connected to the internet is specific to life conditions as these resources are usually uncertain, self-provided, and related to constant movement. Even though many of the participants in this research speak about the internet as being virtual and different from physical reality, we endure its materiality every day. Frictions in the flows represented by mobile work and the flow of information manifest when the technologies we use cease to work, and our socio-economic conditions—often precarious—open up for certain possibilities and closes others.
We are involved in a constant placemaking in our devices and through our devices. Place continues to be important and the internet helps create the feeling of a transitory shared work place. This sense of co-presence is nevertheless fragile, and not enough to generate the sense of having a strong bond or to avoid the feeling of isolation. The ability to be in contact and exchange information with others in real time makes certain things possible, but is not enough, because it is understood as an incomplete connection to others. This incompleteness is explained in part by the work conditions of mobile freelancers, where relationships and network opportunities aren’t a given and have to be sought for continuously.
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As I have shown, project-based and ICT-mediated mobile work does not necessarily represent freedom and a privileged lifestyle. It is certainly a tool for work, but not an emancipatory one. If one is tempted to apply a naïve Marxist analysis regarding the possession of the means of production in the context of capitalism, I have shown that it does not entail freedom from constraints attached in this case to the labor market. The Internet is also a place for the exchange of information, but not a place for being with others and learning informally. The internet as a forced way of being is highlighted when we reflect on how difficult it is to be present or disconnect from our working selves. The internet does not support a free-style identity, which could be supposed from the possibility to personalize and supposedly adapt these technologies to our needs.
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1 I started this autoethnography (inspired by Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Pensoneau-Conway & Toyosaki, 2011) on December 2015. It is still ongoing. I wrote, filmed and voice recorded fieldwork journals, and recorded interviews both face to face and remotely with eight mobile freelancers working in different fields (university teaching and research, design, digital code developers, and culture related-professions). Constantí, Laura and Thilo are programmers. They are in a better position to find paid labor compared to Muriel, Alvaro, Elena and myself. Muriel is a cultural mediator, she finds “the field of culture much more precarious (…) in Spain [compared to the UK where she used to live].” Alvaro and myself are academic researchers with no access to a well-paid or stable jobs in desirable conditions in the Spanish university system. Loli, a PhD who transitioned from an academic career to an academic freelancer, is able to find projects to work on, but describes the situation as unpredictable and underpaid. Elena is transitioning from being a consultant for public institutions in one country to a writer in another one, and she acknowledges her family’s financial support and her own savings as allowing her to continue this personal and professional project.
