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Knowledge, age and data
PP 065
Work with the Media: ‘Connected Presence’ and ‘Presence Bleed’ Amongst Transnational Business Elites
K. Fast
1
1
Karlstad University, Department of Geography- Media and Communication, Karlstad, Sweden
The “labor turn” in media and communication studies means that questions about work are being brought to the surface in all the more areas of research.
Existing research recognizes the increasingly blurry borders between work-time and leisure-time, between office and home, and between professional and
private identities. Much of the existing research also acknowledges the role of media technology for the collapse of boundaries between work and life at
large. The smart phone, in combination with all the more wide-spread Wi-Fi networks, is typically seen as the key to the “flexible” or “liquid” work-place,
from which work can be done irrespective of time and space. For the specific category transnational workers, for whom flexible work-hours and mobility
are demands, the connectivity afforded by new media is particularly essential. For these workers, the ability to keep in touch with home and family as
well as work organization and colleagues allow them be “present” in both contexts while being on the move. While the benefits of this development for
individuals as well as employers are constantly reproduced in marketing and management literature – as the freedom and affordances of new media are
praised – the ontological insecurities and ambivalences that highly mediatized working conditions may invoke in individuals is an emerging theme in com‑
munication research. This paper draws particularly on Melissa Gregg’s (2011) notion of ‘presence bleed’(i.e. the dissolving of boundaries between different
realms of life) and Christian Licoppe’s (2004) concept of ‘connected presence’ (i.e. mediated interactions), to scrutinize the working/-life conditions of one
of the most “flexible” work categories of our times: the transnational corporate business elite. More specifically, the paper aims to phenomenologically
understand how the ability to be, and the expectations of being, constantly present via the media make highly mobile subjects feel about themselves,
work, and life. The paper rests on 13 qualitative interviews, conducted in Sweden in 2014, with transnational business elites working in the private sector.
The respondents have in common that they work abroad (mainly in Europe, Asia and the U.S) for shorter periods of time, on a more or less regular basis.They
have also in common that they occupy top positions in the organizations that they work for, and that they (with one exception) have families back home. My
results suggest that, for this group of workers, the time spent in hotel rooms, airport lounges, conference venues, and in the air, becomes a time of self-ne‑
gotiation; a time when questions of whom to connect with need to be answered in ways that please all parties involved, including the traveling subject.
Ultimately, such ponderings engender existential queries about how to balance work and leisure time, or, how to cope with presence bleed between
life-as-employee and life-as-family-member. While the media help the respondents to manage the tiresome and routinized traveling that transnational
work entail, by establishing connected presence with home and family, they also encourage significantly prolonged working days, which leaves little room
for affective communication with loved ones.
PP 066
Fluid, Invisible and Always Available: Using Mobile Technology to Present Sex Work as Respectable Non-Work in Ohlala, an App for Paid
Dating
E. Ljungberg
1
1
Karlstad University, Geography- Media and Communication, Karlstad, Sweden
The last decades have seen changes in how commercial sex is perceived by mainstream society but this is ambivalent and contradictory (Weitzer, 2010).
The increasing acceptance and mainstreaming of the sex industry is foremost about economic inclusion while socially the industry remains highly stigma‑
tized (Brents and Sanders, 2010). Digital technology plays a central role in this partial mainstreaming of commercial sex. Ohlala, an“app for paid dating”, is
an example of this. The app was launched in Berlin March 2015 by the developer Pia Poppenreiter. It is now available in several large German cities, and in
February 2016 it was launched in New York. Ohlala uses digital technology to navigate the ambivalent landscape of late modernity and avoid stigmatiza‑
tion by claiming to connect its users for “paid dates”, presenting sex work as a kind of remunerated non-work. In my paper the app is placed in the context
of late modernity characterized by the liquid nature of identities, sexualities, consumption and work (Bauman, 2000). The material studied is the website
of the app, media interviews with the owner, articles in the media, the social media use of the company and as much of the app itself as is available to
me. The paper analyses how Ohlala constructs respectability by making use of the myths around new mobile app technology. The analysis thus shifts
the gaze from the technological affordances of the app to the narratives of fluidity and urban cosmopolitanism that invest new digital technology with
cultural meaning. Ohlala presents itself as part of an online culture of dating and casual hookups, not much different from Grindr and Tinder, but it also uses
the narratives of the trendy tech startup and the apps of the sharing economy such as Uber that also dismantle traditional definitions of work. By presenting
sex work as dating it blurs the lines between workers and customers just as Uber argues that their drivers are ordinary people rather than professional
drivers. Another similarity with Uber is the emphasis placed on presenting the service offered as on-demand. Through the mobile app technology sex work
becomes placeless which removes it further from the stigma of prostitution that is highly associated with street based workers in rundown inner city areas
(Hubbard, 2011). When sex work moves online it becomes dispersed and invisible in the urban landscape (Bernstein, 2007). The affordances of the app are
used to make the workers even more invisible compared to for example an online escort service since the workers’Ohlala profiles are only visible once they
have taken an interest in a date request posted by a customer. Digital technology provides the sex industry, as well as other stigmatized groups, with new
opportunities for visibility online but it can also be used to ensure invisibility and discretion, both online and offline. Ohlala exemplifies how the many con‑
tradictions of late modernity can be made profitable, most of all the contradictory demands on the sex industry to be both invisible and instantly available.