Downey begins by giving a little
bit of his background and his experience as a researcher and Professor. As a researcher,
he focuses his studies on media technologies of the nineteenth century, such as
the telegraph, librarianship, and stenography. He noticed that these
technologies have adapted into new technologies that exist in the twenty-first
century. As a teacher, Downey’s “specialty is addressing the ‘new media’
concerns of the current day”. By teaching about new media, old forms of media
have to be referred to because many of the examples and arguments made have
been drawn from this old media. The main insight Downey is attempting to convey
is “that a wide range of human ‘information labor’, enabling and constraining
the constant circulation of information across a wide range of technologies and
social contexts, remains crucial to making media technologies work”.
A key concept Downey explores is “information
labor”. In order to explore information labor, we must study the different
contexts in which we might search for information, technology and labor. These
contexts are “situated geographically and temporally, a condition we can analyze
in terms of place, space, and scale. An important note is that students’ own information
labors are directly connected with the labor that occurs behind- the-scenes by
designers, builders, operators, and maintainers of websites, such as Google,
Wikipedia, Facebook, and Amazon. He stresses that users of sites tend not to
see the labor involved to make the information and/or technologies available to
them. With these information laborers being hidden, being kept out of sight and
out of mind, we must reveal, situate, and explore what occurs underneath the
surface in order for us to “explore our own daily labor with these systems”.
Within information labor, there is
a concept of “jumping context”. Downey explains that there is always some sort
of labor involved in order to set information in context, meaning “to move information
across context and the reset that information in a new context”. To better
explain the theme on jumping context, he uses the examples of the telegraph
messenger boys, library technical workers, and real-time stenographers. The
messenger boys focuses on understanding the value of information labor in the
sense over time and space, which “enables that jumping of context from one sociotechnical
infrastructure to another. They serve as an example of jumping context in three
ways, (1) from the virtual to the physical, (2) from the intra-urban to the
inter-urban, and (3) from the telegraph to the post office and the telephone.
By studying the library technical workers it “suggests a second way of
understanding the value of information labor: as providing a way for information
…to jump context from one temporal, organizational, or cultural milieu to
another. They allow this in three ways: (1) jumping context from the past to
the future, (2) from one kind of knowledge institution to another, and (3) from
one set of cultural meanings and expectation to another. The final example
given is the real-time stenographers, however, this case of labor has been born
digital because it stems from the use of the minicomputer, resulting in a
human-machine symbiosis. Real-time stenographers have had to negotiate a series
of historical changes. These involve jumping contexts in three ways: (1) from
the defense industry to the legal industry; (2) from the administrative realm
to the media realm; and (3) from the mass entertainment imperative to the
individual communication imperative.
Downey stresses that while new
media is constantly evolving, we must not forget the old media from which it
came from and the labor involved. The article appears to be more so geared
towards the academic field, yet it is still applicable to the everyday reader
because it calls people to action. People need to unite with the collective
goal of “uncovering labor’s place in society as a whole”. By using the
information/communication technologies that are available to us (YouTube,
Twitter, Blogs, etc.) we can “calculate and reveal the presence, importance,
and impact of labor in new ways”.
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