<nettime> where is the social in the technological?

[Faith Wilding <fwild@andrew.cmu.edu>]

thanks Coco for posting this response to the thumb tribe article. I was at
a conference last week in which a sociologist from San Francisco State
also talked about her research with immigrant women technology workers in
Silicon valley (yes Donna they are still working there under much the same
conditions as when you first wrote about them in the early '80s). She
pointed to many of the same illnesses and health effects as Grupo Factor x
did. She also pointed out that many of these women have at least 3 jobs
because otherwise they could not pay the exorbitant rents in the Silicon
Valley. The stress factor among them is incredibly high and worst of all
they have pretty much no social life and no time to be social which brings
on a lot of depression. Whether their thumbs are getting more muscular and
flexible wasn't mentioned but in terms of pleasurable embodiment it seems
their lives are pretty devastating.

I also want to say that similar stress levels are true of so many of my
women friends with jobs in academia or other professions. While many of us
are much more satisfied with our work and our lives, many of us are also
approaching levels of overwork and stress that are really disabling. And
if we insist on having social lives it becomes even more stressful. I
believe not enough attention is paid to the importance of the social and
the embodied experience of the social. in solidarity, faith wilding

--On Wednesday, March 27, 2002 12:10 AM +0000 TONGOLELE@aol.com wrote:

> Sadie Plant's technoeuphoric views on how digitial technologies
> "transform"  the body are insidiously pro-globalization and ethically
> irresponsible. The  last post failed to mention that her "study" on the
> impact of cell phones was  financed by Motorola - and it appears to be
> quite a puff piece that serves  the interests of her employers.


<....>



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