Why all the labor?

This week's reading deals with some nice and concrete case studies on how the changing social emphasis on information has changed the working lives of the people, especially the people working directly related to the very infrastructure of information technology. But even this involves a wide array of jobs, ranging from clerical works via programmers to cargo laborers.

Rosenhaft explores into the soaring labor of 19th century German clerical workers. Sampson and Wu look into the shipping laborers who get excluded from the whole work process of the shore due to more 'efficient' communication/transportation technologies. Benner looks into the works of ICT workers in the Silicon Valley as guilds, who are struggling to stay competent (that is, profitable) in this ever-changing environment. Postigo explains how the AOL volunteeres were dumped, because the coporation wanted more stable reorganization. Voluntary labor contribution becomes obsolete when the technology adjusts to the more formal aspects of the capitalistic market. Drawing from the cases, Downey concludes that 1) technological labor is needed to sustain labor-saving infrastructures, and 2) any changing technological division of labor involves social division 3) which leads to spatial/temporal divisions, and 4) their positions are understood in terms of cultural understandings.

A couple of questions occurred to me while making sense of the broad scope of the readings. First, as the title of the volume suggests, all of them attempt to uncover the many previously less-noticed labor processes involved in the so-called information revolutions. But they are mostly focused on how the more information technology-oriented environment changed the lives of the laborers, rather than looking into how such labors changed the way the technological infrastructures look. In a sense, even though the articles emphasize human labor, it looks like it is still the technology that shapes the changes. What possible routes of information technology have been taken 'because of' specific labor patterns? It is a question largely left out of the discussion.

Second, I would have liked to see some more insights into the reason 'why' labor is so hidden from our sights when talking about information revolutions. Why are we always implementing the technology itself as the unit of analysis rather than the labor relationships? (Have the Marxists completely given up their worldview?) What ideological backgrounds leads us to forget the obvious labor, and what concrete advantages do we have when we do acknowledge the role of labor? I think uncovering of labor processes can and should contribute to more than historical knowledge per se.