Stephen Baker, on the worker. From his book, The Numerati.
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In the past decade, much of the work we do has moved away from the piles on our desks, the notebooks and newspapers and Post-Its stuck to the door. It has migrated right onto the computer, which is now linked to a network. We’re tied to a workmate equipped with a phenomenal memory, and uncanny sense of time, and no loyalty to us. He works for the boss, who can measure our efforts with no need for a notebook or a stopwatch. The computer will rat on us, exposing each one of our online secrets without a nanosecond of hesitation or regret. At work, perhaps more than anywhere else, we are in danger of becoming data serfs- slaves to the information we produce. Every keystroke at the office can now be recorded and mathematically analyzed. We don’t own them. If our bosses wanted to, they could order up an email chart for each of us. It would display the words we write most often, in proportionally sized fonts. You could only pray that movies or beer wouldn’t show up bigger on your chart than the medicines you sell or the stocks you recommend. That online version of the Wall Street Journal? Our employers can follow which articles we read. They can also buy software to create maps of the people we communicate with- our social networks. From these, they can draw powerful conclusions about our productivity, our happiness at work, and our relations with colleagues. Just what kind of team player are you, anyway? Microsoft even filed in 2006 to patent a technology to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and facial expressions of office workers. The idea, according to the application, is that managers would receive alerts if workers were experiencing heightened frustration or stress. Such systems are in the early stages of research. But even with today’s technology, if your company is not scouring the patterns of your behavior at the keyboard, it’s only because it doesn’t choose to- or hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
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