Technology and the Workplace

What struck me most about this clip was the incorporation of the theme park into the everyday life. While visually this makes the film fun for children, the incorporation of the theme park acts as a metaphor for the ways the American worker uses technology to get through the mundane work day in the cubicle. The US, similar, to the beehive is notorious for a diligent work ethic and lack of vacation days and time away from the office. Technology has therefore had to develop as both functional and entertaining. I also am thinking about the ways technology is personalized in regards to the user's attempt to break free of the homogeneity of office life. Whether it be a case for an iPad, a ringtone, or a particular wallpaper for a computer's background. All of these actions work to mitigate the dependency on technology as well as make personal the impersonal processes of cubicle life.

However with all of this work to make the workday more entertaining comes the consequence of a distracted laborer. The ability to multitask on a singular platform delays the completion of a task and only exasperates the problem of the American work schedule.

What is also interesting about this clip is it seems to be critiquing job specific training and the thought of staying with a job for a lifetime. Gen X is notorious for lacking loyalty to their employers by often searching for the next bigger and better source of employment. This sort of manic jumping from career to career is completely counterintuitive to generations before who would commit themselves to 1 or 2 employers in a lifetime. I can not help but wonder if our outlook on life is influenced by our day to day interaction with media. We experience media in shorter fragments while simultaneously using or accessing other media.

Copyright 2010, by the Contributing Authors. Cite/attribute Resource. kwagner. (2010, December 02). Technology and the Workplace. Retrieved May 16, 2012, from Critical Commons Web site: http://criticalcommons.org/Members/kwagner/commentaries/technology-and-the-workplace. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Bee Movie graduation

Bees graduate from the public school system every 15 minutes and go to work in the honey industry

In Dreamworks' The Bee Movie, an extreme vision of the school-to-work pipeline is seen in the functioning of a beehive. Making frequent allusion to The Graduate, the homogeneity of bee societies prompts a non-conformist bee voiced by Jerry Seinfeld to seek adventure in the world outside, eventually revealing the labor exploitation of the honey industries and organizing a worldwide strike of bees, resulting in a catastrophic agricultural collapse. The depiction of labor organizing is stereotypical of post-McCarthy Hollywood, with striking bees depicted as lazy and uncaring about the global disaster their walkout precipitates. Predictably, the status quo is restored and the bees return to work as an incidental outcome of the resolution of the film's central personal drama, with no significant concessions from the honey industry.