Mechanizing writing and photographing the word: Utopias, office work, and histories of gender and technology∗

Abstract

Mécaniser l'écriture et photographier la parole :utopies, monde du bureau et histoires de genre et de techniques.Mechanizing writing and photographing the word:utopias, office work and histories of gender and technology. Delphine GardeyTo cite this version: This article deals with the history of the profession of shorthand typing and more generally, of the transformations which took place in offices from the end of the 19th century onwards, when the acceleration of writing production became a new economic imperative. A series of figures, projects, and practices are cited in order to analyze the conditions surrounding the emergence and the development of a profession as well as the reasons for, and consequences of its feminization in France. The joint development of a practice and a profession centered on the Remington typewriter and shorthand emerges as one outcome among other future or existing practices. Inventors, propagandists, manufacturers, amateurs, and professionals participated in this history, a history which shows how diverse the milieus involved in the mastery of specific techniques were, how relative the motives and criteria put forward to enhance and promote them were, and how different the meanings and values given to them could be.

Perfect present, perfect gift: finding a place for archival consciousness in social theory

“…See Manifesto of Futurism as well as The New Religion-Morality of Speed. The evolution of the correlation of accelerated office information processing technologies and modernity and progress-including comparisons made between speed-typing contests and motor car racing-has been observed in a number of historical studies (Gardey 2001(Gardey , 2007Studeny 1995), A number of works have also addressed and critiqued the ''culture of impatience,'' ''speed'', accelerated document production, and the disappearance of careful reading, its origins in the Industrial Revolution, the contemporary ''technology of near-instantaneity'', and the need to resist its proliferation through deliberate loitering. (Levy 2001;Chamberlain 1999;Agger 1989.)…”

Coordinating office space: Digital technologies and the platformization of work

“…The opposing tendencies of dispersal and concentration of workers constituting contemporary office space highlight that technology can be implicated in different and sometimes divergent socio-spatial forms, and further, that its operations are materially changed and given meaning according to the spatial arrangements through which they take place (Pfaffenberger, 1988). Indeed, previous studies of a variety of workplaces have illustrated this contingency to technology, in which both their design and operations are shaped by existing socio-spatial relations rather than inevitable or automatically occurring (Boyer and England, 2008; Davies, 1982; Gardey, 2001; Leonardi and Barley, 2008; Luff et al., 2000; Orr, 1996). Offices are particularly significant workplaces in this regard because – given their purpose as spaces for making sense of information – they have been archetypal situations for the definition of ICTs in at least three ways.…”

What did we forget about ANT’s roots in anthropology of writing?

“…Once formalised, clerical work could be seen as a trivial matter that did not require real intellectual skills. Some of it (like copying) could be taken care of by devices, some other (like typing, or sorting files out) could be handled by unqualified employees, who happened to be almost exclusively women (Gardey, 2001). These projects of mechanisation were reinforced by the first attempts to build computers and the birth of digitisation, during which engineers identified writing and reading tasks they considered as already 'mechanical' (routines), in order to delegate them to machines (Agar, 2003).…”