Category Archives: Writing

As the electronic record grows and we conduct more and more of our business and our conversations on company servers, more analytical firms will spoon through our digital soup. Their job is getting harder. E-mail has gotten much shorter and terser over the past eight years. In the workplace, we switch from IM to telephone to BlackBerry and often don’t use any proper names. It’s difficult to stitch these conversations together so that they make sense to outsiders. Yet some people still assume that anything they write will be lost in the giant sea of e-mail. Charnock says she still sees messages like: “I probably shouldn’t put this in e-mail, but …”

Yes, it’s lame if a manager needs to rely on an algorithm to figure out who her most valued employees are. Yes, the Big Brother-ish aspect of all of this gives one pause. But if you set aside that reaction, most of what Charnock is talking about is common sense. Are you in the mainstream of your workplace or off in a little eddy of your own? If so, why? Are you being productive in your own time and style or just getting really good at Desktop Tower Defense and wishing you did something else? Your electronic tracks don’t indicate your true value as an employee—Who cracks better jokes in the weekly meeting? No one!—but it’s naive to think they don’t reveal anything at all.

Sent Mail- Does your outbox reveal how productive you are? Michael Agger, Aug. 26, 2009, at 7:04 AM ET

My old economics professors, Dr. Harry Cleaver, used to talk about “chipping away at the working day” as one of the important ways that we resist capitalism. We come in late, take an hour instead of an hour and a half for lunch, leave by mid-afternoon on Friday. Surveys tend to show that people are working more and getting paid less, but there’s a lot of this hidden resistance.

It’s never so simple, of course, because employers are always looking for ways to do the opposite: to get us to work more, and more productively, for the same amount of money. Here’s the class struggle in an industrialized country writ small. We push for more money and more time to do what we want; the bosses push to take more and more of our time while paying us less and less.

If you work in a factory, the time-clock (and the motion study) govern your world. In education, and many other professions, things have always been looser. We are just now seeing the dawn of a new age in this basic struggle, one in which companies take full advantage of new communication technologies to monitor and shape employee behavior. It’ll be fun to see how folks fight back.

Agger gives us a hint of what’s next. If an employer uses the GPS on your phone to track your comings and goings, we’ll develop a application to fudge the data. If your boss uses email to check to see that you are on the job, someone will design clever automatic response software that will pass any Turing test. Students and professors are likely to be at the front of this wave of resistance.

Students who choose Cengage’s rental option will get immediate access to the first chapter of the book electronically, in e-book format, and will have a choice of shipping options for the printed book. When the rental term — 60, 90 or 130 days — is over, students can either return the textbook or buy it.

With the growing competition from online used-book sales, digital texts and new Internet textbook-rental businesses like Chegg and BookRenter, other publishers and college bookstores are also edging toward rentals.

Textbook Publisher to Rent to College Students TAMAR LEWIN, August 13, 2009

I worked at a university for several years that was, as far as I know, the only university with a textbook rental program. I was always surprised at how few professors supported the idea, despite the fact that we were rapidly making an four-year college degree either too expensive or a decades long debt burden. This isn’t a myth.

One reason the online school I work at now is so successful is that it manages to cut the cost of education nearly in half. That’s nothing to sneeze at in any market, much less in the deepest recession since the great depression. One of the dirty little secrets of certain cadres in academia is that they believe restricting access (via testing or finances or both) makes their jobs easier.

Many professors insist that, particularly when it comes to writing, students should have the skills they need before they enter the door. If they don’t, these professors complain bitterly. A minority work hard to improve the public schools. But far too few believe in the democratic mission of an educated society. Too many accept the hierarchies created by the cultural capital of a college degree.

Textbook publishing can be monetarily tempting, too, especially when professors usually come out of school with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I don’t think that rentals will save the textbook industry, though. Who wants to use a technology that is so expensive to update when alternatives are available? Their days are numbered. Open source is the future, sooner or later.