In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an a... more In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ...
This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it ... more This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a “telecommuting personality,” a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and s...
This dissertation examines a contradiction: why and how are the narratives of passionate work bec... more This dissertation examines a contradiction: why and how are the narratives of passionate work becoming more pervasive in the aftermath of the Great Recession? The financial crisis of 2008 had brought problems of wealth and income inequalities to the forefront of American public discourse. Inequality was the theme of, to name some, the Occupy protests, Thomas Piketty's widely publicized book, Capital, Bernie Sander's political campaign, and popular films like Snowpiercer, The Hunger Games, and The Company Men. These varied cultural and political reactions are significant because they unsettle the position of work as the symbolic center of the good life, providing grounds for struggle and proletarianization. ❧ But yet in what should be a moment of disillusionment, I argue that we can observe a parallel dissemination in the cultures of passionate work. Focusing on subjects that are assumed to reside outside the traditional boundaries of passionate work—the anxious unemployed, t...
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
This essay provides a historical context to the office interiors, describing its capacity to ench... more This essay provides a historical context to the office interiors, describing its capacity to enchant the sphere of work and to transform the subjectivities of workers. Focusing on Florence Knoll and Robert Propst, American designers who contributed to the modern aesthetic in the postwar, I highlight how the sale of offices conveyed a fantasy of information work. Knoll and Propst had marketed their ideas using showrooms, textiles, seminars, and informational materials. These communicative practices emphasized the sensate quality of information work, which coached workers to recognize and interpret the visual, aural, and tactile quality of work environments. By doing so, it tied sensations of pleasure to the prospect of self-transformation, which provides basis for the modern attachment to beautified workspaces.
This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively mu... more This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively multiplayer online games (MMO) through fourteen in-depth interviews. MMO relationships are theorized to be influenced by social architectures within the MMO and the player's ...
The proliferation of media production technologies has allowed for game players to become game cr... more The proliferation of media production technologies has allowed for game players to become game creators, tinkering and forging their own games. This qualitative project explores how amateurs express and construct their identity through the activity of game creation. Forty interviews ...
International Journal of Communication, Apr 15, 2013
The article describes the convergence of neoliberal subjectivities and the digital labor of game ... more The article describes the convergence of neoliberal subjectivities and the digital labor of game modding. The entrepreneurialism associated with neoliberal subjectivities represents an extension in the critique of digital labor, a mode that allows corporations to extract more value from participatory activities. Using textual materials and interviews, this article highlights the attempts by game industries to discursively situate the activity of game modification, producing norms that energize the productivity of modders and render their labor more amenable to the circuits of accumulation. It understands these emergent subjectivities in relation to the modders' desire for professionalization, creative self-expression, and acts of resistance. In fall 2011, Bethesda, a video game company, published Skyrim, the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls game series. Although Skyrim was much anticipated for its formal game content, also eager for the game's release were members of the "modding" community, a collective of users who had demonstrated interest in the activity of modifying existing game content and sharing their alterations online. Months before the game's release, members of the community, also termed "game modders," had mobilized themselves to discuss the "mods," or game modifications, that would best enhance Skyrim's gaming experience (Miozzi, 2011). In the first week after launch, more than 800 different mods were recorded within the mod distribution website Skyrim Nexus. Over subsequent months, numerous game publications would praise the creativity and expertise of Skyrim modders, acknowledging their ingenuity in improving the game. So great was the faith placed in this community that one reviewer proposed that the perfection of the Skyrim game would come about not through additional work by the company's development team but through the passionate involvement of game modders (Kuchera, 2011). This scenario is illustrative of the growing influence and tensions of participatory cultures. The shift toward Web 2.0 altered digital environments, causing productive paradigms to be reshuffled in favor of "prosumers," a term that identifies Internet users as hybrid consumers and producers. Yet the move toward this productive schema belies a pressing concern: chiefly, the question of whether prosumerism represents a digitized version of traditional factories. As in the case of Skyrim, although the creative energies of mod-makers have improved the playability of the game, the modders also constituted a source of free work upon which Bethesda could capitalize. Using textual materials and interviews, this article extends the argument of digital labor, proposing that neoliberal subjectivities open modding practices to
Examining career guides, this essay seeks to understand how the notion of passionate work is pres... more Examining career guides, this essay seeks to understand how the notion of passionate work is presently framed as an injunction, a commonsensical good thing we should aspire to find. How does the discourse of passion respond to labor conditions after the crisis, and what are among the possibilities it forecloses? This essay contains three overtures. First, I analyze how career guides change the pain of job loss to a space of empowerment. Directing readers to the optimistic proposal that their work can be better, career guides advise that the negative effect of the present needs only to be endured by the private individual so that a better future can be produced. Second, I consider what meanings passion produced by the instruments of career guides have, thinking about its relationship to neoliberal subjectivity. Last, I examine career guides that provide a counter-discourse of passion, looking into the values it cultivates in readers.
Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference in Advances on Computer Entertainment Technology - ACE '08, 2008
This study examines how changes in game features through patches and expansions can affect the so... more This study examines how changes in game features through patches and expansions can affect the social interaction within massively multiplayer games. Since patches and expansions are now commonplace within massively multiplayer games, understanding of the relationship would enable better production of social capital. In-depth interviews uncovered that the recent changes to the World of Warcraft affect in-game social interaction in 3 aspects. The areas of social interaction affected included interpersonal relationships, community size and social alienation. The discussions highlight how these findings can advance models of social interaction within MMOs.
This article focuses on the concept of labor in co-creation, arguing that its definition needs to... more This article focuses on the concept of labor in co-creation, arguing that its definition needs to be expanded to include a process of intensity. Intensity foregrounds the different degrees in which participants involve themselves in a craft, and also the elements of time, effort, and affectivity. Using game modification as a case study, the article analyzes how automated, computerized systems of evaluations, embedded into webpages, can create grounds for a self-understanding of productive abilities. Maneuvering through the three registers of industry, websites, and game modders, it examines the discourses of evaluative systems and details how participants use these technologies to self-manage and calibrate their labor. Interviews showed that the increasingly competitive drive for optimal standards of production comes at a cost to the well-being of participants. Studies of labor therefore need to consider the “intense” aspect of participatory production, and the impact it may have on...
This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively mu... more This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively multiplayer online games (MMO) through fourteen in-depth interviews. MMO relationships are theorized to be influenced by social architectures within the MMO and the player's ...
Theory of Game Change," written by Stewart Brand in 1976 for the New Games movement, provides one... more Theory of Game Change," written by Stewart Brand in 1976 for the New Games movement, provides one of the earliest examples of digital game logics being brought into real-world use. This article focuses on this event to reconsider gamification's play on complexity. Applying Spacewar! to New Games, Brand sneaked in an epistemology of the computer interface, breaking real-world games down into parameters to modulate and probe complex systems. The result carried a utopian cybernetic imaginary: Changes in rules were meant to motivate spontaneous and harmonious adaptions to new situations. The black-boxing of complexity required of this process, however, carries the solutionist impulse that would later form the main critique of gamification. Yet, focusing on the critique neglects the relations that gamification has with complexity and limits the critical potential that the term presents as a demand for ethical accountability.
This article focuses on two users of early portable computers – the ‘road warrior’ and ‘digital n... more This article focuses on two users of early portable computers – the ‘road warrior’ and ‘digital nomad’ of the 1980s and 90s – to illustrate how portability has served an imperialist function in engineering a world fit for buffering privileged subjects against conditions of existential precariousness. The label ‘road warriors’ emerged in the early history of portable computers as a reaction against the hostile environs of airports and aeroplanes, spaces that were deemed unaccommodating to the use of laptops. These complaints made clear the importance of portable milieus, spaces that had to come into existence to accommodate the transversal of portable computers. The article examines how these emergent portable milieus functioned also as pedagogical habitats, worldly enclosures that guided white, middle/upperclassed, male executives on the means to adapt to a precarious economic existence. Drawing from computer magazines, news articles, and the manifesto Digital Nomad, the article illustrates how these habitats romanticized the value of remote workers, legitimated their transformation of environments, and laid a foundation for the world to be engineered as a buffer for privileged populations. The trend of digital nomadism today which seeks to create opportunities for the austere good life amidst endemic economic problems in the West, speaks to the currency of this imaginary and the longstanding politics of remote work, ushered in by portable computers.
The cultural rise of ''big data'' in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to ma... more The cultural rise of ''big data'' in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to make an epistemological shift toward data-driven science. Though expressed as a professional move, this article argues that the push incorporates gendered assumptions that disadvantage women. Using the human resource occupation as an example, I demonstrate how normative perceptions of feminine ''soft skills'' are seen as irreconcilable with the masculine ''hard numbers'' of a data-driven epistemology. The history of human resources reflects how assumptions of a biological fit with an occupation limit what women can convincingly describe as her skillsets. However, challenging this cannot stay within the confines of the occupation itself. To undo sexist thinking, it is necessary to understand the broader networks of patriarchal power that dictate how value is defined in corporate environments, especially within other high status professions in business.
In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an a... more In Passionate Work, Renyi Hong theorizes the notion of being “passionate about your work” as an affective project that encourages people to endure economically trying situations like unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. Not simply a subject of aspiration, passion has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Tracking the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, Hong demonstrates how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate. Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ...
This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it ... more This article examines the early telecommuting discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, understanding it as a pedagogical context for white plasticity, an ecological project in which racial privilege is protected through the transformation of homes and inhabitants. Rationalized initially as a crisis of adjustment, pedagogies of telecommuting were disseminated largely to upper-middle-class white professionals to build a “telecommuting personality,” a subjectivity that was also meant to buffer them from the growing precarious nature of jobs. Not content to focus simply on work, however, telecommuting gurus took occasion to urge the enhancement of relationships between partners, families, and communities. The home office was core to this imaginary. Convertible, modular, ergonomic home offices that can be changed to suit the needs of the home's many inhabitants were said to yield more integrated and rounded personalities that would radiate outward, creating emotionally mature children and s...
This dissertation examines a contradiction: why and how are the narratives of passionate work bec... more This dissertation examines a contradiction: why and how are the narratives of passionate work becoming more pervasive in the aftermath of the Great Recession? The financial crisis of 2008 had brought problems of wealth and income inequalities to the forefront of American public discourse. Inequality was the theme of, to name some, the Occupy protests, Thomas Piketty's widely publicized book, Capital, Bernie Sander's political campaign, and popular films like Snowpiercer, The Hunger Games, and The Company Men. These varied cultural and political reactions are significant because they unsettle the position of work as the symbolic center of the good life, providing grounds for struggle and proletarianization. ❧ But yet in what should be a moment of disillusionment, I argue that we can observe a parallel dissemination in the cultures of passionate work. Focusing on subjects that are assumed to reside outside the traditional boundaries of passionate work—the anxious unemployed, t...
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
This essay provides a historical context to the office interiors, describing its capacity to ench... more This essay provides a historical context to the office interiors, describing its capacity to enchant the sphere of work and to transform the subjectivities of workers. Focusing on Florence Knoll and Robert Propst, American designers who contributed to the modern aesthetic in the postwar, I highlight how the sale of offices conveyed a fantasy of information work. Knoll and Propst had marketed their ideas using showrooms, textiles, seminars, and informational materials. These communicative practices emphasized the sensate quality of information work, which coached workers to recognize and interpret the visual, aural, and tactile quality of work environments. By doing so, it tied sensations of pleasure to the prospect of self-transformation, which provides basis for the modern attachment to beautified workspaces.
This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively mu... more This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively multiplayer online games (MMO) through fourteen in-depth interviews. MMO relationships are theorized to be influenced by social architectures within the MMO and the player's ...
The proliferation of media production technologies has allowed for game players to become game cr... more The proliferation of media production technologies has allowed for game players to become game creators, tinkering and forging their own games. This qualitative project explores how amateurs express and construct their identity through the activity of game creation. Forty interviews ...
International Journal of Communication, Apr 15, 2013
The article describes the convergence of neoliberal subjectivities and the digital labor of game ... more The article describes the convergence of neoliberal subjectivities and the digital labor of game modding. The entrepreneurialism associated with neoliberal subjectivities represents an extension in the critique of digital labor, a mode that allows corporations to extract more value from participatory activities. Using textual materials and interviews, this article highlights the attempts by game industries to discursively situate the activity of game modification, producing norms that energize the productivity of modders and render their labor more amenable to the circuits of accumulation. It understands these emergent subjectivities in relation to the modders' desire for professionalization, creative self-expression, and acts of resistance. In fall 2011, Bethesda, a video game company, published Skyrim, the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls game series. Although Skyrim was much anticipated for its formal game content, also eager for the game's release were members of the "modding" community, a collective of users who had demonstrated interest in the activity of modifying existing game content and sharing their alterations online. Months before the game's release, members of the community, also termed "game modders," had mobilized themselves to discuss the "mods," or game modifications, that would best enhance Skyrim's gaming experience (Miozzi, 2011). In the first week after launch, more than 800 different mods were recorded within the mod distribution website Skyrim Nexus. Over subsequent months, numerous game publications would praise the creativity and expertise of Skyrim modders, acknowledging their ingenuity in improving the game. So great was the faith placed in this community that one reviewer proposed that the perfection of the Skyrim game would come about not through additional work by the company's development team but through the passionate involvement of game modders (Kuchera, 2011). This scenario is illustrative of the growing influence and tensions of participatory cultures. The shift toward Web 2.0 altered digital environments, causing productive paradigms to be reshuffled in favor of "prosumers," a term that identifies Internet users as hybrid consumers and producers. Yet the move toward this productive schema belies a pressing concern: chiefly, the question of whether prosumerism represents a digitized version of traditional factories. As in the case of Skyrim, although the creative energies of mod-makers have improved the playability of the game, the modders also constituted a source of free work upon which Bethesda could capitalize. Using textual materials and interviews, this article extends the argument of digital labor, proposing that neoliberal subjectivities open modding practices to
Examining career guides, this essay seeks to understand how the notion of passionate work is pres... more Examining career guides, this essay seeks to understand how the notion of passionate work is presently framed as an injunction, a commonsensical good thing we should aspire to find. How does the discourse of passion respond to labor conditions after the crisis, and what are among the possibilities it forecloses? This essay contains three overtures. First, I analyze how career guides change the pain of job loss to a space of empowerment. Directing readers to the optimistic proposal that their work can be better, career guides advise that the negative effect of the present needs only to be endured by the private individual so that a better future can be produced. Second, I consider what meanings passion produced by the instruments of career guides have, thinking about its relationship to neoliberal subjectivity. Last, I examine career guides that provide a counter-discourse of passion, looking into the values it cultivates in readers.
Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference in Advances on Computer Entertainment Technology - ACE '08, 2008
This study examines how changes in game features through patches and expansions can affect the so... more This study examines how changes in game features through patches and expansions can affect the social interaction within massively multiplayer games. Since patches and expansions are now commonplace within massively multiplayer games, understanding of the relationship would enable better production of social capital. In-depth interviews uncovered that the recent changes to the World of Warcraft affect in-game social interaction in 3 aspects. The areas of social interaction affected included interpersonal relationships, community size and social alienation. The discussions highlight how these findings can advance models of social interaction within MMOs.
This article focuses on the concept of labor in co-creation, arguing that its definition needs to... more This article focuses on the concept of labor in co-creation, arguing that its definition needs to be expanded to include a process of intensity. Intensity foregrounds the different degrees in which participants involve themselves in a craft, and also the elements of time, effort, and affectivity. Using game modification as a case study, the article analyzes how automated, computerized systems of evaluations, embedded into webpages, can create grounds for a self-understanding of productive abilities. Maneuvering through the three registers of industry, websites, and game modders, it examines the discourses of evaluative systems and details how participants use these technologies to self-manage and calibrate their labor. Interviews showed that the increasingly competitive drive for optimal standards of production comes at a cost to the well-being of participants. Studies of labor therefore need to consider the “intense” aspect of participatory production, and the impact it may have on...
This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively mu... more This qualitative project attempts to develop a theory of relationship development in massively multiplayer online games (MMO) through fourteen in-depth interviews. MMO relationships are theorized to be influenced by social architectures within the MMO and the player's ...
Theory of Game Change," written by Stewart Brand in 1976 for the New Games movement, provides one... more Theory of Game Change," written by Stewart Brand in 1976 for the New Games movement, provides one of the earliest examples of digital game logics being brought into real-world use. This article focuses on this event to reconsider gamification's play on complexity. Applying Spacewar! to New Games, Brand sneaked in an epistemology of the computer interface, breaking real-world games down into parameters to modulate and probe complex systems. The result carried a utopian cybernetic imaginary: Changes in rules were meant to motivate spontaneous and harmonious adaptions to new situations. The black-boxing of complexity required of this process, however, carries the solutionist impulse that would later form the main critique of gamification. Yet, focusing on the critique neglects the relations that gamification has with complexity and limits the critical potential that the term presents as a demand for ethical accountability.
This article focuses on two users of early portable computers – the ‘road warrior’ and ‘digital n... more This article focuses on two users of early portable computers – the ‘road warrior’ and ‘digital nomad’ of the 1980s and 90s – to illustrate how portability has served an imperialist function in engineering a world fit for buffering privileged subjects against conditions of existential precariousness. The label ‘road warriors’ emerged in the early history of portable computers as a reaction against the hostile environs of airports and aeroplanes, spaces that were deemed unaccommodating to the use of laptops. These complaints made clear the importance of portable milieus, spaces that had to come into existence to accommodate the transversal of portable computers. The article examines how these emergent portable milieus functioned also as pedagogical habitats, worldly enclosures that guided white, middle/upperclassed, male executives on the means to adapt to a precarious economic existence. Drawing from computer magazines, news articles, and the manifesto Digital Nomad, the article illustrates how these habitats romanticized the value of remote workers, legitimated their transformation of environments, and laid a foundation for the world to be engineered as a buffer for privileged populations. The trend of digital nomadism today which seeks to create opportunities for the austere good life amidst endemic economic problems in the West, speaks to the currency of this imaginary and the longstanding politics of remote work, ushered in by portable computers.
The cultural rise of ''big data'' in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to ma... more The cultural rise of ''big data'' in the recent years has pressured a number of occupations to make an epistemological shift toward data-driven science. Though expressed as a professional move, this article argues that the push incorporates gendered assumptions that disadvantage women. Using the human resource occupation as an example, I demonstrate how normative perceptions of feminine ''soft skills'' are seen as irreconcilable with the masculine ''hard numbers'' of a data-driven epistemology. The history of human resources reflects how assumptions of a biological fit with an occupation limit what women can convincingly describe as her skillsets. However, challenging this cannot stay within the confines of the occupation itself. To undo sexist thinking, it is necessary to understand the broader networks of patriarchal power that dictate how value is defined in corporate environments, especially within other high status professions in business.
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Papers by Renyi Hong