Excursus about media, technology and work¹

Abstract

This article discusses unemployment as consequence of technological mutations and the analytical persistency of mass media in approaching work disconnected from the metamorphoses to which it has been subjected. The haste of the productive processes and the introduction of new typologies, such as flexibility and innovation, embody new variables which disconnect the human being from the material, devaluing the knowledge and the immaterial, because of the impossibility of turning those into commodities. Looking throughout the work, the dichotomous impact between humanity and techno-science, perceives innovation as an end, introducing in the media an approach, where this impact as mediator of the metamorphosis phenomenon is perceived according to the absence of the importance of technology, though appearing an irreconcilable narrative between the media approach and social reality.

Keywords
Media; Work; Technology; Metamorphosis; Innovation

Resumo

Este artigo discute o problema do desemprego em consequência das mutações tecnológicas e da persistência analítica dos media na abordagem do trabalho desligado das metamorfoses a que este tem sido sujeito. A aceleração dos processos produtivos e a introdução de novas tipologias como flexibilidade e inovação corporizam novas variáveis que desligam o ser humano do material, desvalorizando-se o conhecimento e o imaterial, pela impossibilidade de os transformar em mercadoria. Visto por meio do trabalho, o impacto dicotómico entre a humanidade e tecnociência toma a inovação como fim em si, introduzindo nos media uma abordagem em que o seu papel de mediador dos fenómenos em metamorfose se concebe segundo a inexistência do papel da tecnologia, dando-se assim uma narrativa irreconciliada entre a abordagem dos media e realidade social.

Palavras-chave
Media; Trabalho; Tecnologia; Metamorfose; Inovação

Resumen

Este artículo trata sobre el problema del desempleo como consecuencia de los cambios tecnológicos, y la persistencia analítica de los media en el tratamiento de mundo del trabajo como una realidad aislada de las transformaciones a la que éste se ha visto sometido. La aceleración de los procesos productivos y la introducción de nuevas tipologías, como la flexibilidad y la innovación, han dado forma a nuevas variables que desconectan al ser humano de lo material, desvalorizando el conocimiento y lo inmaterial por la imposibilidad de convertirlos en simples mercancías. Vista a través del mundo del trabajo, la dicotomía entre humanidad y tecnociencia considera a la innovación como un fin en sí misma, introduciendo en los media una perspectiva según la cual su papel de mediador de fenómenos en metamorfosis se concibe a partir de la ausencia de la tecnología, dando lugar, de esta manera, a una narrativa irreconciliable entre el abordaje de los media y la realidad social.

Palabras clave
Media; Trabajo; Tecnología; Metamorfosis; Innovación

1. Introduction and problem

Since the last quarter of the 20th century one has observed changes in the concept of work (GORZ, 2005; BECK, 2000; CASTELLS, 1998; GROZELIER, 1998; SENNETT, 2001), translated in the appeal of the technical object (NEVES, 2006) and in the substitution of man for technology (MARTINS 2003; GARCIA, 2010), resulting in high rates of unoccupied workers in the southern European countries (KOVÁCS et al, 2006; MARQUES, 2001; SILVA, 2012). In general, governments have been able to feed the idea that jobs’ suppression is related exclusively to the economic crisis, thus shielding themselves in a conservative approach which persists in the centrality of work as a principle (SCHNAPPER, 1997; MARQUES, 2001; ANTUNES, 2013), insisting in the immutability of work as a decisive factor in production’s relations and in a healthy organisation of the social world.

Nevertheless, the problem seems to be more complex if one looks at some of the research undertaken by social researchers in the late 20^th century, beginning of the 21^st century. The results of the these researches underline the end of a society in which work was at its heart (GORZ, 2005; SENNET, 2001), constituting a guiding line for people’s life, generating harmony in human relations, thus emerging with these changes a profound mutation in social organisation and a fragmentation in our senses. This reality is only perceptible if one looks at the whole and not to an isolate problem in some country. In 2015, some European countries such as Macedonia, Greece, and Spain presented unemployment rates well above 20%. The average of EU unemployment rate was by then above 10%. In every European latitudes, this phenomenon has grown, promoting, each passing day, the perception of a serious problem due to the exponential growth of unemployment for over a year and the rising tendency in the average of time individuals are unemployed.

Figure 1
Unemployment rates by European country, and by time length, in December 2015

In view of these high unemployment rates, the discourses on how to tackle them follow a classic perspective which implies a solution to the unoccupied by raising the investment in the economic sphere. However, instead of using the classic investment measure, based on an estimate of the production or in the raising of the expected profits, the media started to measure financial investments by the number of generated jobs, though decentring the focus on the economic and entrepreneur endeavour to the social field. Several examples reveal the existence of a substantive change, in shape and content, of the production of news responsible for a transformative metamorphosis of the creation of jobs into a sort of coin. Some of these examples are precise and unequivocal:

• “The Government has announced last Monday, 12 new investments with an overall value of 185 million of euros. In total, there will be 12 industrial projects focusing exportation that will allow the creation of 401 new jobs and the endurance of over 2610” (Diário de Notícias, May 12^th,2014)

• “The first factory in Portugal from the Chinese company Wuhan Industries will be finished in June 2015, as stated by the executive president Carlos Teixeira to Lusa. This factory represents an investment of around 27 million of euros and will create 60 new jobs until 2017” (Expresso, June 7^th,2014)

• “Portucel company is expected to create 100 more jobs until June” (Jornal de Negócio, April 15^th, 2015)

• “A new shoe factory will open in Pinhel during this year and will create straightaway 100 new jobs, according to the local authority’s president in declarations to Lusa (…) This new factory will be located on the former shoe factory Rhode, which has closed in 2006, thus making 370 unemployed (…)” (TVI24, January 11^th, 2016)

• “It was signed today the protocol to create the ‘Altice Call Centre” in Lamego. The council president, Francisco Lopes, estimates that this project will generate up to 180 new jobs” (Sol, January 18^th, 2016)

The number of jobs created becomes the centre stage of a business and the idea of workforce goes from being a mean to be incorporated into a product, to a sort of representative object with an ultimate value, becoming the absolute of results and ends, thus neutralising the causality principle arising from the means (WEBER, 2004). This way, there is an alteration on the analytical attention of the former business economical dimension – whose attention was on the possible profits, financial vigorousness, performance in market disputes, and probability of success through innovation – to a present-day vision, now oriented by a contradictory decision-making perspective, determined by the reconversion of work, needed to the running of the project, into a paradoxical notion in which companies take the place of a prodigious entity with an anointed essence in the salvation of the workforce.

In face of scarcity, there is the rise of those who present themselves as solvers or even saviours, individuals who have some job places to offer, thus carrying the antidote with healing proprieties to those sickened lives, due to the non-observance of a busy horizon, therefore secure.

Work has always been considered, economically speaking, as an exchange-value element whose measure was incorporated in the merchandise. The sudden discovery of work – in its employment strand – endowed with a social value beyond the traditional productive feature (MARX, 2015), seizing the attention of the institutionalised powers, gives a substantial modification in the way employment is understood by the general public, underpinning a new conceptual interpretation present in the way media assume the transformed reality.

This behavioural change of media could, alone, set a change in the attention focus to a sort of social urgency impossible to avoid. However, a more accurate analysis allows glimpsing the reality which has been changing without, nevertheless, the exhibition of external changes or even some sort of recomposition of the ontological notion of work as a social occupation, thus promoting a kind of ideology settled in the mediatised excursus.

The communicational paradigm perceives work as a creator of relationships, producing meaning in the construction of a social work which welcomes the individual (RODRIGUES, 2011). Despite the internalisation, by the subject, of the exterior which is given to him at the start, the subject is also granted autonomy as being, not only to play with the predicted guidelines but also to, through experience, “properly violate” (RODRIGUES, 2011, p.256) the rules, in a sort of dialectic exploration of the application of the rule, simultaneously with its fulfilment and transgression which “overcomes the classical opposition between the paradigm originated in the supremacy of the subject, and the paradigm founded in the supremacy of the system” (RODRIGUES, 2011, p.256). Thus, the unpredictability emerges constantly, where adaptation and fugue coexist in a useful process to organisation. At the bottom, there is a duality of the structure which, in a transference exercise, is influenced by individuals, and simultaneously influences the changes of the agents (GIDDENS, 1984). In the underlying relational form, associations are promoted (LATOUR, 2005), which, despite the indistinctness between actors and actants, separates humans and technology in the organisational configuration. In work’s approach and its consequences in the field of the media, there is the domination of an imaginative static and the refutation, by default, of the impact of the changes introduced by technology, which tendency is the substitution of the work produced by the worker.

2. Active life, social logics and happiness

The work notion here brought should not be understood under the light of an activity to indulge the basic needs, namely biological and physical, in an imposition of the body and of survival, but rather as an act resulting of solidary activity between individuals, transformed in a culture which roots are located in the restlessness of the vital energy and in the human uneasiness which conceives an active life (ARENDT, 1998). This way, work is established as a human mister, harmoniser of the inner individuality with the outer freedom, conciliator of imagination and the economic notion fulfilled in the production of goods and services, with the individuals’ consciences of usefulness and integration in their community networks, thus resulting in a shared overall benefit acting as a sense of order to which all contribute and benefit from.

Modernity, dominated by the notion of collective progress through industrial transformation, exalts work as one of the main “duties that each one has to oneself” (LIPOVETSKY, 1994, p.139 – Our translation), without comparison to any other social phenomenon. It is not only an imposed and accepted social duty, it also congregates the individual obligation to “improve one’s natural perfection” (LIPOVETSKY, 1994, p.139). It is only by working that the man could be “worth of the humanity that exists in its being” (p.139) since the social features introduced in the world, used to produce logic and sense of meaning in the social being, have imposed in the being a moral according to which “if work ennobles man, indolence degrades, dishonours him” (p.139). The consequence of this embeddedness of work in human nature resulted, historically speaking, in a world culture (LIPOVETSKY & SERROY, 2014) understood as coherent and purposeful.

In current society, employment has become, since long ago, a substantive (when it refers to the place where work is executed) and an adjective (when it characterises the professional occupation of an individual), embodying a wide assignment and a decisive role in the post-industrial revolution society. Thus, employment constitutes a skilful and rightful social construction of modernity, not only by classifying and determining the occupational status of individuals, but also by being the merging force with a certain order to which the whole society is submitted. The expression “having a job” means “having appliance”, that alone reveals the utilitarian notion of the individual towards the organisational imperative of social world.

Every social orientation and normalisation embrace the individual ability to learn skills that are appreciated, useful and with significance to include in a productive process, which, at the end imposes an occupation to individuals. Keeping individuals deprived of free time, dedicated to a meaningful finale, has naturalised human existence in current times, giving coherence to individual acts. The overvalued meaning of occupation trough “employment” results from the significance produced in the chain of the established relations’ network, which originates an existential logic that goes beyond the notion of social connection, since it becomes vital not only to a coherent organization of the lived world, but also to the sedimentation and trust in the same world.

This construction has its basis in the economic and social organization centred in work, which constitutes the core element in society. Despite being often associated to slavery, “work is much more than slavery, or else people would not feel so lost and disoriented when they become unemployed” (GIDDENS 2004, p.377 – Our translation). From this perspective, work becomes an essential element in the establishment of order, being responsible for the notion of obligation and responsibility to which individuals submit.

Likewise, an occupation provides “frequently a basis to the acquisition and exercise of certain skills” (GIDDENS, 2004, p.377) and even when individuals are submitted to a routine work, “it supplies a structured environment in which the energies of a person can be absorbed” (p.377). Work diversifies contexts, providing acquaintances which enable friendship bonds and an opportunity to share with others. Those who have a permanent job, work organises and structures their day “according to the work pace” (p.377), providing logic and giving a natural order to things. Thus, employment becomes a place of individual, professional as well as social fulfilment, being one of the factors that drive happiness (RUSSELL, 2009). It is normal to have an occupation in the sense that the whole social organisation guides individuals to that guided life².

At some point Giddens (2004, p. 377) asks: “how would you feel if you thought that you would not find a job again?” Used as a rhetoric question, the author does not answer the question, choosing to reinforce the importance of having a job in modern societies even to “preserve the self-respect”, because “(…) work tends to be the structural element in the psychological constitution of people and in their daily life activities” (p.377). For the same reason, the non-work imposed to individuals, would be psychologically de-structuring, transforming into diseased those who cease to receive the energy of an active life.

3. Employment-unemployment as a way of living

There are, nevertheless, several unemployed people who lived by thinking that they will never find a job again –a feeling that is not necessarily everlasting, but it is a reality while it lasts – and so, thenceforth, feeling lost and disoriented. A richer example can be found in those workers whose lives were oriented in a logic of responsibility in which work and family reconciled, forming the core of their existence (ANTUNES, 2013; SCHNAPPER, 1997). Falling into an unemployment situation after long years of routine but coherent work, these individuals discover, with horror, that their utility was vanished, their skills were useless and their experience devalued, as expropriated (CALERAS, 2008; SILVA, 2012). Displaced from the apprehended logic learned throughout time, what is left for these individuals is a new learning, which, beginning with the extension and consequences of work as the regulating field of social organisation, will inevitably fit into a suitable adaptation to an unknown order that gives meaning to the existence of individuals in the world.

At the end of the 90s of past century, sociologist Richard Sennet³ has produced a critical analysis regarding the variations promoted by capitalism, characterised by the introduction of a flexible nature in work’s approach, replacing the traditional bureaucratic forms. According to Sennet, this change has its basis on the disappearing of linear narratives, sustained in experience and in a disciplined use of time, based on the prospect of an orientation grounded in an anticipated and planned life story by their actors. At the end, “aspects such as job security and commitment kept people with their employment” (SENNET, 2001, p.24 – Our translation), and produced meaning, capable of inciting some certainty in individuals. Routine and its harms, translated into a brutishness of workers, have been used as essential elements to sustain the introduction of the changes in work relationships.

Thus, the time use is restructured, promoting more flexible institutions where work is discontinued and displaced, diligent factors in the disconnection of the worker with space, and agents of a rupture between past and present time. Activity finds in man a being in constant revaluation, result of its liable condition, renewing formulas such as “cooperation and distribution”, enabling companies to have an answer to “flexibility and competition challenges” (LIPOVETSKY, 1994, p.142 – Our translation), giving place to a new enchantment in the company in a post-modern turnover.

In opposition to the argumentative insistency of Schnapper (1997), the beginning of the 21^st century has demonstrated that the age in which work was at the core of individual existence is over. This is not about pronouncing the end of the story (FUKUYAMA, 1992), but rather to replace work in a new productive order. Despite effort and subjacent activity have not lost their social and individual value, “we no longer exhort them as moral ends” (LIPOVETSKY, 2004, p.140 – Our translation) and the obstinate abnegation for the encounter of the individual’s place as reconciliation of the social being with the world lived is “no longer socially exalted” (LIPOVETSKY, 1994, p.140). The betterment through sacrifice “is no longer seen as an absolute obligation concerning the respect to humankind that exists in us” (p.140), releasing the individual from obstinacy and embarrassment: “it is not unworthy any longer to recognise a frail predisposition to effort and to choose leisure over work” (p.140) as a way of life.

With the introduction of new and imperative substitutes to individual submission, “competition and flexibility become urgent” (LIPOVETSKY, 1994, p.141 – Our translation) occurring the substitution of the “culture centred in motivation and responsibility” (LIPOVETSKY, 1994, p.141) by the declared presence of drive and involvement based on a managerial pragmatism of a sort of “intelligent company” (p.141) decentred of mankind. The undeniable and imperative extolling vanishes to the emergence of “the discourse of appreciation of human resources”, invoking the reorganisation of working conditions submitted to predefined behaviours where “attention is centred on the demand to obtain an active adhesion of employees” (p.141), fading the “authoritarian working forms” (p.141) opposed to the principle of human potential as promoter of a painless ethics.

Thus, ascending a new relationship of the worker with him/herself, which is responsible for a non-linear existence and it is characterised by the absence of emotional relations. Simultaneously, this flexible regime transfers to the worker a large part of the organisation’s risk, since the probability resulting from unforeseen issues is no longer exclusive territory of capitalists or “extremely adventurous individuals. The risk becomes a daily need supported by masses” (Lipovetsky, 1994, p.125). A new ethics is promoted, meaning a new personal character where uncertainty coexists with failure and “the unchanging is seen as a sign of failure and stability almost a dead in life” (Lipovetsky, 1994, p.134) resultant of a disease to avoid at any cost. Fragmentation is installed and the time for work is shattered.

In other words, workers live now with an insecurity feeling, the most usual feature of those who live in a situation of intense risk. Despite working in a precarious occupation, unsustainable and coexisting with a non-existent network of relationships, on an unknown but large mesh, the worker will coexist also with the ghost of the reverse of that moment, which can be the unemployment in tomorrow’s day.

Unemployment, as an isolated field of research, where one looks to understand the inside of those unemployed by their experiences, has not been a field which polarised sociologists’ interest (CALEIRAS, 2008). Perhaps because one stands over a social anomaly which Western States consider impermissible and intolerable, unemployment is perceived as having more than one approach, being one of them the reception, by the States, of the economic consequences of those unoccupied, something to which is not indifferent the individual unemployment unaccountability, normally attributed to external causes to individuals, seen as victims, mostly defenceless.

Work is becoming autonomous and disconnected from individuals. This perspective imposes the inexistency of a place where the inherent tasks are completed and where the individual proceeds with its existence inside the occupational logic, which permeated the last two centuries. Consequence of new socioeconomic dynamics and of the alignment of new paradigms based on recent ways of approaching work⁴ – one could recall here the notion of professional flexibility – individuals realise the likelihood, each time larger, in contacting with leisure time from work imposed by consequences increasingly present in the daily life.

These increasing probability and frequency, despite not changing unemployment into an isolated social fact, raise the individual’s perception, leading those to protect themselves through the incorporation in their imaginary of accepting the possibility of joblessness in their lives. The result is the construction of mental resistance to long periods of unemployment that will happen along their lives. That is to say that, approaching individuals in a permanent treat, unemployment, continuing to constitute a social anomaly – a disease that all avoid – becomes, to some extent, a normalised event in people’s lives.

4. Working dilemmas in technological civilization

The question of working suppression is directly connected to the technological haste systematically introduced in productive processes. The consequences of this change have been noticed in the beginning of the “glorious thirties” of the post-war. Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) predicted that automation would empty factories, releasing humankind of its burden, and in this path, society as being released from working shackles would be, paradoxically, a society of workers. GORZ (1997, 1998, 2005) realised the transformations and metamorphosis of work from the contradiction manifested in the fact that society produces more wealth with less workforce, being this the theme of his intellectual and academic life. His assumptions commence with the farewell of factory workers stating that, gradually, workers would be transformed into entrepreneurs and self-employers, despite the rising demand for further knowledge.

Nevertheless, this reality does not go beyond being even ostensibly forgotten. In the postulate of most governments, the employment supressed by technology would be replaced by jobs created by the existence and demanding of that same technology.

This perspective is based on the principle that all individuals would ascend to a stage of knowledge which would guarantee the human utility in the production processes. In this idea persists “a pan-logic vision of history” (GARCIA, 2010, p.66 – Our translation) in which, since the industrial revolution, one attributes to technology the responsibility for the accomplishment of a “magnificent and benevolent project” (GARCIA, 2010, p.66). During this period, one assists to the construction of a mental mesh based on the assumption that all future technological improvement would concur to overcome necessities being responsible for “guiding in a rational and subordinated way to the well-being and happiness values of humankind” (p.66), building, this way, modernity based on linearity, stability and trust.

However, Rifkin (1995) theorised that such premise was no longer realistic as in any circumstance technology appealed to humans, moreover, ceased gradually to generate activity allocated to individuals. His thesis was based on the perspective that the two stages of industrial revolution had been able to absorb the spare workers – peasantry was absorbed in the first industrial revolution while factory workers were assimilated by the tertiary sector in the impact of the second technological revolution⁵. Nevertheless, the present, consequence of unemployment in the tertiary sector – banks, insurance companies, trading, telecommunications – and the emergence of a society based on technology and knowledge, would not produce the same historical results in the sense that, despite the low costs of work, those are always higher in comparison to technology costs. Thus, the investment in present assets, seen as the key solution to the lack of individual occupation, represents, actually, more and more, the raise of unemployed people.

The question pointed by Rifkin thickens in the superlative value reached by the immaterial dimension contained in the products, while inversely the material became reduced to the minimum value. Paradoxically, the “materialised” comes to occupy a secondary place and the immaterial becomes the essence of the productive process. The fact that the immaterial results, increasingly, from the embedment of human knowledge in productive processes (GORZ, 2005) and in the fact that it is in it that is centred the importance of the merchandise, transforms the productive structure.

“The notion of knowledge guided society as an end in itself, being used as a form of capital with a profitable use in the productive processes distinguishing, moreover, as an extraordinary and superior stratified capital” (GORZ, 2005). Still, as merged and objectified capital, knowledge is nowadays “abstracted from its human material” (GORZ, 2005, p.10 – Our translation) multiplying itself infinitely in a software form almost without costs, being used “unlimitedly in machines that follow a universal pattern” (GORZ, 2005, p.10). Increasingly, machines are those that produce knowledge, which therefore promotes even more and better knowledge, in a process that is even exponential and originator of a broad gnosis and rapidly extended in a vast field very useful to society.

However, this utility is devalued in its mercantile value, not only because it is a common good available to all, but primarily because it is not a human production. Knowledge becomes thus a common good, but with no matching value. The difficulty or impossibility in transforming knowledge in a commodity is in the basis of its undervaluing. Thus occurring a prodigious change that makes Gorz to state that “no one is able to tell with certitude where, in the social context, the inventive work of knowing begins and ends” (GORZ, 2005, p.10 – Our translation). The twinning promoted by knowledge and immateriality throughout technological colonisation processes is replaced by depreciation of human work without assessing its consequences.

The technological civilization is questioned towards a series of dilemmas (MARTINS; GARCIA, 2003 and COSTA; NEVES, 2006) of which hastening is not foreign, placed in the top of the solutions hierarchy, according to a logic in which “the increasing income law prevails over the one of decreasing income” (MARTINS, 2003, p.24 – Our translation). In the case of work, the introduction of technology is more accelerated than the ability of individuals to discover new demands, and even in the field of needs, it is technology that makes the rules nowadays, leading⁶, on one hand, the lucubration process, and on the other, the production technique. This principle seems to explain and justify the prevalence of the traditional forms of reasoning and thinking towards the question of the use of technology in the field of work, which consequence is the substitution of the human without, for example, in the substitution process, to process the correspondent accompaniment concerning the taxation and contributions of technology for the systems of the field social protection in favour of the individuals. This notion of instrumental acting, very much in tune with the capitalist vision and followed by the majority of European States, contradicts with the real world, a world that is attached to the communication acting (HABERMAS, 1988), protruding from a set of values which impose spontaneity and naturalness to experiences, individuals or collectives. In a hasty time, the historical values persist as foundational analytical pillars, while in the acting field it is technology that introduces new senses of change. Human ability no longer produces change but rather a new technical ability produces a transmuting reality. Such circumstance authorises the statement that the working society is being rapidly replaced by a technological society⁷, vacating the social being of the great artifice called work that occupied people, giving a sense of utility, existential meaning and working as a conducting wire of their lives.

5. Innovation as an end

Media have an important role in the social construction of reality (BERGER; LUCKMAN, 1967) not only by fixing events and renewing interpretative diversity, but mainly by the mission of the approach of human intersubjectivities in the typification of multiple realities translated in the monitoring, debate and prospective of the phenomenon in metamorphosis (SCHUTZ, 1970). Despite its defined social mission as renewal agents of interpretative diversity, working mutations as concept and practice do not have a match in the media excursus, persisting in a conservative approach in the discursive forms.

In this particularly, working mutations follow a current ideology which understands the discussion over technological change and the relations between “the moral structure of contemporary societies or risks, uncertainties, sub products and unpredicted outcomes” (GARCIA, 2010, p.69 – Our translation) as result of imagination without practical result, thus superfluous. In the dichotomised vision between human and technology, despite revealing the hasting presence of a techno-scientific future acting in competition with the slow pace of human activity, media does not feel “attracted by the discussion of alternative ways of social organisation and the different importance that other technological systems better fitted could have in human well-being” (GARCIA, 2010, p.69). Despite the accentuated thickening of unoccupied individuals, this reality persists in media as something transitory and solvable through traditional ways, meaning, centring its narratives in the reproduction of discourses, which solutions are almost exclusively centred in the economic and political genesis and rarely in the human and societal, persisting the following premise: the economic investment, in its greater achievement power, appeals, increasingly, to technology in replacement of human work, but there are no consequences from there, neither are any other problem to world’s organisation.

The social thing and the power emanating from its sources, disseminate themselves through the lodging of their principles in individual minds (TARDE, 1992), being this desideratum reached and reinforced by the corporation of mass communication, with the consequence of an imposition of the model. In this era of global communication, methodological nationalism (MARTINS, 1996) used to manage the public thing, “inhibited the true knowledge of nature and the limits of the modern project” (GARCIA, 2006, p.12 – Our translation). It is with the omnipresent strength of media in everyday life that this methodological nationalism gives more and more space to a “methodological globalism”, in the way that it imposes and stimulates its presence in individual conscience in a displaced logic (SOUZA, 2007). If there is an example that illustrates this clearly is the paradigm of post-modern thought about the world of work and its conceptualisation.

6. Conclusion

The principle according to which modernity conceived an alliance with technology, trusting that technology would be at the service of human being, guided in a rational way and subdue to well-being and happiness values, has promoted contradictions observed in several vectors of social organisation.

Innovation as a process protruding from the introduction of the notion of knowledge in productive processes, presented as reason in the techno-scientific conquers, which assignment is embodied in economic change and in the reflexions of human well being (GARCIA, 2010), was naturalised according to the principle of its totalised and unquestionable ability in media excursus.

In the course of this transformation, media drive their attention to a static perspective, approaching the phenomenon in accelerated metamorphosis in a conservative way, thus devaluing the introduction of mutation stages in society. The field of human work replacement by technological production has been globally approached exclusively in a perspective of social enchantment, where underlies a hedonist notion of individual achievement through consumption without promoting other shocking mutations in world organisation, which consequences in social order result in lack of control and effects dominated by uncertainty to the same individuals.

The haste introduced by technology in the processes of human existence has promoted the idea of “innovation” as a new dimension which replaces lost jobs. The fact that technological acceleration introduces a productive speed widely superior to individual needs and, simultaneously, the existing of a continuous devaluation of knowledge as part of the product, promotes the replacement of humans, removing them from a world originally theirs: the world of work.

• Following the customary lexicographic tradition in Portugal, this work uses throughout the text, the original Anglo-Saxon word media to designate the mass media.
• 2
  Coleman (1988) conceives three stages of “the potential investment in human capital”. The first stage consists in a time in which societies were mainly rural, living from what subsistence agricultural provided. Here, most of what is produced is consumed by those who produce. All the workforce available is important because it is survival that is at stake, resulting in the use of child labour in production. This is a pre-modern way of life characterised by an intense transference of practical knowledge and a nearly linear social reproduction of beliefs and values. The second stage is characterised by a way of living based on an “exchange economy”, a post-agricultural era, based on wages. People live in cities and work in industries. Familiar investment in “human capital” is intensified, result of the idea of investment in the future: parents invest in their children with the hope that their children will help them as they grow old. The third stage is characterised by happening in a post-industrial moment, in which insecurity persists. There are no certainties regarding children’s education, namely it is not possible to determine an investment which ensures a professional future. Some of the family roles are transferred to other institutions, such as nurseries and schools, in a clear replacement of the family by the State. With the loss of the family’s influence in children’s training, there is a divestment in family’s “social capital”.
• 3
  Sennett (2001) diagnoses “the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism” as well as produces, starting from this diagnosis, an analysis of an ethical change advocated by the introduction of flexibility in working relations which, in his point of view, originates human degradation and emptiness, castrating the existential feeling of workers. Despite the relevance and notability of his work, one will use here only parts of its theoretical basis and not his conclusions, since the theme here approached is directed to other cardinal points.
• 4
  To Kóvacs (2006, p.8), “The signs of crisis in the work model that was prevailing during the fordist accumulation regime and industrial society were evident. Between them, the reduction of stability/security of working bonds; the multiplication of flexible working forms, frequently precarious; the raise of unemployment; the lacking in terms of social security, social integration and social regulations, and even a certain individual and collective crisis”. Following the same perspective presented in this work, the author believes that these signs are apparently more “consisted to the transformation and crisis of a certain working model than with the end of work and employment”.
• 5
  For this purpose look at the research by Silva (2012) in which the existence of overlaps is demonstrated, from agriculture to industry and from industry to services, with the absence of a new field able to receive the surplus workers released from the factories.
• 6
  Confirming this understanding, one can look at the words of Steve Jobs, former leader of Apple Computer, to whom the business secret of his company consisted in discovering products and technology for which people had not yet realised they needed (ISAACSON, 2015).
• 7
  Concerning the current technological determinism, Simões (2006, p. 77) thinks that “technology is seen as if it is above society, shaping its form, leading to a confined analysis of the social impact of technology”.

Referências

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Apr 2017

History

• Received
  30 May 2016
• Accepted
  31 Jan 2017