work activities and bodies, but makes the material constraints apparent. When this happens, the worker is cut off from significant parts of their workplace(s).
Mobile freelance work and mobile media also have a bodily dimension: the freelancer has to carry the weight of the basic kit on their bodies. As Álvaro puts it, “you never know where you will end up working, you have to take it all with you just in case,” an experience Loli describes as a “snail with its shell” and Laura as being “one of those carriage horses in the park.” I’m often exhausted by the weight of my workplace. I often find myself staying home just to rest my back. Carrying this equipment is a requirement to get work done, and as I will describe in the next section, to have a workplace we can call our own. The distinction between knowledge/intellectual/creative work and physical work is blurred, when working as a mobile freelancer, and the generally accepted idea about the privileged life conditions entailed by this work type is questioned.
Workplace making
Digital work is often defined as immaterial (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 30) and placeless; done anytime, anyplace, without putting a “personal mark on the ←40 | 41→environment” (Felstead et al., 2005, p. 22). The platforms that organize work are designed to amplify this seeming placelessness (Lehdonvirta, 2016). However, for the mobile freelancers I studied the platforms and software used for, as well as the processes of text processing, design, internet browsing and instant messaging create a sense of a bounded and shared place. For instance, GoogleDocs is a tool frequently used for remote collaborations, and becomes a place where multiple people can be co-present (see chapters by Schreiber and Prieto-Blanco and Raun, this volume). Place and placemaking are relevant for digital labor (Flecker and Schönauer, 2016; Liegl, 2014; Pigg, 2014).
The opening auto-ethnographic vignette showed how different personalizations of our mobile and laptop computers transform standard machines into an intimate place to be alone or with others, to work by oneself or in collaboration. Personalization is accomplished through creative means but also through the affordances of the objects and the platforms and systems within them. Affordance here is understood as “the capacity of an object to help people do something by virtue of its ‘interface’ features—how it invites and facilitates some particular action” (Molotch, 2011, p. 103). I’m most likely to create personalization through changing preferred settings, adding bookmarks, specifying notifications, using color tags, changing the desktop background. Other mobile freelancers do more or less the same.
Transforming our devices helps make them into stable work places, so that when we log on, we are at work. But it also serves a secondary purpose, helping us transform different types of spaces (semi-public—such as coffee shops—or domestic) into our workplaces for intermittent periods of time, while we move. This, together with the “stuff” stored in people’s machines, is similar to the “living space making” Daniel Miller (2011) describes people doing with their households. Work and living place making is influenced by habitus, biography and the material culture available. When Muriel was looking for work, she created a marker system for every museum and gallery in town within her preferred internet browser. Alvaro said “I prefer working on my laptop because I control the programmes. Working on another PC is very uncomfortable. The one I have available at the Uni is a powerful PC, it’s really fast, but my files aren’t there and I refuse to have a copy of my Dropbox there [due to privacy issues].” Personalization is key in workplace making, as it creates a sense of privacy and intimacy, which is particularly important for precarious mobile workers.
My laptop computer and mobile phone are my workplaces and so is the coffee shop I am at in Brussels (Figure 4.7).
Figure 4.7: Brussels, 26 December 2016. Source: Photo courtesy of Nadia Hakim-Fernández
Finding a place that can temporarily be made one’s own is part of the daily work routine for mobile freelancers. It can be extremely time consuming and mentally exhausting. We move with our technologies to find an adaptable place with a wifi, electric sockets and other conditions such as acceptable ambient noise. It is ←41 | 42→of course also important that our activity is welcome. Elena describes her routine of workplace making: “I have two main activities and I do them at different spots of the city. One of them requires writing a lot and being alone, and when I try staying at home, it never works, I cannot concentrate. I’ll just settle down and then the doorbell rings and I have to open the door to the gas guy, etc., and there’s a thousand other interruptions. I have tried going to libraries, but I need to feel free to answer the phone, move around (…) and the opening hours don’t match my schedule. I go to a coffee shop or to my gym that has a big social area, a restaurant, and is very quiet, the coffee is cheaper and I can exercise after work. I normally get up at 8, get my 3-year-old kid ready for school, and I then choose between going to the coffee shop, where we are now, the gym, or returning home. I love home because I can take a nap if I am too tired.”
Mobility combined with workplace making is one of the strategies we have to separate what would be otherwise a collapsed work and personal life. Leaving ←42 | 43→home is important, but maintaining this separation can feel like a struggle. When I was interviewing Constantí at a coffee shop near his home, a phone alert indicated that it was time for him to clean the kitchen. This alert is a reminder for him to stop working and invest some time in his household. He didn’t want to interrupt the interview and preferred to stay a while longer, claiming to be “already late in all my [his] tasks anyway.” Freelancing requires a sustained effort to be able to create workplaces distinct from personal places. In other words, creating a separation between work and not work through movement, or with the help of technological constraints is fragile; it requires a rejection of some of the affordances designed into our technologies and a lot of self-discipline.
(Dis)connection
I disconnect my phone [from the internet] to sleep, and it is an achievement to be able to keep it disconnected until 10:30 am, because you get the feeling that it is getting very late. So the challenge is to wake up and not check the email or whatsapp, but to wake up, exercise a bit, straighten things at home, load the washing machine, and then say OK, now I connect. It’s not a big deal to wait until 11 am, and then it’s like, OK, ‘let the craziness begin’. And you get 40 thousand whatsapps, and mails.
As Alvaro, all of the interviewed mobile freelancers experience the internet and its related digital technologies inevitable and absorbing, even against their will. This feeling of constant connection to the technologies, to the information and the requirements that come with it, becomes too much. “Disconnection” is a word used by many of my respondents. These mobile freelancers yearn to “escape,” to “block” the stream of information and separate work from other aspects of life.
A:It’s that feeling that whether you connect or not, the world changes completely, it’s really crazy.
N:Changes in what sense?
A:There is a feeling of being intruded on. There are always things there demanding your attention. And I feel a bit persecuted.
For many mobile freelancers, disconnection, and connection for that matter, present complicated tensions. We recognize it is a matter of boundaries, but these are negotiated with multiple stakeholders—other people, technological devices, and ourselves. Even when we might handle the first two, and that’s an ongoing challenge, we might not recognize the third, where we battle to balance our own expectations. On the one hand, we expect that being a freelancer has advantages related to having independence from a boss and sense of “freedom” to create a personal life/work project. On the other hand, we experience keen disadvantages, such as feeling the pressure to work all the time to find material security and feeling as if we must be available all the time. As a result, disconnection carries a double edge.
←43 | 44→
Disconnection, or more precisely the seemingly constant desire for time and space for oneself, provides compelling evidence for the fact that even if the internet is ubiquitous, it is, for these mobile freelancers, not a seamless way of being. They have a strong object/subject