I imagine that they made the interactive graphic have only 3 options for most demographic characteristics to make it more manageable to present, so I’m not too irritated that, once again, a major mainstream data source doesn’t reflect me or a lot of other people I know at all.

The information that is there is just fantastically informative!

Then I read the accompanying article, which focused on the employed/unemployed differences:

“Without a paying job, these Americans have picked up other forms of labor: vacuuming the house, sending out résumés, taking classes and caring for family. “

all was well until I came across the closing quote:

“If all we were doing is substituting production at home for production in the marketplace,” said Daniel S. Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, “then maybe unemployment wouldn’t be so bad.”

Read it twice.

My first reaction: ass-hat! Making money is not what defines “productive” (read: necessary, valuable) work, in my worldview anyway. Furthermore, work in the internal/domestic sphere is historically “women’s work”, and in spite of changing attitudes, it is still a social and cultural expectation that women are primarily responsible for it, so when it’s excluded from being considered “productive”, we have clear sexism interfering (and in a post-colonial world, there’s of course also the race+class element: who does what work in whose home?) and overemphasizing the contribution of external/public sphere work in the economy.

There is such a thing as a non-monetary economy, and we have many of them, whether you believe it or not! And I’m not chasing after a chicken-egg question: plain and simple, if you don’t have your needs met in the domestic sphere, you can’t function adequately in the public sphere (e.g., if you don’t have food, it’s pretty damn hard to work all day at BankCorp, Inc. trying to bring home bacon, i.e., the ‘masculine’ side of the gendered division of labor in our neoliberal world contributes only material support to the home).

My second reaction: okay, maybe they cut off what he was saying. The reporter probably talked to Dr. Hamermesh for 20 minutes and then had to choose one key quote to meet the 500 word limit and was writing on deadline, and then the article got edited.

Third: I wonder exactly what Dr. Hamermesh means by “so bad”. I think it sucks when people don’t enough money to feed, shelter, clothe, educate, and spend time with themselves and their families adequately. Since money is a means to all of these things under American capitalism, well, then certainly higher unemployment means more people aren’t going to be able to do all that stuff as easily, and some not at all. But the way “we” Americans live, the going rate to live like that is wildly expensive. The cost of time, money, energy, and (other) resources is exorbitant for food, housing, clothing, education, and enrichment. Exorbitant!

But I have a suspicion that this is not what Dr. Hamermesh means when he says “so bad”. I can’t say for sure (his CV highlights many publications related to labor, but I don’t know what his angle is).

The way I see it, displacing work from the external spheres to the internal ones can’t be so bad. That’s where all the nurturing and cultivating work gets done! I would love to see a follow-up study of the same respondents measuring quality of life, and controlling for emotional, psychological, and physical/material stress related to unemployment and loss of income.

I appreciate that we all have bodies! And all of our bodies produce mucus, and sometimes we’ve got to expectorate and get that stuff out. I am glad that you feel safe enough in the library to do what you need to do with your body.

However, I kindly ask that in the future, you make sure to read the label marked PAPER RECYCLING before spitting directly into the narrow slot on the lid of the container.

Yours sincerely,

Anand

I was listening to Weekend All Things Considered on Sunday, and caught a wonderful, insightful interview with the creator of a new web 2.0 information-seeking application. It’s called Aardvark, and maybe you’ve already heard of it.

Here’s how it works: the Aardvark app taps your social network on facebook to figure out who you know (or who you don’t know you know, or who knows someone you know, or, oh this always makes me dizzy) who knows about something you wanna know. Get it?

It’s like this: I’m wondering, gee, does anybody know of a good holistic doctor in Southeast Michigan?

And I ask that question via IM or email to Aardvark. The friendly rodent then does some fancy algorithmics and sends the question to people who might know about things related to the words in my question. Then they have the opportunity to send an answer back through Aardvark, who sends it to me. They self-describe as a “hub”.

My thoughts:

1. This is really cool! However, it raises the age-old information literacy issue of source authority. Why should I trust my uncleji’s cousin without knowing the guy? The idea is that someone who cares about the subject will answer, and I don’t dispute that. I’m not suggesting people will just send made-up answers to troll around. However, everybody’s got an agenda, all the time, and I don’t think Aardvark gives me sufficient metadata about the responders for me to adequately assess the authority of my sources. It’s probably better for “factual” kinds of information, but we all know that facticity is itself a tool of hegemonic dominance.

2. One lady’s “hub” is another one’s “goddamn meddling middleman who can collect my goddamn data on the frigging internet”.

3. I was happily surprised with the All Things Considered interview, because for once it wasn’t a mainstream media outlet going, “OMG YOU GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FREAKY THING ON THE INTERNET. IT MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE SOME SOCIAL UTILITY! STOP THE PRESSES! IT MIGHT KILL US ALL OR SAVE US ALL OR MAKE US ADDICTED TO THE SHINY COMPUTER BOX! I’M SO HIP RIGHT NOW.”

Anyway, so I was happily enjoying the interview until Guy Raz (the host) asked the annoying neoliberal question I suppose many people wanted to hear: why would anyone participate when they don’t “get anything” out of it?

Now, I was in the car listening to the radio, and I have a habit of talking back to it anyway. At the particular moment that I heard this, I was pulling into my driveway with all my windows down, and my strait-laced neighbors were out in their backyard (adjacent to the driveway) arguing about their grill.

And as I mentioned in my profile, I’m an angry librarian (I have my reasons). So, when Guy Raz pushed that “oh golly, isn’t money the only thing that matters in this world?” button, I blew a fuse, and yelled at a rather high fraction of my lungs: “IT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE LIBRARIANS, A$$H***!”

And there you have it, kids: A is for Anand, Adultery, Aardvark, and Asshole.

Bottom line: Aardvark gets an A for concept, but I have to play with it more to evaluate the execution.