The Preservation of Embodied Masculinity in Tech-Altered Workplaces

• In Event: Networking Rurality Part 2

Abstract

Tech sector work is often thought to represent a shift from an old regime that favors physical strength and capability to a new one favoring disembodied human intelligence. By contrast, the occupational values of traditional rural industries in the Western United States (including, logging, commercial fishing, and cattle ranching) persist in centering the laboring body. Rural work of this sort is celebrated and even mythologized as physical, perilous, embodied, and done in the outdoors. So what happens when the work worlds of high tech make inroads into rural places? How do communities respond when the livestock auction becomes Internet-connected and a Facebook data center becomes the newest employer in town?

Drawing from ethnographic work in Central Oregon and the Northern California coast, this paper explores how rural workers reconcile occupational values when disparate work worlds intersect in rural sites. A recent trend reclaims digital work from the realm of weightless ‘ephemerality,’ situating it instead in the material world, a world of brutal, embodied physicality. For example, in an interview for Outside magazine, Ken Patchett, director of the Facebook data center in rural Prineville, Oregon insisted, “The Internet is not a fake thing…it’s a very, very real thing made with hammers and concrete. And nails. And blood and sweat and tears and people” (Streep 2017). This study accounts for how tech work is made suitable and meaningful in rural sites through its connection to embodied masculine identity.

Author

• Jenna Burrell, School of Information, UC Berkeley