It would seem that I’m not the only person facilitating such conversations in a university context. Melissa Gregg, from Sydney Uni, wrote a really ace post the other day about some issues which had arisen in tutorials she convened about Facebook and employers’ demands for profiles as part of the recruitment and selection process. She writes about this at home cooked theory:

…for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.

Her remarks sparked some interesting comments, and prompted a post on the legal issues surrounding this sort of demand by Legal Eagle at Skepticlawyer. Legal Eagle’s post, as usual assured in its comprehensiveness and insight, correctly notes that the law has not kept up with technology in this domain, as in many others.

There’s another set of issues arising here about the increasing blurring of professional and personal identity. A lot has been written about emotional labour, and the breakdown of boundaries between work and personal life. There’s another angle – following Norbert Elias’ sociological thought – about informalisation as a secular process in modernity. But it would be very interesting indeed if there were to be some more research and discussion focused on the impact of social media on these broader trends, and concomitantly, on their impact on social media, privacy and subjectivity (and indeed on how human or workplace rights are affected by the distribution of personality throughout webspaces). Social media reveals the distributed nature of subjectivity and cognition and undermines the unity of the individual subject of legal rights. It strikes me that social networking is a key node accelerating, or perhaps accentuating, cultural shifts which have been on the boil for some time.

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict – through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project – on cities and war – I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanising war. This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity.

The whole article can be read here.

Elsewhere: At the Global Sociology Blog, there’s a complementary post from SocProf where she also takes a look at Sassen’s work in the context of Mumbai as a space of globalisation.