Evil Media

Technicalities

Technicalities Workflow One of the many different “systemic” ways of addressing the shape of practices in the world of production, workflow recommends itself to a study of evil media because of the peculiar place that the ensemble of tools, techniques, and technologies that make it up occupy in the creation of the abstract spaces of the contemporary economy. Defined as the “automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules,”1 workflow has the requisite aura of scientificity about it. However, once this aura is put aside and its status as a set of techniques is restored, workflow appears as a means of extracting control from the coordination and cooperation required to undertake particular forms of work, to distribute the information needed to perform particular acts of work, to make decisions about the allocation of resources, and so on. Disjoining work in this way from the irritating initiatives that people take when trying to execute complex tasks or the misplaced ideas that they might form if they came across the wrong piece of information in the workplace is what, precisely, allows work to “flow.” Commenting on the benefits of globalization, Thomas L. Friedman has argued that workflow software is one of the ten causes of what he calls the flattening of the world. A “quiet revolution that no-one knew was happening,”2 in Friedman’s account, workflow effectively permits the extension of production into a global, and hence twentyfour -hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week, set of processes. In the virtual factory, everything from making animated movies to booking a dentist’s appointment to applying for a mortgage becomes fluid, malleable, and geographically nonspecific work, directable or divertible at will. In the global imaginary, workflow is endowed with a magical capacity with far-reaching effects, an enchanting power that any strategist should want to understand in its own right. 106 Technicalities As with many of the other forms of media technics we are cataloging here, workflow is often understood in terms of a strictly formal nomenclature, and more specifically— following the contemporary imperative to design the social relations into which people are inserted—as a set of patterns. Experts in the workflow community typically categorize general and recurring patterns of work activity in terms of how these patterns bear on control over the work process, the distribution and availability of data, the specification and allocation of human and nonhuman resources and the handling of exceptions. We will examine some concrete examples of these patterns in due course. For the moment, it should be noted that as much as workflow forms a set of techniques for modeling work, it also forms an unparalleled tool for understanding the implementation of structures of domination and control within the workplace, a quasiscientific notation for the distribution and redistribution of cognition and agency. While general and recurring patterns of working activity may well be annotated using a variety of formalisms, workflow appears strangely refractory to unequivocal definition. Indeed, the seemingly uncontrollable extension of the term in contemporary accounts might suggest that as a result of the rapid diffusion of new media technologies throughout the pores of society, work has managed to seep into almost everything we do. When Friedman discusses it, workflow is incarnated in everything from the personal computer, the protocols used to define the exchange of information in e-mail (SMTP), or the operations of browsers (HTTP requests) through to more expansive notational standards such as XML, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, used to exchange “structured” information over the Internet), and even the AJAX coding that Web designers use to make interactions with Web pages less bureaucratic. And this is before one even begins to consider dedicated workware (Lotus Notes for example) or the proprietary packages that the large corporations of NASDAQ offer to help the intelligent consultant fluidify all too solid forms of working practice. There are also dedicated modeling tools (UML activity diagrams, for example) and even languages for workflow—the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (expressing an unusual level of agreement and cooperation between normally competitive tech corporations),3 and YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language, the opensource alternative). While this displacement away from the mundane activity of producing “digital content” (which, in Friedman’s libidinally inflected turn of phrase, we now “shoot” around the office)4 occludes the relations of force that workflow expresses, as...