Visualising the future of work: myth, media and mobilities

Abstract

Microsoft’s Future Vision, Googleplex, Apple’s ‘spaceship’ campus: predictions of the imminent demise of the office workplace coincide with a proliferation of media images of the ‘office of the future’. This article argues these visions function as powerful cultural myths for bringing about and stabilising new mobile and flexible work forms and identities. Cultural myths perform a range of ideological and mediating functions. They are a symbolic form for naturalising the cultural production of meaning and a map or charter for the way that society is ordered in the present. While visions of mobile work forms and arrangements promise a revolutionary break from the past, they also mask the re-inscription of a rational economy of time and gendered relations of labour. These visions maintain their currency because they work with contemporary processes of commodification and mediate the very mobilities they help to bring about.