David Elesh

COPRESENCE AS ‘BEING WITH’

This article examines the issue of ‘ubiquitous connectivity’ on the Internet. The Internet, combined with the wireless technologies, is said to have made it possible for ‘anyone to contact anyone else anywhere at anytime’, but such ubiquity of connectivity has failed to materialize in actual human contact. Drawing on Goffman and Giddenss theories of human interaction, the authors make a distinction between co-location, which is a spatial relationship among individuals, and copresence, a social relationship. While co-location puts people within range of each other, copresence renders people mutually accessible for contact. However, the establishment of copresence is normatively regulated in society, which demarcates different regions of space for different types of activity. Social contact takes place in a domain where copresence is affected not only by the regionality of contact but also by the power relations that underlie personal affinity and social engagement. It is concluded that so long as there are social barriers that separate people into different groups of interests and different positions in the hierarchy of fame and power, there will be fragmentations in the online world that make the ubiquity of social connectivity impossible.

Gender, occupational, and age cohort consequences of the industrial transformation, 1980–1990☆

Abstract Existing research on industrial and occupational shifts has concentrated on how these changes have altered the profile of work or their consequences for particular segments of the labor force such as females or older workers. This paper offers a different perspective: it compares the gender experiences of the consequences of the industrial and occupational restructuring of the 1980s for the cohorts in the labor force at the start of the decade and examines hypotheses derived from three alternative theoretical perspectives. Using data from the 1980 and 1990 PUMS files, it shows that (1) the occupational careers of male and female workers who began the 1980s aged 25–54 were primarily influenced by the restructuring of work rather than by industrial shifts; (2) in every cohort women fared better than men in terms of occupational upgrading; (3) there was a loss of jobs with age that bore particularly heavily on males; and (4) scientific professionals lost jobs, raising questions about their importance to the “new economy.”