When Writing Goes Wrong: Stacey Pigg and the Incorrigible Journey of Reinventing the Wheel

Stacey Pigg's Article "Coordinating Constant Invention: Social Media's Role in Distributed Work" outlines the idea that the workplace isn't what it used to be and works hard(er than it has to in my opinion) to centralize social media as a phenomenon that connects, informs, markets and how this trifecta is being used by technical and freelance writers to leverage bigger and better professional opportunities. Pigg defines these "symbolic workers" as "professional communicators whose work is symbolic-analytic often face a dual burden: composing an immediate time and space to conduct their work and overcoming a long-term lack of stability related to future professional opportunities. Her identification of a rising issue in the professional sphere and his research to provide nomenclature around the distribution of work and how it effects writers' roles as social coordinators was interesting and relatively well-stated. The issue I had was with the seeming structural issues this article suffers from that made reading a pure drag.

Over-worded and Dramatic:

Because the the multiple components of work life are being compartmentalized instead of exploring the fluidity of the intersections as Kirk St. Amant does in his definition of distributed work as the “coordinative, polycontextual, crossdisciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities.” The article also presupposes that the idea of integrated communication networks are not currently being valued by companies and corporations today and using fallacious arguments (for example that companies banning employees from accessing social media sites is equal to companies not understanding the power social media can play in business processes).

Too Many Topical Shifts:

Pigg begins her article by challenging the idea of a workplace as physical location to set the stage for his argument about the increasing validity of nontraditional and virtual spaces as credible work spaces. She then transitions--not so seamlessly--to ideas about the degrees of communication that are becoming critical for their tacit role in informing writers. Methods of communication relegated as personal, social applications for interaction are "today, non-hierarchical model[s] of exchange," like in her reference to digital lists of friends as concretized relationships.

The Issue of Revamping the Old into the New:

Pigg presents the information as if social media founded an entirely new principle of corporate relationships. The concept of network building did not begin with social media, it merely pivoted. It was hard to truly invest in this article when every other sentence I thought, ‘duh’ or ‘that’s how work has always been.’ A more worthwhile angle might have been social media’s role in the evolution of the idea of the workplace or a work space.

                          What about sales?

                              What about marketing?

For Pete’s sake, the entire idea of the assembly line is distributed work and Henry Ford was using this concept for almost 100 years. If you replace “social media” with “globalization” within Pigg's article, this same argument was happening 50 years ago. Heck replace social media with coal, and people were saying the same thing at the start of the industrial revolution. And yet this piece marched on…

Pigg did eventually get to making a poignant point about how social media was being used to leverage employment marketability and the process that one blogger undertakes to gain success (at which point I thought, You should have just started here). But it also made me question—again—what the actual topic of this article was. 

Overall, I found the article shifty, wordy, and slightly unsure of itself like that girl at the prom who, despite her parents assuring her how beautiful her gown was, or how shiny and modern her limousine, or how many of her friends complimented her, still felt awkward. That is what reading this article was like for me; like observing someone who had all the right elements that somehow did not fit together.

P.S. Social coordination is not mutually exclusive to social media.