context

online-game

hardware-interface

"Mental imMigration" - a collective networked environment which allows on a playful level experiental approaches to new forms of global teleworking.

definition: mental imMigration
requires from teleworkers a mental, immaterial migration in another cultural logic. This does not imply a traditional concept of migration, i.e. the physical leaving of a “home” caused by political and/or other existential circumstances, or the exterritorialisation of a cultural identity. Thus mental immigration does not require a physical travel. The already existing physical working and living situation of a worker stay the same , but the immaterial part of the work (the service) is transferred in another cultural context. (i.e Call Centers of global enterprises: service workers in the so called third world take over the call service after office closing-hours in the western part of the world. These teleworkers are performing a double consciousness, to be here and there, a form of consciousness which influences the conditions of language, of gender, and infiltrates thus the roles of education,of work, of citizen, ETC. - one has to play in tele-jobs. (V. Grassmuck).

The actual tele-working conditions provoke rather a blind copying of western cultural logics (workers in call centers imitate western dialects in providing technology support, transcriptions of texts and programming styles are trained linear in western styles of working and thinking instead of rearticulating them through a personal confrontation). These enables a digital divide between those who are able to switch virtuosly between different cultural and technological structures and those who are not able or willing to do so.