Writing is used on a regular basis in organizing our daily lives. Making diary reminders, texting friends, labelling boxes and jotting down to-do lists may seem like the small stuff, but they are uses of writing that are important to us, and they are woven into the very fabric of everyday life. For day-to-day tasks such as these, we tend to use the materials at hand. Sometimes that’s a choice between different writing technologies, between digital and paper-based technologies – and that choice may depend on personal preference or convenience. What’s more, our preferences are often task-specific. For instance, always adding appointments to an online calendar on a smartphone has certain advantages, whereas a scribbled note on a scrap of paper may be sufficient for a to-do list. But what might be considered to be the mundane business of arranging and organizing our lives also includes our interactions with a variety of institutions and service providers, such as when we book appointments, settle bills, make travel arrangements and so on – and these interactions nearly always involve some sort of writing. We have recently come to accept that many of these written transactions will be conducted online. The implications of this move to the digital will be explored in greater depth in Chapter 9.

In what follows I consider these ordinary everyday writing practices, first by looking at the role of writing in maintaining our place in social networks – through the exchange of news and views, by keeping in touch with our friends and family, and in refreshing and developing social ties. I include in this some of the ways in which we use writing to engage and interact with formal institutions through the course of daily life. Since its early development writing has played a part in our social world, and I trace the recent history of some current practices, and show where other practices are being modified or adapted with the uptake of new technologies. The second topic, writing in the workplace, is a substantial area of study in its own right, so here I restrict the focus to some general reflections on workplace literacies, highlighting the diverse ways in which the written word becomes part of working life. In these contexts, there can be a reciprocal relationship between written texts and work processes, their practices and goals. Although this chapter does not aim to present an exhaustive exploration of all the different ways in which we use writing to navigate our way through our social and working lives, it offers some insights into the everyday and often ephemeral texts that we create and exchange in order to facilitate social action, organization and institutional life. In some instances of this, the message content of such written communication may seem minimal or even banal, but I shall be arguing that even the simplest of exchanges may have an important role to play in maintaining relationships or supporting joint endeavour – whether that is formal or informal, and that these interactions help to constitute and consolidate overall patterns of social organization.

In a similar way, the final focus on organizing, labelling and categorizing shows how short pieces of writing – often single words – are routinely used to help us navigate daily life, to help us to store and retrieve things and to create order and meaning. Although these kinds of recordings may be helpful in organizing everyday activity, they are not always innocent; they are also complicit in exclusionary practices, used to prop up repressive regimes, and even the most heinous of crimes against humanity. I end the chapter with a chilling example of this – records of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the late 1970s.

8.1 Writing and Social Networks

Writing plays a significant role in the routines and relationships that constitute our social life and it acts as an important way of locating ourselves within particular networks. Of course, writing is not the only way to belong to a network – face-to-face interaction, being together and working alongside each other structures much of our collaborative time and is considered by most people to be at the centre of their social life, but in contemporary contexts maintaining relationships in our primary social groups often involves the use of writing to keep in touch with one another, to organize travel, meet-ups and social events. To clarify, I’m using the term social network here to refer to the totality of relationships, such as those that exist between family members, friends, work colleagues and members of civic or religious groups that an individual might be located within. This is to be seen as distinct from what is sometimes described as an online social network – often used to refer to one’s friends or followers on social media. Admittedly, for a lot of people, there is considerable overlap between the two, but here I’m using social network in a wider, more inclusive sense that embraces both online and offline interactions.¹

Domestic settings, whether they involve friends living together, co-habiting couples or family groups, often involve sustained periods of co-location and they are likely to function reasonably effectively through face-to-face communication. But even in these settings, there will be occasions when notes are used to indicate jobs that need attending to, shopping that is required or updates on one’s whereabouts. Writing of this sort may be analogue or digital, but its purpose in coordinating activity and keeping each other informed – what we might refer to as the micro-co-ordination of daily life – is often a useful supplement to face-to-face interaction. Shared calendars may work as helpful reminders of regular events, anniversaries and appointments, but often they’re not sufficiently adaptable to capture changing plans and unscheduled events. The rapid uptake of mobile technology means that we can quickly update one other, and more or less in real time, too. As a result, SMS or WhatsApp messages may be involved as a way of feeding in new information, communicating changes of plans, sharing one’s progress on a journey or alerting others to unexpected delays.

Domestic settings are also implicated in more formal transactions. In fact, households could be seen as a nexus for a range of more official written communication. They are a delivery point – an address for personal and official communication, for billing, for collecting taxes and for addressing enquiries. Following widespread availability of the Internet, many of these administrative communications have started to move online, and although a postal address may still function as the primary focus for identifying a household unit, the occupier’s email address or login details may often act as a proxy, and of course, if these communications are online, the day-to-day business of settling bills, making enquiries and conducting routine financial transactions can happen anywhere and pretty much at any time. The larger point here is that many mundane, often quite brief, written exchanges do the work of holding our place in the social order. And although neighbourhood communities² may not be as significant in our lives as they once were, there are some indications that local sodalities and lightweight community networks are now sustained and supported by new technology. For instance, the popular NextDoor app acts as a forum for exchanging local news and establishing a sense of neighbourliness. And, of course, this sense of neighbourly community is sometimes enacted in other ways too, through the use of local WhatsApp or Facebook groups.

8.2 Writing Social Lives

Initiating and maintaining social contact has a fascinating history. The gradual move away from small doorstep communities to larger and more complex social units was an outcome of early urbanization, and this trend certainly accelerated in the later stages of industrialization. Changing conditions meant that networks dominated by family members and neighbours, or local employers and landowners, and defined by geographical proximity, were no longer the only form of social organization. And as social interaction became more complex, so writing became an important tool for keeping in touch as well as for making new connections. For some social groups, brief messages on visiting cards or postcards did a lot of the work that text messages do today – the work of initiating, negotiating and maintaining contact in social networks. With the rise of this sort of hand-written communication, and the accompanying development of national postal services, longer and more detailed messages came to be associated with the exchange of letters, whereas postcards and greeting cards were used for briefer messages. Direct comparisons are not always possible, or helpful, but is interesting to note in passing the rise of a similar distinction between texts and emails. Although brief exchanges on email are easy and quite acceptable, short informal or conversational exchanges are more typically conducted by text or WhatsApp. Email, particularly in work settings, can often be associated with a higher degree of formality.

With the spread of writing, the written negotiation of social contact quickly become a marker of social class, an indicator of ‘sophisticated’ or ‘civilized’ behaviour, typified, particularly in Western European societies, through the use of calling, or visiting cards. Conventions governing such practices were codified and often written out in books of etiquette. As one such text explains:

This is a rich example of how material form – in this case, the quality of the paper and card, as well as its design, became an integral part of the message, and perhaps communicated just as much – or even more than the written content itself. But the example also points to a wider practice, a way in which the visiting card was embedded in a related set of norms of behaviour. In this example, it even included the time of a day that a card should be delivered. Visiting cards date back to the fifteenth century and are thought to have developed from the convention of writing one’s address on the reverse, or blank, side of a playing card. By the late eighteenth century, prints of iconic views – of buildings and landscapes, of reigning beauties and celebrities were in wide circulation, and were cheaply produced and printed on card and these were used for similar purposes. The practice of using these as calling cards (‘billets de visite’ in French) became popular as a way of introducing oneself or maintaining a place in the social network,⁴ even if they were to explain one’s absence or unavailability as in the following:

They would usually carry the name and address of the visitor and a brief handwritten message – although in the example above, the message was typewritten with the addresses name, Dowager Lady Shelburne, added in pen and ink. In this era, visiting cards were sold in sets, printed on thin card, usually eight to a page, to be cut out by hand.

It seems likely that visiting cards were the precursor of several different kinds of written communication that we are familiar with today. There are striking similarities with the trade or business cards that began to circulate in the late nineteenth century, and these remain an important way of initiating contact in an era that often seems to be dominated by digital communication. There are also some similarities between visiting cards and postcards. Postcards were in their heyday in the early years of the twentieth century, being used to share plans, jokes, holiday news and just about everything else that you could fit into their small graphic space. They have been described as the most popular social networking tool of their time and we know that, with a well-developed postal service, short messages could at one time be delivered within a few hours.⁶ Although postcards are still sold and sent, their popularity went in slow decline through the last century, and for many of us they have now been supplanted by online social media, by messaging or by photo-sharing on Instagram. Whilst it may be the case that many of the arrangements we make in our social lives are now done online, paper-based writing still plays a major role. For example, there is still an important place for print which is the preferred medium for things like wedding and party invitations, the exchange of cards to mark special occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries and religious festivals.

8.3 Writing in the Workplace

Working environments are the context for a broad range of writing practices (see Figure 8.1 for instance). Whether work involves developing plans and estimates, marketing and selling products, registeringand approving transactions, dealing with customer queries or caring for the emotional, health or educational needs of others, it is likely to involve its fair share of written communication. Some situations may require relatively short one-to-one interactions, whereas others may depend upon more lengthy multi-party exchanges. Communication may be focused on those inside an organization or business, on external individuals or groups, or a combination of both. Writing is likely to fulfil a variety of functions, from consulting or informing to agreeing or authenticating; it may function as a way of enabling work processes or become an output in its own right – in the form of a document, report or contract. Furthermore, some writing may be an individual accomplishment and some a collaborative or negotiated effort. Because of all this variation, it is virtually impossible to generalize about workplace literacy. In addition, the notion of ‘workplace’ is itself rather vague, particularly once we acknowledge that some of those involved, such as clients, customers or students may not even be thinking of transactions as ‘work’ in the first place, and when its claim to be ‘placed’ is in itself rather unclear. Despite all of this, the phrase is useful as an umbrella term for thinking about the way in which specific writing practices become part of paid and voluntary employment, and are often the most efficient or customary way of getting things done.

Figure 8.1 Writing in the workplace.

Such writing is embedded in the actions, interactions and activities that constitute the work context, and as a result, it is patterned by the relationships and relative functions of those that constitute the workplace community. Most of the writing done in workplace communities is instrumental, some of it is inward-facing, in that it is primarily concerned with those within an institution or business, and some outward-facing. One’s role, level of knowledge and experience, and status tend to dictate the kind of writing required in an institutional context, but quite often communication involves intense collaborations with others, through face-to-face and electronic media, and a dynamic movement between draft texts and previously produced documents. Workplace writing is rarely an isolated event – the use of specific templates or earlier versions of a particular genre can be standard practice. Intertextuality is a key feature of a lot of workplace writing. Texts draw on, or are shaped by, existing documents, and they are developed through chains of communication, often involving complex negotiations, multiple versions and lengthy email exchanges.

Professional work, such as that of doctors, lawyers and accountants will involve differing uses of writing related to the particular demands and expectations of their role and purpose. In fact, the texts that are produced and the working practices involved are in many instances mutually constitutive. The concept of genre, which was explored in Chapter 6, has been extensively applied to writing in the workplace and is helpful in understanding its place in the social-material practices of work environments. To recap, the idea of genre developed earlier is not simply concerned with textual regularities, but with the patterns of social practice and interaction and the material transactions in which they are embedded.⁷ In Chapter 6, I applied this concept of genre to knowledge practices, whereas here I suggest that it can also be applied to specific work practices. To illustrate this, I draw on an example from research conducted by Deborah Brandt. Amongst the interviews included in her thorough exploration of workplace literacy is the case of a police officer she calls Henry Pine.⁸

Pine is a night patrol officer in a midsized city in the US. In the interview, he talks about the writing of incident reports. After responding to a call and visiting the scene, he is, like all patrol officers, required to submit a factual report on that incident using a templated form. He has to construct a chronological account of things and events that might be good enough from a legal perspective. His incident report is therefore an integral part of his work in law enforcement. Pine needs to collect factual material through observation and interview, and as Brandt suggests, he has to try to make his report work for all parties, for victims and witnesses as well as for detectives, prosecutors and juries. Pine’s incident reports aim to be a democratic narrative, an unbiased account and a mnemonic device for telling the truth – at least as closely as he can capture it. But, of course, it’s not that he’s being paid for the writing itself, for the interest or excitement he can convey, or for his sensitivity to the craft of composition – Pine has to work within the genre of an incident report in the full knowledge of his own role and the role that his text may subsequently play in the judicial system. In this way, the characteristics of any particular incident report, its content and the way it is written are always part of a specific work practice, which is precisely located in a larger field of relationships, actions and activities. Brandt⁹ places textual practices like this in the general context of workplace interactions, observing that writing ‘…has always been used for work, production, output, earning profit, publicity, practicality, record-keeping, buying, and selling’.

Some forms of employment are now heavily dependent on single or multiple channels of digital communication, and I conclude this section by looking at some of the implications of this. As in other walks of life, the use of new channels of communication can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Although mobile communication technologies offer employees considerable flexibility in when, where and how they work, they may also lead to excessive monitoring by employers, or to employees working in their own time, and the rather unhelpful blending of work and leisure. Recent research points to the fact that many professionals continue to blur the boundaries between work and leisure by using mobile email devices at all hours of the day and sometimes into the night.¹⁰ Perhaps they may claim that this gives them greater flexibility – perhaps even a degree of control over their work life by continually monitoring the flow of communications, and increasing the speed and efficiency of work tasks; but this flexibility often comes with the habit of repeatedly checking, and possibly responding to messages as they are received. In the worst-case scenario, this can lead to an escalation in the communication demands of employment, creating new expectations about availability, culminating in increasing stress levels and compulsive behaviour. The materiality of mobile devices plays an important part here – their portability, ubiquity, unobtrusiveness and level of connectivity make it possible to be constantly available. Add to this the fact that most handheld devices now feature alerts and push notifications that display even when the screen is locked, thereby reminding you of incoming communications, the popular description ‘always on’ seems quite appropriate. A participant in a recent study reported on this habitual message checking as ‘…the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do before I go to bed … you just get in the habit of always knowing what’s in your email’.¹¹ This may not be an uncommon scenario as mobile technologies amplify communication, and make it ubiquitous. Continuous and compulsive connectivity can lead to work intensification and intrude in private relationships and leisure activities. The anytime/anywhere paradigm gets caught up in a ‘collective spiral of escalating engagement’ in which employees ‘end up working everywhere/all the time’.¹² This condition is sometimes described as hyperavailability, a phenomenon which is explored further in Chapter 9.

8.4 Organizing, Labelling and Categorizing

One of my favourite pieces of literary description comes from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Here, in the extract shown below, Flaubert¹³ gives us our first glimpse of the character Monsieur Homais, with a cameo of him at work in his pharmacy:

The pharmacy described is like an extension of Homais’ character – it works as a visual summary of him, from his hubristic display of scientific rationality to his self-important professional aspiration. But one can’t help but be struck by the prominence of writing in this description. His pharmacy is literally ‘plastered’ with writing – longhand, copperplate, block capitals and gold letters. In the context of the novel, all this conveys a sense of Homais’ self-importance, his claim for status in the small community of Yonville. It is, though, a particularly literate performance of identity. And, in the context of our current concerns in this chapter, the description of the pharmacy highlights the significance of labelling as a writing practice. Whether this is done to advertise, to inform, or simply to organize the working environment those single words are efficient reminders of what’s on offer and where it can be found.

We can see this principle operating in all sorts of public spaces including civic amenities, shops and libraries. Of course, in libraries, labels that categorize not only help us to find our way around but they also work to enact and reproduce knowledge practices, and to regulate subject and disciplinary boundaries (see Chapter 6). But there is no doubt that they also help us to systemize knowledge and to locate sources, being examples of what we might now think of as metadata. A good example of this is Hans Blumenberg’s elaborate system of categorization. Blumenberg, a twentieth-century German philosopher, created an elaborate labelling and categorizing system of the references and quotations that he used in his writing and public speaking.¹⁴ His legacy includes boxes containing some 30,000 typed or handwritten cards, referred to as Zettelkasten. Systems like this, based on index cards and catalogues, use single words, or lists of words to help us map concepts onto one another and are significant in the history of ideas. In the European context, they seem to emerge in the Early Modern period and often had a distinctive material form – such as different coloured strips of paper, guide cards or numbered cards as well as tailor-made boxes, cases, shelves and pull-out drawers for storage. Card indexes of this sort were common place in libraries and an essential part of academic life for much of the twentieth century, until they were superseded by microfiche and digital search tools.

But labelling also has a strong role to play in daily transactions, such as those that involve buying and selling – and this includes marketing and promotions as well as the storage and retrieval of consumer products – and in more basic navigation and orientation. We shouldn’t underestimate the relatively straightforward work that written notes and signs do in telling us what something is, where we are or where to go. Place names, street signs and house names are useful to us. Figure 8.2 is a sign that simply tells us that this particular door is part of Hall Farm – we can find it on the map, visit the occupants or deliver a parcel. As always, there is an accretion of meanings that attach to even these most simple of labels. Our reading of them assembles with the location, our state of mind and the activity we’re engaged in. The harried Amazon driver is relieved to have found a delivery point, the local history enthusiast sees evidence of an old hall in the vicinity, the visitor may scoff at the fact that it looks nothing like a farm, seeing a fake patina of tradition – or the tired walker is just pleased to note that there are only two miles left before a welcome rest.

Figure 8.2 Hall Farm.

So labels and signs can simply assist us in our routine navigation of social spaces. Of course in times of unrest, and of national or international conflict they can be rapidly weaponized.¹⁵ News reports of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine describe the rapid alteration of street names, the removal of directional signs and the appearance of billboard slogans aimed at confusing or abusing the aggressors.¹⁶ But this is an extreme situation – most of the time we find environmental signs more or less helpful. Visiting a swimming pool, I’m guided through changing rooms and then towards the pool, I’m shown the deep end and introduced to some important rules (no diving) through clearly displayed signage. In all this, my experience is regulated, and in this example, the regulation works in making the swimming experience unproblematic.

In some instances though, regulation underlines social divisions. The First Class notice on some forms of transport separates the privileged, usually wealthier, passengers from the rest. Most of the time, of course, we accept this – on the basis that it’s a privilege you pay for. A different kind of categorization is found in countries such as Japan, India and Malaysia, where you’ll see women-only carriages on trains – desirable when the aim is to protect women from sexual harassment, but less so if it builds on a wider culture of gender segregation. All of which leads us to consider practices in deeply divided societies in which transport, and movement in general, is restricted. Where you’re allowed to wait, where you’re allowed to sit and where you’re allowed to travel can be restricted, designated, labelled and controlled. After all, at the heart of the Rosa Parks’ story is her heroic refusal to be dominated by the system of racial segregation which enforced segregated seating on buses, trains and in station waiting rooms. In this context, writing labelled particular seating areas for black people, who were, as a result, also labelled and excluded from sitting elsewhere.

In common with all the other kinds of writing explored in this second part of the book then, the apparently straightforward activities of organizing, labelling and categorizing cannot really be considered to be neutral or innocent. As ways of ordering our lives they undoubtedly can be useful – writing the word ‘kitchen’ on a box when moving house is a reasonably reliable way of ensuring that it ends up in the right place, whereas I can use the box-file labelled ‘social software’ to store print-outs and reports in a way that makes them easy to find later on. In just a few words I can exploit the mnemonic function of writing. But, since labels and categories impose order, they can also be used to regulate, to control – to include as well as to exclude, in ways that are far from benign. Jenny Erpenbeck’s fictional account of the lives of asylum seekers in contemporary Germany shows this to good effect.¹⁷ Not only are these migrants held in limbo by the state, they are also marginalized by the official designations given to them in different jurisdictions, their own descriptions of their nationality, and the pernicious and de-humanizing ways in which they are labelled by nationalists on discussion boards. In her own way, Erpenbeck shows how this kind of labelling is never innocent and is used to regulate movement, and restrict the rights of those who are not able to show written evidence of their citizenship. Although all this is fictionalized in Go, Went, Gone, the novel captures the ways in which bureaucratic uses of writing are used to define and control migrant populations in contemporary Europe. Even more chilling than this are the many historical instances of labelling and categorizing individuals and groups that have accompanied pogroms, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The part played by ‘rational’ bureaucracy in the holocaust is well-documented.¹⁸ In more recent history, the atrocities committed in Cambodia under Pol Pot were listed in a cold-blooded way. The identity of well over a million Cambodians that were killed by the Khmer Rouge is catalogued by the lists and records that were kept. In a New York Times report, a man called Sous Thy who co-operated with the Khmer Rouge is quoted as saying ‘I was just making lists’.¹⁹