Miller- Response to Watkins and Lilvis questions

This week and Last week's Questions

Watkins: What was the experimental work of Iqbal and Horvitz and what were their findings regarding personal technology and the workforce?

Iqbal and Horvitz were trying to investigate the disruption and recovery of work-related tasks by testing a few hypotheses regarding what employees do when they are interrupted by something such as an email or an instant message. They found that many of the people that they studied went and responded to the emails or instant messages within just a few seconds, disrupting their current task at hand. Also, Iqbal and Horvitz found that participants lost around 20-25 minutes of work time due to the influx of responding to emails and instant messages. In addition, they also found that people would go into other applications or websites after responding to these emails or instant messages, further distracting them from the task at hand as well. In conclusion, they found that distractions in the work environment such as emails and IMs have a major impact on productivity, often taking a solid chunk of productivity in the workplace.

Lilvis: In what ways does Butler’s “A Necessary Being” confound contemporary hierarchies?

Octavia Butler's “A Necessary Being” proves the contemporary racial hierarchies wrong by using her example of a posthuman atmosphere with Tahneh using the Master's tools to dismantle the Master's house, which is completely contrary to what the quote mentioned by Audra Lorde says. Also, with changing traditions came the dismantling of Kohn power structures as well. Lastly, Diut also comes to a similar conclusion that Hao superiority complexes were completely constructed by building a relationship with the Tehkohn, which weaken the superiority complex and voids Kohn ideology altogether.