This is the second week in a row that I've linked to Fred, but his recent entry about "enterprise Twitter" - i.e. using Twitter as a kind of back channel for employee communication - reminds me of the idea of idle talk as a critical element in post-Fordist labor. I suppose that's as close to a stereotypical sentence that I could write on this blog, but it does seem particularly interesting.

The idea of enterprise Twitter brings idle talk into the explicit grasp of the controlling levels of capitalist production. Virno, among others, seemed to imagine idle talk taking a back-channel role in post-Fordist production - an additive role, but not a forward one. Here, we see the implicit recognition that loosely related conversation within the productive environment might actually be something the encourage and promote within the organizational structure itself.