Logiques d'innovation, multiactivité et zapping au travail

The paper calls on two different models to describe the increasing fragmentation of activities in the workplace. One is based on successive switches from one focused commitment to another ("occupational zapping"), while the other is based on the relevance at any one moment of multiple tasks demanding a greater or lesser degree of concentration ("'multi-tasking"). We show how the present-day logic of innovation and design in communication technologies tends, on the one hand, to permanently establish demands on people's attention within the working environment in ways that requires only minimal attentiveness and commitment, and on the other hand, to favour sequential tasking. A case study on the uses of instant messaging in the workplace provides empirical evidence on how the persistent mediated cues signalling the incursion of others into a working environment, together with the sequential order they demand, combine to make the preoccupation sbared between a subject and his or her technical environment actually visible: homo communicans thus turns out to be a "multi-tasking" subject and the hub of multiple commitments.