My Virtual Place in the Clouds
- Tabar Smith
- Jun 3
- 5 min read
Places not as points or areas on maps, but as integrations of space and time; as spatio-temporal events. — Doreen Massey, For Space, p. 130
This interactive map represents my current virtual place in the cloud. Zoom in and click the pins to learn more about the people in each place, their literacies (defined as their shared knowledge and values), and the hub that connects us all.
Shape-shifting place
I work remotely for the tech industry from my home in Bozeman, MT. My daily definition of place shifts based on which projects I’m working on, who I’m meeting with, how many meetings I have scheduled, which meetings I can decline, who I message with on Slack, which Slack posts I engage with, and which posts I avoid or ignore. Although my workplace has a physical location — my home address — even that shifts depending on whether I need my large monitors to work across multiple applications, if anyone else is home, if I want to gaze out my dining room window or catch the view from my second-floor office window, if I want to be close to the kitchen, or if I’m visiting headquarters — that spot on a map that connects me to my colleagues and my work.
But I don’t envision my home or Salesforce Tower as my place of work. I’ve visited the headquarters a few times. It’s overwhelming, architecturally phenomenal, airy with amazing views from inside, and massive and oppressive on the outside. I perceive my place of work as an intricate web of connections that constantly reform in the cloud. Datacenters connect us through apps such as Google Meet and Slack, with their bright colors and customizable formats to fit each user’s unique identity, bringing my colleagues’ voices, faces, and environments into my space.
People ask me if I ever feel lonely working remotely. My answer is no. I feel very connected to my colleagues and the work I do with them. But I’m intentional about building those connections using our professional and human literacies.
Literacies in place
This is the event of place in part in the simple sense of coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing… ‘“Thinking conjuncturally” suggests a shuttling back and forth between different temporal frames or scales to capture the distinctive character of processes which appear to inhabit the “same” moment in time.’ — Doreen Massey, For Space, p. 141
Our literacy is our innate, acquired, and evolving knowledge about our profession and about our humanity.
It begins with technology, the applications we use to perform our jobs and to interact with each other, and the technologies we build as a company. We each have a working knowledge of the technologies we engage with, and we grow this knowledge by using the technology, watching others use technologies, and sharing new ways to engage with technologies. We also develop new technologies and improve existing ones by understanding what our customers need through informal conversations, customer interviews, user testing, and customer-initiated requests. We become technologically literate by using, watching, listening, and adapting.
From technology, our literacy expands out to our missions, values, goals, policies, processes, and standards. Company executives revise our mission, values, and goals each year, each quarter, each month. And as smaller and smaller teams nested within each other and the company all the way down to the individual, we develop and continuously revise our own missions, values, and goals in response to our company mandates. We build our company culture literacy by reading, discussing, responding, creating, and revising when we access new information.
Going further, our literacy reaches outward to our different roles and areas of expertise. We are an organization of vertical roles from executives to directors, managers, and individual contributors. We are an organization of horizontal roles: product managers, software engineers, UX designers, researchers, content designers, content strategists, writers, product marketing managers, and many others. There are also vertical stratifications within each role, building from junior to principal to architect. We develop our role-based literacy by reviewing org charts, role-based competencies, experience, and mentorships.
Moving ever outward, our professional literacies begin to intersect with our human literacies. We have dedicated Slack channels where we can air our grievances about the company’s latest mandated training, shifting directions, or partnerships with other companies or governments that we perceive as unethical. We also have dedicated Slack channels where we can celebrate work anniversaries, congratulate retirements, send well-wishes to those departing, and share something funny or uplifting that happened during our day. Within each of these channels, we can respond, carry on long conversations, and learn about each other’s humanity — our values, concerns, humor, and relationships.
Then we cross completely into our human literacy. Within our human literacy, we share more intimate information about our families, homes, hobbies, values, concerns, fears, and dreams. We are selective in who we share this information with and to what degree. As we interact more and get to know one another better, we tend to share more, unless we don’t trust the other. Then we rely solely on the exchange of our professional literacies. This literacy is cultivated during virtual meetings, usually hosted on Google Meet, where we may start our meeting by asking questions outside of our professional lives. How’s the weather? Where are you going on vacation? Tell me what you do for fun? How many children do you have? What’s it like living there? And within these questions, we glean other bits of information in our colleagues' answers.
“It’s been so unseasonably warm and dry here. Good ole climate change.”
“I’m going to Mexico City with my husband to visit his family, who all still live there.”
“I love to run, but I get slower and slower as each year passes by.”
“I have two sons, 4 and 8, who are my world. It took years of IVF, heartbreaking miscarriages, and almost giving up before I was blessed with these beautiful boys.”
“I love living here. It’s so beautiful. The mountains are close, and the summers are so sunny and mild. But the winters can be miserable. Always gray, the sun doesn’t rise until after 8 am and sets before 5 pm.”
This knowledge, which we all cultivate and share to varying degrees, is our literacy in place. And through this literacy, we grow our own perspectives and help/push others to expand their own. We come with our individual perspectives and find ways to reach a shared perspective for the sake of a project’s success — and for the benefit of each other’s humanity. Even when we don’t fully agree with the project itself. Even when a new technology raises ethical concerns. And when this occurs, we whisper our concerns to each other. Some of us even scream them from the tops of our virtual clouds. But there’s always a fear of having our voices repressed or being severed altogether. For some of us, there is a felt sense of oppression within the cloud, a symbolic violence of company mandates that have us working towards our own erasure by a new technology. We either comply or find ways to transgress, cultivating new literacies to either survive or thrive.
My very real place
I’ve only met two of my colleagues listed on my map in person. I’ve never met my closest friend of those listed. But we found a way to build relationships through a shared humanity, a shared literacy that empowers us to successfully navigate our shape-shifting, virtual place. Our very real human connection shapes our very real sense of place in the moment.
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