Friday, December 19, 2014

People as Numbers

Lastly, Simon Sinek discusses that in an environment without connections workers have become numbers rather than real individual people.  Due to the increasing size of corporations it is no longer possible to know everyone who works in a corporation. Therefore, managers and executives must rely on documents and reports to judge the performance of the company. This is dangerous to both the health of workers and the health of the corporation (Sinek, 2014, p. 101). To explain this disconnect Sinek cites the example of the Milgram experiment. In this experiment the test subject who took on the roll of teacher was asked to deliver several different levels of shock to the student in the experiment every time a question was answered incorrectly. It was found that the teacher (the test subject) were much more willing to give the highest levels of shock even when the student complained of pain if they were in a different room and could not see who they were supposedly harming.  The test subjects expressed that they knew what they were doing was wrong but they were just following orders. Similarly, in a workplace when the individual harm cannot be seen people are willing to not do the right thing. Corporations may opt to follow the bare minimum requirements as required by the law rather than operate on a moral code.  Also, the Milgram experiment demonstrates that people tend to blindly follow authority so unethical leadership in the current workplace framework would most likely not be questioned. Overall, these numerical abstractions cause corporation executives to divorce themselves from humanity.


Tarleton Gillespie in his piece, “The Relevance of Algorithms” explains a similar phenomenon in which humans become data rather than individuals. Algorithms are meant to very quickly and efficiently group people and determine their habits. Gillespie explains that the online persona assigned with an algorithm is known as a shadow body. This means that some aspects of an individual are emphasized while other things are overlooked. This is problematic because people are being over simplified and there is the assumption that all people must fit into a set category (Gillespie 2014, p. 174).  Gillespie would agree with Sinek’s argument that assessing data on people rather than actually connecting with them is harmful. 



Works Cited:

 Sinek, S. LEADERS EAT LAST: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't (2014).

Tarleton Gillespie, “The relevance of algorithms,” in T. Gillespie et al. eds., Media Technologies (2014).

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