Thanks to the new computer-mediated milieu, the scientists’ social and professional conversations now appeared as an electronic text: visible, knowable, shareable. It enriched their work in many ways, but it also created unexpected vulnerabilities as dispositions, values, attitudes, and social interactions were recast as objects of scrutiny. In a series of conflicts that unfolded over the years, I watched as the managers and executives at Drug Corp were simply unable to quell their inclination to use the new social text as a means to evaluate, critique, and punish. On more than one occasion I learned of managers who had printed out pages of DIALOG conversations in order to spread them out on the floor and analyze opinions on a particular subject, sometimes actually taking scissors to the pages and organizing the entries by theme or person.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 843