Safety First

Variations of this "Safety at Work" PowerPoint have been widely disseminated via e-mail. By the time it reached my inbox this week, it had been translated into an English-French bilingual edition that featured seventeen places of seemingly "award-winning" photographs of supposedly humorously dangerous workplace practices shot around the world that depicted a variety of trades.

Electronic office humor may seem a relatively minor genre in a serious study of digital rhetoric, but it is an important part of the social media practices of many in the labor/management dynamic in play around the world. Those studying the e-mail exchanges around the crash of the space shuttle Columbia even had to include some of this kind of office humor in their official report.