Digital labor

Digital labor or digital labour is a term for a schema of ideas focusing on exploring and understanding the high levels of cognitive and cultural labor associated with the replacement of jobs in the increasingly automated industrial sector, into globalized production systems embedded in high-technology, and into a knowledge economy. Digital labor also describes a series of affective and social activities within capitalist modes of production not typically viewed as work, including the increasing participation on social media websites, and the effect of social media on social patterns and communication and the collapse of work and play.

The notion of digital labor has evolved from the traditions of workerist/Operaismo, Autonomism, and Post-Fordist theory that grew during the workers' struggles in Italy, which included a substantial feminist movement in the Wages for housework campaign.

Digital labor as a field also includes consideration of the affect and the axiomatization of the body, collective intelligences, and the hive mind, semiotics and postmodernism, artificial intelligence, science fiction, gaming culture, hyper-reality, disappearance of the commodity, Contested definitions of the "knowledge worker" in capitalistic society.

Studies of the digital labor of social media were some of the first critques of digital labor.[1] This included scholarship like, "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" (Trebor Scholz), and "From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City" (2010). (Andrew Ross), Tiziana Terranova and others developed a working definition of digital labor, drawing from the idea of free labor, and immaterial labor. Other scholars who have written about Digital Labor include: Ursula Huws, Trebor Scholz, Frank Pasquale, Sergio Bellucci, Christian Fuchs, Andrew Ross, Jaron Lanier, as well as Postcolonial feminists, including, Lisa Nakamura.[2] Their work has been tied to other Alter-globalization texts.

Precedents

Digital labor borrows from understandings that the cognitive-cultural economy, and the rise of capitalism in the 20th century, has eliminated the previous separation that existed between work and play/entertainment, and work.

Digital labor is rooted in Italian autonomist, workerist/Operaismo worker's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the wages for housework movement founded by Selma James in 1972. The idea of the "digital economy" is defined as the moment, where work has shifted from the factory to the social realm. Italian autonomists would describe this as the, "social factory."

Digital economy

The digital economy has been written about by both those critical of the contemporary geopolitical net sphere and those interested in how to exploit the new features digital economies.[3]

Digital labor is also interested in emergent digital subcultures including: community forms, blogs, digital organizing tools, and the way these platforms can be potential generators of cultural goods subsumed and incorporated into globalized networks of cultural goods.

Digital labor markets are websites or economies which facilitate the production, trade, and selling of digital content, code, digital products, or other ideas or goods emerging from digital and technological environments. A widely used example of a digital labor market is Amazon Mechanical Turk.[4]

Digital labor has been concerned with the topic of disintermediation, where digital labor has taken away the job of the mediator in direct, social, communication.

The concept of the digital economy has been applied to the onset of the peer production platform economies, like free and open-source software projects like Linux/GNU, free and open-source projects like Wikipedia. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier, in the books You are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, argues that the open source approach contributed to the social stratification and widening of the gaps between rich and the poor, the rich being the major stakeholders in digital companies, who own the content of the content creators. A digital labor critique of the open source software movement is that peer production economies rely on an increasingly alienated labor force, forced into unpaid, knowledge labor.[5] In this way, the so-called "gift economy" is an essential part of the reproduction of the labor force within late capitalism.

See also

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Zittrain, Jonathan (December 7, 2009). "The Internet Creates a New Kind of Sweatshop". Newsweek.
  2. ↑ Fuchs, Sevignani, Christian, Sebastian (2013). "What is Digital Labour? What is Digital Work? What’s their Difference? And why do these Questions Matter for Understanding Social Media?". Triple C.
  3. ↑ Tapscott, D., Lowy, A., Ticoll, D., & Klym, N.' (1998). Blueprint to the digital economy : creating wealth in the era of e-business. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  4. ↑ Moshe, Marvit Z. (February 4, 2014). "How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine". The Nation.
  5. ↑ Terranova, Tiziana (June 20, 2003). "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy". Electronic Book Review.

External links

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