Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory

by Trebor Scholz (editor)

Digital Labor calls on the reader to examine the shifting sites of labor markets to the Internet through the lens of their political, technological, and historical making. Internet users currently create most of the content that makes up the web: they search, link, tweet, and post updates leaving their "deep" data exposed. Meanwhile, governments listen in, and big corporations track, analyze, and predict users interests and habits.

This unique collection of essays provides a wide-ranging account of the dark side of the Internet. It claims that the divide between leisure time and work has vanished so that every aspect of life drives the digital economy. The book reveals the anatomy of "playbor "(play/labor), the lure of exploitation and the potential for empowerment. Ultimately, the 14 thought-provoking chapters in this volume ask how users can politicize their troubled complicity, create public alternatives to the centralized social web, and thrive online.

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Ayhan Aytes, Michel Bauwens, Jonathan Beller, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Sean Cubitt, Jodi Dean, Abigail De Kosnik, Julian Dibbell, Christian Fuchs, Lisa Nakamura, Andrew Ross, Ned Rossiter, Trebor Scholz, Tizania Terranova, McKenzie Wark, and Soenke Zehle

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Technology, Labor

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2011

Reviews

[Wendy Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my dissertation. Skipped the essays that weren't relevant to me. My faves:

* In Search of the Lost Paycheck by Andrew Ross
* Free Labor by Tiziana Terranova
* Considerations on a Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark
* Estranged Free Labor by Mark Andrejevic

The third one is extending the thesis from Wark's excellent 2004 book, A Hacker Manifesto; the others are mostly about unpaid labour in the context of the digital domain. All excellent and each with a slightly different approach, though they're all fairly aligned in terms of their political standpoint.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiziana Terranova: "that social networking platforms should be deprivatized... ownership of users' data should be returned to their rightful owners as the freedom to access and modify the protocols and diagrams that structure their participation."

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea driving this collection of articles is importnat and intriguing: The web economy relies on an extraordinary amount of free or underpaid labor--intellectual work we do because it feels like fun. "Play-bor".

But the book itself is painful to read--almost a parody of academic theorizing and handwringing. If this is the new labor resistance, then capital has nothing to worry about.

[Kim Lacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book to tackle the social divide with breadth and without all the internet optimism (which of course I buy into because I'm posting here, right?). A necessary and important collection of essays.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

review to follow