Digital Labour And Prosumer Capitalism

In the digital age tasks are increasingly modularised and consumers are increasingly becoming prosumers. Replacing digital labour and prosumption within an American context and the wider political economy, this volume presents a critical account of the forces which shape contemporary subjects, networks, and labour practices.

In the digital age tasks are increasingly modularised and consumers are increasingly becoming prosumers. Replacing digital labour and prosumption within an American context and the wider political economy, this volume presents a critical account of the forces which shape contemporary subjects, networks, and labour practices.

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.

'Digital Labor' asks whether life on the Internet is mostly work, or play. We tweet, we tag photos, we link, we review books, we comment on blogs, we remix media and we upload video to create much of the content that makes up the web.

This volume explores current interventions into the digital labour theory of value, proposing theoretical and empirical work that contributes to our understanding of Marx's labour theory of value, proposes how labour and value are transformed under conditions of virtuality, and employ the theory in order to shed light on specific practices.

More than 130 years after Karl Marx’s death and 150 years after the publication of his opus magnum Capital: Critique of Political Economy, capitalism keeps being haunted by period crises. The most recent capitalist crisis has brought back attention to Marx’s works. This volume presents 16 contributions that show how Marx’s analyses of capitalism, the commodity, class, labour, work, exploitation, surplus-value, dialectics, crises, ideology, class struggles, and communism, help us to understand the Internet and social media in 21st century digital capitalism. Marx is back! This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Internet and Digital Media Studies.

For every person who reads this text on the printed page, many more will read it on a computer screen or mobile device. It’s a situation that we increasingly take for granted in our digital era, and while it is indicative of the novelty of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is also the key to understanding its driving force: the relentless impulse to commodify our lives in every aspect. Ursula Huws ties together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of the last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. She examines the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation: in culture and the arts, in the privatization of public services, and in the commodification of human sociality by way of mobile devices and social networking. These trends are in turn accompanied by the dramatic restructuring of work arrangements, opening the way for new contradictions and new forms of labor solidarity and struggle around the planet. Labor in the Global Digital Economy is a forceful critique of our dizzying contemporary moment, one that goes beyond notions of mere connectedness or free-flowing information to illuminate the entrenched mechanisms of exploitation and control at the core of capitalism.

This edited volume brings together researchers from various disciplines (i.e. education, psychology, sociology, economy, information technology, engineering) discussing elementary changes at workplaces occurring through digitalization, and reflecting on educational challenges for individuals, organizations, and society. The latest developments in information and communication technology seem to open new potential, and the crucial question arises which kind of work can be replaced by technology? The contributors to this volume are scholars who have been conducting research on the influence of technological change on work and individuals for a long time. The book addresses researchers as well as practitioners in the field of adult education and human resource development.

Humans at Work in the Digital Age explores the roots of twenty-first-century cultures of digital textual labor, mapping the diverse physical and cognitive acts involved, and recovering the invisible workers and work that support digital technologies. Drawing on 14 case studies organized around four sites of work, this book shows how definitions of labor have been influenced by the digital technologies that employees use to produce, interpret, or process text. Incorporating methodology and theory from a range of disciplines and highlighting labor issues related to topics as diverse as census tabulation, market research, electronic games, digital archives, and 3D modeling, contributors uncover the roles played by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics in determining how narratives of digital labor are constructed and erased. Because each chapter is centered on the human cost of digital technologies, however, it is individual people immersed in cultures of technology who are the focus of the volume, rather than the technologies themselves. Humans at Work in the Digital Age shows how humanistic inquiry can be a valuable tool in the emerging conversation surrounding digital textual labor. As such, this book will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of digital humanities; human-computer interaction; digital culture and social justice; race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital realms; the economics of the internet; and technology in higher education.

“Matching the rigour of the analysis with an extraordinary pedagogical capacity, the authors unveil all the arcana of the ‘openness’ capitalism model and digital labour. Essential for scholars and students across the social and economic sciences.” (Carlo Vercellone, Université de Paris 8, France) “This vital book is an objective and detailed assessment of the private capture of common value, concluding with an in-depth survey of what commons-friendly public authorities could do to defend the new 'common-wealth'.” (Michel Bauwens, Founder of the P2P Foundation, The Netherlands) “An outstanding analysis of how digital capital uses openness as principle of capital accumulation and exploitation. A must-read for everyone who wants to understand what the internet and digital media are all about.” (Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster, UK) This book tackles the concept of openness (as in open source software, open access and free culture), from a critical political economy perspective to consider its encroachment by capitalist corporations, but also how it advances radical alternatives to cognitive capitalism. Drawing on four case studies, Corporate Capitalism’s Use of Openness will add to discussion on open source software, open access content platforms, open access publishing, and open university courses. These otherwise disparate cases share two fundamental features: informational capitalist corporations base their successful business models on unpaid productive activities, play, attention, knowledge and labour, and do so crucially by resorting to ideological uses of concepts such as “openness”, “communities” and “sharing”. The authors present potential solutions and alternative regulations to counter these exploitative and alienating business models, and to foster digital knowledge commons, ranging from co-ops and commons-based peer production to state agencies' platforms. Their research and findings will appeal to students, academics and activists around the world in fields such as sociology, economy, media and communication, library and information science, political sciences and technology studies.