Activity

The labor infractions in these old media sectors are conspicuous
because they take place against the still heavily unionized
backdrop of the entertainment industries. In the world of new
media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the blurring
of the lines between work and leisure and the …

Many readers will no doubt conclude that this dual utilization is all part of some big-picture trade-off. After all, the social web has opened up a whole new universe of information-rich public goods—including the potential for anticapitalist organizing; really, really free markets; peer-to-peer co…

Participants in the free labor debate often come close to
assuming that digital technology is its causal agent—responsible
in and of itself for punching a colossal hole through the universe
of employment norms. Yet blaming new media is a sorry instance
of the fallacy of technological determinis…

[...] ethnographic studies of knowledge and
creative industry workplaces have shown that job gratification
comes at a heavy cost—longer hours in pursuit of the satisfying
finish, price discounts in return for aesthetic recognition, self-exploitation in response to the gift of autonomy, and dispe…

The new kind of distributed labor does not need to be performed
by payroll employees in far-flung branch locations [...] it is done either by users who do not perceive their interactive
input as work at all, or else it is contracted out online—through a
growing number of e-lance service sites—to…