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The notion of digital labor has evolved from the traditions of Workerism, Operaismo and Autonomism that grew during the workers' struggles in Italy, which included a substantial feminist movement in the Wages for housework campaign. Operaismo refers to an Italian movement during the 1960s and 1970s in which working class members fought for better working conditions and more pay.http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/7-1wright.pdf
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. 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.
The rise of digital labor can be attributed to the shift of human history from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, as production-based industries declined with the rise of a new digital and information-based economy. Multiple authors, including Christian Fuchs (sociologist) Sebastian Sevignani, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greg de Peuter have linked digital labor to the theory of Marxism.[1]https://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/profiles/nick_dyer-witheford.html https://www.wlu.ca/academics/faculties/faculty-of-arts/faculty-profiles/greig-de-peuter/index.html Although this theory applies to the production economy of the time, it can be used to describe labor within the digital economy as digital labor replaces factory labor.
On-demand platforms On-demand work has been rising since the years 2008-2010. It follows the development of Internet access and the spread of mobile devices, which allow almost everyone to be in touch with this kind of platform, including children and teenagers. Such platforms cover a large field of domains : rental (Airbnb, Booking.com), travel (trivago, tripadvisor), food delivery (Uber Eats, Grub Hub, Postmates), transportation (Uber, Taxify, Lyft), home services (Task Rabbit, Helpling), education (Udemy, Coursera), etc. Workers on such platforms are often not considered as employees, and aren't well paid. For example, an Uber driver earns between $8.80 and $11 per hour after expenses. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/7-1wright.pdf https://www.nber.org/
Social Media
The notion of digital labor on social media arise from the fact that most of the value of any social media platforms is created by the users. Therefore they can be considered as digital workers on the platform. On most platforms however this work remains unpaid. Some exceptions include video and music sharing platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. This is linked with the notion of participatory culture, "a term often used for designating the involvement of users, audiences, consumers and fans in the creation of culture and content"[3].
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." Studies of the digital labor of social media were some of the first critiques of digital labor.[4] 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. In the book Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games authors Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter analyze video games and virtual environments through the lens of a Marxist critique. This book was published in 2009 by the University of Minnesota Press. Nick Dyer-Witheford is an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario and Greig de Peuter is an associate professor for Communication Studies at Wilfird Laurier University. Immaterial labor is explained in this chapter as “the activity that advanced capital depends on its most dynamic and strategic sectors.” (pg. 4, 2009). It is linked directly to video games because games are essentially built on immaterial labor the authors explain. The video game industry was started because there was an overlap between the military industrial complex and the counter culture movement. Both hacker communities and major corporate capitalists intertwined in the development of this industry. In addition, the video game industry was one of the first cultural mediums where the United States was not the country of origin. The authors argue that this concept of immaterial labor negatively impacts capitalism by that users to given the autonomy to expose capitalistic principles such as reliance on labor. Immaterial labor allows workers to become individual entities and not beholden to a typical capitalistic structure of labor. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/games-of-empire [12] In this way, the so-called "gift economy" is an essential part of the reproduction of the labor force within late capitalism.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.[1] Their work has been tied to other Alter-globalization texts.
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 has been concerned with the topic of disintermediation, where digital labor has taken away the job of the mediator in direct, social, communication.
In the book "Games of Empire" the idea of gender wage gaps in machine domestic labor is examined. According to the book, while decline of manufacturing jobs sent young men toward computer-related industries, capital's rely to women's domestic rebellion was to turn the activities they had performed for free into jobs in the service sector. Both service work and high-technology jobs can be defined as forms of immaterial labor; technology jobs.https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/games-of-empire
Bibliography http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/7-1wright.pdf https://www.nber.org/ https://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/profiles/nick_dyer-witheford.html https://www.wlu.ca/academics/faculties/faculty-of-arts/faculty-profiles/greig-de-peuter/index.html https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/games-of-empire