Knowledge, Work and Subject in Informational Capitalism

Abstract

With the development of informational capitalism and the network society, globalization and informatization play an increasingly crucial role for understanding technology and society. Informatization describes a qualitative leap in technology development which opens up new dimensions of productivity by information modelling on the one hand, but which demands new forms of knowledge of information workers on the other hand. Work is becoming more flexible, but also more precarious and more polarized socially. These tendencies create a contradictory situation for the subject: formalization and new scopes of autonomy exist side by side. This constellation allows for new approaches to the social shaping of technologies. But they presuppose a fundamental change in attitude by both, system developers and social scientists.

New approaches to housing complexity: designing dwellings in the age of cognitive economy

“…Although the elaboration of knowledge and the collection and control of data accompanied industrial capitalism from its beginnings, two main factors boosted them significantly. On one hand, the spreading of IC technologies and computers, which are universal machines that rapidly became constitutive parts of the production process, and their ubiquitous networks that can operate globally and in real time (Schmiede 2006 ; Rasmussen and Corbett 2008 ). On the other end, the diffuse intellectually, the mass education, and the high level of training produced by the welfare state in late post-war time (Vercellone and Lucarelli 2013 ).…”

Digital assemblages: evidence and theorising from the computerisation of the US residential real estate industry

“…Evidence from this work illustrates this concept of reconfigured access leading to re-framed problems, and reshaped working arrangements. Such expanded access to sources of potentially useful data is at the core of computerisation-what Schmiede (2006) called 'informatization'. Over 25 years ago, Zuboff (1988) made this point relative to the automation of factory work, focusing on the increasing access to information for both workers and managers.…”

Karl Marx @ Internet Studies

“…For Marx, capitalism is a system of capital accumulation, in which the worker ‘has permission to work for his own subsistence, that is, to live only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter’s co-consumers of surplus value)’ so that ‘the whole capitalist system of production turns on increasing this gratis labour’ which ultimately amounts to ‘a system of slavery’ (Marx, 1875: 310). The notion of capitalism/the capitalist mode of production is reflected in IS within concepts of communicative capitalism (Dean, 2004, 2005, 2009; Passavant, 2004), global informational capitalism (Fuchs, 2008, 2009a; Schmiede, 2006), the antagonism of the networked digital productive forces and the relations of production (Fuchs, 2008, 2009b; Žižek, 2004: 293), digital capitalism (Schiller, 2000), hypercapitalism (Graham, 2006), or new media/digital visual capitalism (Nakamura, 2008). Beer argues that studying web 2.0 and social networking sites requires ‘a more political agenda that is more open to the workings of capitalism’ (Beer, 2008: 526)…”