Production Cultures and Differentiations of Digital Labour

Abstract

Abstract:The article makes two theoretical interventions to engage with current scholarship on digital labour. First, the author complicates the relationship between culture and production by bringing the former from the "superstructure" in the classical Marx's framework to the "base." As various cultural production, consumption, and economic activities converging onto digital, networked media ecosystem, digital labour is indeed the indispensable source for capitals' accumulation of surplus and, more importantly, for cultural differentiations of production process. How labourers perceive their relations and interactions to the digital production process is as crucial as which capacity they rely on to perform their labour. Culturalization of production process (re)draws the boundaries for the meanings of labouring and thus is complicit in constructing ideal digital labourers with exemplary, normative social behaviours. Second, precisely because the production process has become normative construction site, meanings and values of labouring are subject to broader social and cultural context beyond the digital realm. Therefore, to further understand the conditions of digital labour, historical global inequality needs to be articulated. Equally important is to investigate emerging cultural discourses which render certain social behaviours in the digital realm as normal and desirable while others as invisible.

Being and Television: Producing the Demand to Individualise

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Digital Economies at Global Margins

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