Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism The US Matrix

by Frayssé, Olivier; O'Neil, Mathieu

• ISBN13: 9781137473899
• ISBN10: 1137473894
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-08-16
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The global dimension of recreational and professional uses of ICTs makes them look universal and almost ahistorical. Aiming to reterritorialize globalized issues, this collection addresses new forms of digital labour as economic facts and as ideological justifications for the social order, both of which emerged in the United States.

Digital Labour and Prosumer Capitalism features contributions by some of the leading theorists of value and labour in the digital age, as well as incisive case studies of swiping, collaborative consumption, and convergent media. It explores the two core dynamics at the heart of digital work: tasks, or services, and how they are broken down into components or modularised, and users who work for no pay and become prosumers. Placing digital labour and prosumption within the wider political economy, this volume presents a deeply contextualized critical account of the forces which shape contemporary subjects, networks, and labour practices.

Author Biography

Olivier Frayssé is Professor of American Studies at Paris-Sorbonne University, France.

Mathieu O'Neil is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Canberra and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Australia.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hacked in the USA: Prosumption and Digital Labour; Olivier Frayssé and Mathieu O'Neil
1. Setting the Standards: the USA and Capitalism in the Digital Age; Ursula Huws
2. How the US Counterculture Redefined Work for the Age of the Internet; Olivier Frayssé
3. The Costs of Paying, or Three Histories of Swiping; Michael Palm
4: Work and Prosumerism: Collaborative Consumption in the United States; Marie-Christine Pauwels
5. The Moral Technical Imaginaries of Internet Convergence in an American Television Network; Adam Fish
6. Migration Machine: Marketing Mexico in the Age of ICTs; Eve Bantman-Masum
7. The Dialectics of Prosumption in the Digital Age; Eran Fisher
8. 'Whistle While You Work.' Work, Emotion, and Contests of Authority at the Happiest Place on Earth; Thibaut Clément
9. The Coming of Augmented Property: A Constructivist Lesson for the Critics of Intellectual Property; Johan Söderberg
10. Wikipedians on Wage Labour within Peer Production; Arwid Lund
Afterword: Towards Cloud Labour; Vincent Mosco