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Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age

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Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age Edited by Eran Fisher Open University of Israel Christian Fuchs University of Westminster, UK vi Contents Contents 8 Advertising on Social Media: The Reality behind the Ideology of “Free Access”: The Case of Chinese Social Media Platforms 133 Yuqi Na List of Figures and Tables vii Part IV Rent and the Commons Series Preface viii 9 Mapping Approaches to User Participation and Digital Labour: A Critical Perspective 153 Notes on Contributors x Thomas Allmer, Sebastian Sevignani, and Jernej Amon Prodnik 10 Is the Concept of Rent Relevant to a Discussion of Surplus Part I Foundations Value in the Digital World? 172 Olivier Frayssé 1 Introduction: Value and Labour in the Digital Age 3 Christian Fuchs and Eran Fisher 11 The Demise of the Marxian Law of Value? A Critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 188 2 The Digital Labour Theory of Value and Karl Marx in the Jakob Rigi Age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Weibo 26 Christian Fuchs Part V Productivity in Reproduction 3 The Hands and Brains of Digital Culture: Arguments for 12 Devaluing Binaries: Marxist Feminism and the Value of an Inclusive Approach to Cultural Labour 42 Consumer Labour 207 Marisol Sandoval Kylie Jarrett 13 The Concept of Subsumption of Labour to Capital: Part II Labour and Class Towards Life Subsumption in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism 224 4 A Contribution to a Critique of the Concept Playbour 63 Andrea Fumagalli Arwid Lund 14 Form-Giving Fire: Creative Industries as Marx’s “Work of 5 Marx in Chinese Online Space: Some Thoughts on the Combustion” and the Distinction between Productive and Labour Problem in Chinese Internet Industries 80 Unproductive Labour 246 Bingqing Xia Frederick H. Pitts Part III The Labour of Internet Users Index 261 6 The Exploitation of Audience Labour: A Missing Perspective on Communication and Capital in the Digital Era 99 Brice Nixon 7 Audience Labour on Social Media: Learning from Sponsored Stories 115 Eran Fisher v Notes on Contributors xi political economy of media, communications, culture, and the inter- Contributors net. He is author of Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital, Volume 1 (2016), Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media (2015), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (2014), Social Media: A Critical Introduction (2014), OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism (2014), Foun- Thomas Allmer studied media and communication and political dations of Critical Media and Information Studies (2011), and Internet and science at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and the Victoria Uni- Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (2008). versity, Melbourne, Australia. He is Lecturer in Social Justice at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, and a member of the Uni- Andrea Fumagalli is Associate Professor of Economics in the Depart- fied Theory of Information Research Group, Austria. His publications ment of Economics and Management at University of Pavia and a include Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capital- militant researcher. He got the Habilitation for full professor in 2013 in ism (2012) and Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Economic Policy. He teaches history of economic thought, theory of Commodification (forthcoming). firms, and economics of knowledge. He also teaches at the Department of Informatic Science, the University of Bologna, and is a member of Eran Fisher is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political the Effimera Network, a founder member of Bin-Italy (Basic Income Net- Science, and Communication, the Open University of Israel. He studies work, Italy), and a member of the Executive Committee of BIEN (Basic social issues of digital media technology. His work has been published in Income Earth Network). He is active in the San Precario network. European Journal of Social Theory, Journal of Labour and Society, Media, Cul- His research interests are the transformation of accumulation and ture, and Society, and Information, Communication, and Society. His books valorization processes in contemporary capitalism (cognitive bio- include Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age: The Spirit of Net- capitalism), labour flexibility and precarization, the theory of money works (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Internet and Emotions (co-edited and basic income hypothesis. with Tova Benski, 2014). Kylie Jarrett is Lecturer in Multimedia in the Department of Media Stud- Olivier Frayssé is Professor of American Studies at the University of ies at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her research focuses Paris-Sorbonne. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and Institut on the political economy of the commercial web, including studies of d’Études Politiques de Paris, he is Head of the English Department at eBay, Facebook, Google, and podcasting. She is soon to publish a book Paris-Sorbonne and of the Work, Culture and Society in Anglophone entitled Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife, apply- Countries research centre of that university. This centre analyses the ing Marxist feminist perspectives on domestic work to digital media specificities of anglophone societies in relation to the issue of work and value creation. labour and focuses on work-related issues by taking account of the social and cultural contexts of these societies. His latest publications include Arwid Lund will defend his dissertation Realm of Freedom on Swedish “Work and Labour as Metonymy and Metaphor” (TripleC, vol. 12, no. 3, Wikipedians in Library and Information Science in October 2015. He 2014) and “How the US Counterculture Redefined Work for the Age of is affiliated to the Archival, Library & Information, Museum & Cultural the Internet”, in Olivier Frayssé and Mathieu O’Neil (eds.), Digital Labour Heritage Studies Department at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He and Prosumer Capitalism: The US Matrix (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). is the author of three books in Swedish, and has worked as a librarian with digital publishing and digital repositories. Christian Fuchs is a professor at and the Director of the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), Yuqi Na is a PhD student from the Communication and Media Research UK. He is editor of the journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster. Her main research areas Critique. His field of research is the critical theory and critique of the x xii Notes on Contributors Notes on Contributors xiii are political economy of communication, ideology, social media, and theory of peer production, on the one hand, and his theory of knowl- the internet. edge/information rent, on the other. His articles have appeared in the journals Peer Production, Capital and Class, tripleC,andThe Information Brice Nixon is a visiting assistant professor in the Communications Society. His previous research, resulting in a wide range of publica- Department at the University of La Verne, USA. His research is in the tion, explored post-Soviet politico-economic change in Kazakhstan and areas of the political economy of communication, digital media stud- Russia. ies, media history, journalism studies, communication law and policy, and critical theory. His primary interest is in analysing how communi- Marisol Sandoval is a lecturer at the Department of Culture and Cre- cation industries from the print era to today have sought to determine ative Industries, City University, London. Her research critically deals the conditions of cultural consumption in order to turn communicative with questions of power, responsibility, commodification, exploitation, practices into the business of media and culture. Recent work in this ideology, and resistance in the global culture industry. She is co-editor area includes an article on the “old media” business of Google, in Media, of the open-access journal tripleC – Communication, Capitalism and Cri- Culture & Society. tique. Her book From Corporate to Social Media (2014) looks beyond common understandings of the term social media by providing a criti- Frederick H. Pitts is a PhD researcher with the Department of Social and cal analysis of corporate social (ir)responsibility in the global media and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath, UK. His research explores work communication industries. and work-time in the cultural and creative industries, with a specific focus on the struggle to measure, quantify, and value creative labour. His Sebastian Sevignani studied media and communication, philosophy, approach is informed by a critical engagement with Marxian thought and theology at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is a member and critical theory, including the German Neue Marx-Lektüre and Italian of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria, and an post-operaismo. assistant professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena’s Department of Sociology, Germany. His publications include the book Privacy and Jernej Amon Prodnik is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute Capitalism in the Age of Social Media (2016). Currently, he works on a of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, social theory project about a contemporary critical theory of needs. Charles University in Prague (the PolCoRe research group), and a researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre, Faculty of Bingqing Xia is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Humanities Social
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