Kylie Jarrett

The Relevance of “Women’s Work” Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media

In the ongoing debates about the role of immaterial labor in digital media economics, the work of feminist researchers into affective labor performed in the home—“women’s work”—has barely featured. This article is an attempt to address this gap in the dominant framework for discussing consumer labor in digital contexts. It draws on feminist frameworks, particularly the work of Fortunati, in arguing that affective, immaterial labor has a variable and often indirect relationship to capitalist exchange. This indirect relationship allows the products of such work to retain their use-values while nevertheless remaining implicated in systems of exchange. This in turn draws attention to the immaterial product of reproductive labor, which is the social order itself, and the importance of the disciplining function of reproductive labor.

Labour of Love An Archaeology of Affect as Power in E-Commerce

In the discourses of the electronic commerce (e-commerce) industry, consumers are alleged to be empowered by the affective relations they establish in online communities. This article investigates this claim using a Foucauldian archaeological framework. It seeks to identify the key social and historical conditions that have enabled this representation to appear and to become a viable characterization. The question it examines is not whether consumers are actually empowered by e-commerce, but why it is deemed important to interrogate online consumers’ affective activity in terms of power.

Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife

There is a contradiction at the heart of digital media. We use commercial platforms to express our identity, to build community and to engage politically. At the same time, our status updates, tweets, videos, photographs and music files are free content for these sites. We are also generating an almost endless supply of user data that can be mined, re-purposed and sold to advertisers. As users of the commercial web, we are socially and creatively engaged, but also labourers, exploited by the companies that provide our communication platforms. How do we reconcile these contradictions? Feminism, Labour and Digital Media argues for using the work of Marxist feminist theorists about the role of domestic work in capitalism to explore these competing dynamics of consumer labour. It uses the concept of the Digital Housewife to outline the relationship between the work we do online and the unpaid sphere of social reproduction. It demonstrates how feminist perspectives expand our critique of consumer labour in digital media. In doing so, the Digital Housewife returns feminist inquiry from the margins and places it at the heart of critical digital media analysis.

YouTube: Online video and participatory culture

claiming ‘I’m not willing to use that sort of commercial method’ (129), while Feng maintains he’d ‘rather ‘make fun movies for one billion people than serious ones for a small group of cultural critics’ (166). It is perhaps surprising to note that of the two directors, it is Feng not Jia that is most closely aligned with the state system. Well presented, with extensive endnotes, many of which could have been more effectively utilized in the main text, the book also includes a useful list of Chinese characters to support the Romanized Pinyin names and terms. Not only does McGrath exhibit a strong understanding of his topic but he also writes well, for instance describing the ‘Rupture’ phenomenon as a ‘dramatic break’ from China’s ‘hoary literary institution’ (78). In his concluding remarks, McGrath reminds us of the inherent normative approach of Western scholars taking it ‘upon themselves to diagnose China’s current conditions and prescribe the proper way forward’ (225). Together with Zhang Zhen’s collection, this book provides a much needed look at Chinese cinema beyond the Crouching Tiger phenomenon by examining alternative cultural texts as the products of artists struggling with their nation’s new, and decidedly complex, postsocialist identity.

Devaluing Binaries: Marxist Feminism and the Value of Consumer Labour

Consumer activity has increasingly been theorized as work that contributes inputs necessary to the economic calculations of digital media companies. Users provide unpaid labour that generates content in the form of video uploads, meme sharing, status updates, game play and the affective investment rendering commercial digital media pleasurable and meaningful. Consumer interactions also actively and passively generate data that are captured by the economic systems of such sites, with clickstream records and taste information being sold to advertisers and marketing companies. There is a growing body of literature establishing the value-creating and exploited nature of this kind of work, sparked initially by the insights of Tiziana Terranova (2000) and Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999), but expanded and detailed by Christian Fuchs (2008; 2009; 2014a; 2014b; see also Scholz 2009; (ed.) 2013; Petersen 2008; Andrejevic 2011; 2013). These analyses typically cast the products of such work as alienated from the user, resulting in a reduced capacity for individuals to self-actualize through their productive consumption activity. These arguments are not without their critics, based either in close interrogation of Marxist definitions of productive labour — see contributors to this volume, for instance — or in empirical studies of consumer practices that do not establish their alienating effects. The analysis of consumer labour is consequently shot through with a series of binaries: productive/unproductive, alienation/agency, economy/culture.

Laundering women's history: A feminist critique of the social factory

Studies of digital labour are closely connected to the concept of immaterial labour and how this has been critically interpreted by Autonomist Marxists who draw upon the concept of the social factory in explaining its wider impacts. The extension of labour and capitalist logics outside factory walls that constitutes the social factory is typically described as a novel feature of contemporary capitalism and particularly the digital economy. This paper critiques this assumption by utilising feminist theories of domestic work and examples of women’s labour history. Using the particular case of Magdalene Laundries in the Irish Free State (1922–1937), it demonstrates that the social factory has a longer history than is usually presumed. It then describes the implications for analysis of digital labour that arise from rejecting the novelty of immaterial labour’s incorporation into capitalism.

Economies of the Internet

The papers in this issue of First Monday were originally presented as a series of panels at the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. This short introduction explains the impetus behind the organization of these panels — which was to document diversity in approaches to the study of Internet economies — and briefly introduces each paper by locating them in the nexus between political economy and cultural studies.

Queering alienation in digital media

Marx’s concept of alienation, particularly as articulated in Dallas Smythe’s audience-commodity thesis, is central to critical studies of the political economy of digital media and its exploitation of user labour. However, in its application within critical studies of Internet economies, the concept often becomes limited to alienation from ‘species-being’ or autonomous self-actualisation. Drawing on mostly queer, but also some feminist, critiques this paper seeks to challenge this application of the alienation concept. It uses examples of the mediation of gay and queer sexualities through online hook-up apps to illustrate its position, concluding with some suggestions for how queering the subject of the alienation thesis may shape further analysis.