Immaterial Digital Labour
Responding to Free Labour: Producing Culture For The Digital Economy, by Tiziana Terranova
Terranova, writing in 2000, brings up a lot of interesting points that seem more relevant than ever in our contemporary digital society. She talks about unpaid digital labour, which at the time was manifested by “Net Slaves” and AOL chat hosts who would volunteer their time on behalf of corporations, and would not get paid.
This feels very similar to the unpaid labour that is expected of young people as interns, or as unpaid workers, for corporations, particularly due to their tech-savviness. For example, “social media” is considered an “add on” duty for an intern, assuming that because young people regularly use social media for their personal purposes, that it must be easy and no effort at all to manage social media for a larger, corporate entity. That assumption is false, of course, because social media management is another form of marketing.
One of the reasons it is devalued, perhaps, is because of ageist assumptions of young people wasting their time on the internet, and because the products of their labour are intangible, this assumption sort of perpetuates with older people who do not understand how the technology works. This is especially relevant and illustrated through workshops and trainings by corporations for older generations to learn about and not hate “Millenials”.
This reminds me of a recent event I heard about called the “Millenial Leadership Summit” which is targeted towards businesses who want to hire Millenials but who also fear/hate young people. In their “who should attend” section of the website, MLS includes “Managers, Directors and Executives, Corporate Leaders, and Anyone who wants to build a more engaged, appreciative and diverse workforce.” Interestingly, no mention of Millenials actually being welcome at this Millenial Leadership Summit.
It is fascinating how little marketers, corporations, and older generations in general understand about young people. It is also fascinating and weird that they are simultaneously repulsed by us and yet want to exploit our youth, tech skills, and whatever financial capital we have.
Terranova’s article reminds us of the ‘paradox’ of the Internet. Basically, that is the idea that we feel as though we are free to say and do whatever we want on our blogs, Facebook pages, Instagram, etc. however, we are not fully autonomous, because we are just participating within the capitalist system. Big corporations are profiting off of our self expression, our blog visits, and our unique clicks. Google AdSense is a very insidious but prime example of this. Google stores our information — for example what we search for or key words we use in emails — and then tailors ads to show up on our browsers accordingly.
We are constantly creating revenue for ad companies without even realizing it, or without consenting to it. This is an example of ‘invisible’ labour, perhaps even feminized labour. We think it is feminized for a few reasons:
- Women’s work has historically been underpaid, and now our digital labour is literally unpaid.
- There is an assumption with work that traditionally has been undertaken by women, that there is something “innate” about it. For example, women are ‘naturally’ caretakers, so there is no reasons to pay a woman to look after a child or an elderly person, because that is what they would be doing anyway. Similarly, if we assume that people spend their time on the Internet, we can capitalize on their ‘natural’ patterns and not pay them for it, because… well… they’d be doing it anyway even without financial incentive! This in turn reinforces the idea that this work is not valuable, which normalizes exploitation of digital labour.
