Years ago I think even in the 80s or so, Smythe talked about audience labor in terms of television - this theory was developed in a number of places - television has been often seen as an active zone of audience production - was it John Fiske who wrote on this? - there were some artists also dealing with the issue. So it has a long history - sorry for my blurriness at the moment - alan
On Sat, 10 Jul 2010, marc garrett wrote: > The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies. > > By Rob Horning > > With the advent of Web 2.0, the Internet has begun to take on the > characteristics of what the Italian autonomists like Paolo Virno called > the social factory. The idea is that since many of us no longer have all > that much to offer society, in terms of operating machinery or that sort > of thing, the new way of extracting surplus value from our ?labor? is to > turn our social lives into a kind of covert work that we complete > throughout the day, but in forms that can be co-opted by capitalist firms. > > Work processes, as Virno explains in A Grammar of the Multitude > [Semiotext(e); 2004], become diverse, but social life begins to > homogenize itself in the sense that our identity becomes something we > all must prove in the public sphere?we all become concerned with the > self as brand. This results in the ?valorization??Marxist jargon for > value enhancement??of all that which renders the life of an individual > unique??which is to say our concern for our uniqueness, our identity in > social contexts, becomes a kind of value-generating capital, or rather a > circulating commodity. > > This plays out in seemingly innocuous ways. It can be a matter of hyping > a product free of charge but using it or talking about it. Or it can be > a matter of going to parties with co-workers, learning to get along > better and therefore increasing the efficiency of processes on the job. > Or it is a matter of behaving politely among strangers, extending a > system of politeness and trust that can be harvested economically as a > reduction in transaction costs. To put it in sociologist Pierre > Bourdieu?s terms, our habitus?our manifest and class-bound way of being > in the social world?has been transformed into an explicit productive > force without our conscious consent by the way various social media have > infiltrated everyday life. > > more... > http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tools/print/120581 > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > > == email archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ webpage http://www.alansondheim.org music archive: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ == _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
