Digital Labour and Karl Marx

How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and "social media" such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICT industry. Relying on a range of global case studies--from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo--Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.

List of contents

1. Introduction   2. An Introduction to Karl Marx's Theory  3. Contemporary Cultural Studies and Karl Marx  4. Dallas Smythe and Audience Labour Today  5. Capitalism or Information Society  6. Digital Slavery: Slave Work in ICT-Related Mineral Extraction  7. Exploitation at Foxconn: Primitive Accumulation and the Formal Subsumption of Labour  8. The Division of Labour of the New Imperialism: Work in the Indian Software Industry  9. The Silicon Valley of Dreams and Nightmares of Exploitation: The Google Labour Aristocracy and its Context  10. Tayloristic, Housewifised Service Labour: The Example of Call Centre Work  11. Theorising Digital Labour on Social Media  12. Digital Labour and Struggles for Digital Work--The Occupy Movement as a New Working Class Movement? Social Media as Working Class Social Media? Glossary

About the author

Christian Fuchs is professor of social media at the University of Westminster in London. He is the author of more than 180 academic publications in the fields of Internet studies, social media studies, critical social theory and information society studies. Among his publications are the books, Internet and Society, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies, and the collected volumes, Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media and Critique, Social Media, and the Information Society.

Product details

• Authors: Christian Fuchs, Christian (Paderborn University Fuchs, Fuchs Christian
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 11.11.2013
• EAN: 9780415716154
• ISBN: 978-0-415-71615-4
• No. of pages: 408
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > General, dictionaries; History, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Theory, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, Political science & theory, Humanities, Political campaigning & advertising, Literary theory, Social classes, Political science and theory, Political campaigning and advertising, Information technology: general issues, Information technology: general topics, Library & Information Sciences, Media, Information & Communication Industries, Library and information sciences / Museology