Digital Labour and Karl Marx

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Routledge, Jan 3, 2014 - Social Science - 424 pages
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.
 

Contents

List of Figures and Tables
An Introduction to Karl Marxs Theory
Contemporary Cultural Studies and Karl Marx
Dallas Smythe and Audience Labour Today
Media
Digital Slavery Slave Work in ICTRelated Mineral Extraction
Exploitation at Foxconn Primitive Accumulation and the Formal
The New Imperialisms Division of Labour Work in the Indian Software
Digital Labour and Struggles for Digital Work The Occupy Movement
Important Tool of the Occupy Movement There
Digital Labour Keywords
Bibliography
LabourPower and the Objects Tools and Products
Copyright

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About the author (2014)

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.

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