User:Bohye Woo/1st Thesis outline
Topic
Free labour in the age of technology
Introduction
Background
I am a Millennial born and raised with digital technology. I remember since 1998, my parents bought a big bulky computer with a Window 98 installed. At school, I started having a basic but harecore computer course where I learned how to type keyboard and search on the web. As time goes by, the Internet has become a simple platform to join, search, play and it became a place of comfort. Eventually, scrolling down the Internet, uploading photos on online community, sharing files for fun, cilcking 'accept' button on cookie settings, facing with Internet advertisements come as naturally to me as breathing. As a consequence, I tend to be oblivious on what do we encounter when we interact in digital space, and how our interaction through the Internet impacts on who and why. These digital interaction with the help of human(our) labour creates new products that generate different range of values. Experiencing digital culture as a Millennial generation, how should I look at free digital labor, especially from cultural and social aspect?
Thesis Statement
As the possibilities of technology increase, so does our digital workability on it. Every human interaction on social media, mouse scrolls, clicks we made, comments and contents we created become sellable source in which we voluntarily worked by providing data in the form of labour. We are working 24/7 without getting paid, this work tends to be invisible, appropriated, copied, uncared, influenced, opiniated, piggybacked, borrowed, leaked, imitated, repeated, silenced, reproduced and exploited. What is considered to be a work? Are we working without knowing it? do we agree on this work? are we a digital volunteer, slave or a worker? for whom do we work?
Body
Key topics
- A digital form of labour
- Data exploitation: using our labour to create datas
- Social and networked media as a 24/7 working office
- Digital economy
- Ephemeral labour in gig-economy
- Socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer: colonial relation
- Unfamiliarity of digital labour: Digital labour as a model of volunteerism.
- An attitude on being a permissive user on Internet
- Play vs Work
Chapter 1: The Occurrence(사건 출현) — What is free work? what is digital labour?
Point A: Understanding of how the infrastructure of labour has changed thoughout the time in digital space
1. Comparing with traditional concept of work to digital work && how it's transformed to digital space
2. Infrastructure of labour in colonial era, how it has inherited to digital space
Point B: Emergence of free labour and its consideration on labour (how/why does it considered as labour), idea of voluntary work
2. A Korean concept of free labour called '품앗이(Pumasi)': a traditional form of communal labor in Korean agricultural society
3. Digital labour as a model of volunteerism
Chapter 2: Gathering Evidence(증거 모음) — Values on Invisibility of free labour && the relation with digital economic value
Point A: Internet as a 24/7 working office, what values does free labour has, and how does it affect to digital economic system
Intro: We're highly interconected with Internet, therefore work became indistinguishable
1. Social value: you earn social capital Using social media as unintended/unexpected workplace)
- uploading personal stories and photos, Google maps review and restaurant comment
- social currancy: a social form of assets
- What is actually occupying my time on social media? Swipting phone in bed
2. Entertainment value (Play vs Work): you earn enjoyment capital
- Stories of people constantly generating and uploading contents on web for fun
- Work vs leisure: online activity is fun and it is work at the same time. Work vs (leisure) Play. (playbour creates a data commodity)
- A Korean concept of '노동요(work song)': a piece of music/song work sing while conducting a task to make work effective
- Free software and Open source
3. Emotional value: you earn emotional capital from people giving you likes and comments
- uploading personal stories and photos
4. Socioeconomic value: you earn monetary capital by stealing data
- Digital labour as a model of volunteerism (and slaverism?)
- Privacy and Surveillence: using our labour to create data through social media
- (Data exploitation on the Internet as a colonial perspective: allegedly infringed labour)
- Digitized information as a easily created knowledge/capital
- Digital value and capital as part of a new economy (its conventional association with Internet companies)
5. Time value
- Productivity && efficiency: Time was used to measure the labour of factory workers, leading to the development of the mechanical clock
- Idea of clock: Time in the space
- Korea has high speed internet/high tech: work more for digital labor?