Lifecycle of a digital object

Lifecycle of a digital object Reader for the Digital Work seminar

This set of links and references is intended to provide a small set of resources as a Reader for the Digital Work seminar. Whilst the seminar has an emphasis on digital work in the so-called culture industries such as media design, we also need to see it as being made up of many different kinds of work involving materials, ideas, technologies and organisational and economic forms. This reader therefore, begins to make a map of the lifecycle of a digital object a set of pointer to these formations.

'I do not know how sausages are made. Sausages are obtained through a lot of transformations as well. And since I do not hype sausages, I do not see why why we should hype computer images.'

Bruno Latour, in Geert Lovink, 'Uncanny Networks'

Manufacture

silicon valley toxics coalition http://www.svtc.org/

Distribution

RAQS Media Collective, 'Call Centre Calling, technology, network and location' http://www.sarai.net/journal/03pdf/177_183_raqsmediac.pdf

Communication Workers News http://www.btinternet.com/~donald.macdonald/

Programming

Ellen Ullman, 'Close to the Machine, technophilia and its discontents', City Lights, San Francisco, 1997

Nick Dyer-Witheford, 'Cognitive Capital Contested, the class composition of the video and computer game industry', Multitudes 10, October 2002, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/

Adrian Mackenzie, 'From Cards to Code: How Extreme Programming Re-embodies Programming Practice', Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work , 2003 http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/papers.html/

RottenFlesh http://unpythonic.net/~jepler/cgi-bin/rottenflesh.cgi/

Workplaces

Andrew Ross, 'No Collar, the humane workplace and its hidden costs', Basic Books, New York, 2003 http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0212/msg00121.html

Fucked Company http://www.fuckedcompany.com/

Slashdot Threads What do you do at Work? Are you on time to work?

Use

Matthew Fuller, 'Behind the Blip, essays on the culture of software', Autonomedia, New York, 2003

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School Press, 2002

Malcolm McCullough, 'Abstracting Craft, the practiced digital hand', MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998

Bullfighter: stripping the bull out of business Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Consulting http://www.dc.com/insights/bullfighter/

Lifestyle

Po Bronson, 'The Nudist on the Late Shift' http://www.pobronson.com/index_nudist.htm/,/a>

Richard Sennett, 'The Corrosion of Character, the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism', W.W. Norton, New York, 1999

Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality, http://www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism/holmes1.html/

Cultures@Silicon Valley http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/anthropology/svcp/

Disposal

Basel Action Network http://www.ban.org/

What is work? Undoubtedly, it is a struggle against noise. Michel Serres, 'The Parasite'

"Not by any bosses coercive bidding, but through the seductive channel of work you just couldn't help doing, had the twelve-hour day made its furtive return"

Andrew Ross, 'No Collar'