User:Bohye Woo/2nd Thesis outline

Topic

Free labour in the age of technology within social media

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 hardcore 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 digital activity through the Internet impacts on who and why. These activity 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 activity on social media(in a broad sense, on the internet), mouse scrolls, clicks, comments and contents we made become sellable sources 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 free work? Are we working without knowing it? do we agree on this work? are we a digital volunteer, a worker, a proletariat or a slave? for whom do we work?

Body

Chapter 1: Understanding of free labour & its pervasivness

Intro: We're highly interconnected with the Internet, therefore work became indistinguishable. it's pervasive.

• Point A: Pervasiveness: When you wake up till sleep you're on phone. you more and more you're dependend on this. it's pervasive. Never be independent because it's depend on so many materials. It occupies every moment.
  • Bonded labour/Indentured labour/contracted labour: You give up your passport, ID, information. you're on the contract.

• Point B: My data is not ephemera/my data is inexhaustible

Chapter 2: The infrastructure of free labour in relation to colonial aspect is inherited/migrated/exploited thoughout the time and digital space

1. Inherited Labor: Comparing with traditional concept of work to digital work and its transformation to the digital space

• A Korean concept of human affection, in Korean '정(jeong)' in Korea where people share product/work for free.
• Free labour as a model of volunteerism: A Korean concept of free labour called '품앗이(Pumasi)', a traditional form of communal labor in Korean agricultural society

2. Inherited Colonialism: The social structure keeps changing, but idea of colonialism that is being inherited is showing to the digital world in a different form and struture.

• The form: Traditional colonialism to a new form of colonialism(Neocolonial) — data colonialism: (Raw material = our data, traditional form of labour = digital form of labour)
• The way: In the past, it's geographically bounded, but now it's human bounded, in a bigger scale: group bounded.
• The structure: Economic and social organization dominated by major colonial powers: In social media, major colonial powers are social medias who owns our datas.

3. Inherited Slavery: Free labour is conflated within technology capitalizing on this grey area.

• Internet as a 24/7 working office
• Historical colonialism appropriated territories and bodies through extreme physical violence = Digital coloniallism appropriated social medias and human through our information, data, labour, time and life.
• Free worker as a proletariat: History of how old labour being used, how it's developed to a modern form of labour. Centralized working platform/structure

Chapter 3: What values do you get from? How does free labour influences to digital economic system

1. Economic capital: you earn monetary capital by stealing data

• Privacy and Surveillence: using our labour to create data through social media

(Data exploitation on the Internet as a colonial perspective: allegedly infringed labour — whose traces had suddenly become visible(The costs of connection p.3) )
(Verizon selling information about how often mobile phone users are in certain locations and their activities)

• Digitized information as a easily created knowledge/capital
• Digital value and capital as part of a new economy (its conventional association with Internet companies)

2. Social&Emotional capital: you earn social/emotional capital by gaining likes. (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
• the attention economy: apps are designed with the explicit purpose of making users stay on them

3. Entertainment capital: Play at the same time work (Play vs Work) — Efficiency & productivity

• 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) Youtuber
• A Korean concept of '노동요(work song)': a piece of music/song work sing while conducting a task to make work effective
• Watching ads to keep watching a video
• mukbang & pro gamers as examples of the promise of lucrative entertainment capital
• 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)

Conclusion

The means through which labour is extracted must be made visible in practical, everyday ways. We must become as aware of exploitation in the digital realm as we are about products we buy and consume, such as Fair Trade coffee etc.

How can we, as a digital worker, deal with this? can we offer new understanding of digital work place in the modern era? or suggest radical ways to deal with it? Conclusion could describe some potential cases to introduces alternatives/decentralized platforms. giving ethical choice.