Digital Work
Seminar, October 11, 2003, Rotterdam
Digital Work Seminar
October 11th 2003
How do we work now with digital media? Have we shifted from a work culture based on the ambience of clubs to one locked inside cubicles? Has media design become rationalised to the point of complete predictability or is there still room for creativity and fundamental innovation?
With thousands of graduates being skilled-up in digital media across the Netherlands and Europe every year and with the internet becoming massified and maybe even normal, it is time to look at the daily reality of digital work.
Digital work includes the complete cycle: the non-glamorous work of call-centres and warehousing that provides its back-end, the more deadly globalised work of the manufacture and dumping of computers, as well as the non-work of leisure and consumption. How do the hacker ethics of free, networked, deregulated co-operation mesh with other forms of worker organisation? What are the new models emerging amongst the mix of roles, skills, ideas, talents, activities and technologies? After dot.bomb, is financialisation any way to run a culture? How does digital work effect and provide new perspectives on media design: how is design itself shaped and driven by the sites and software which it makes?