This article discusses the emergence, production and exploitation of what the authors call “immaterial labour 2.0”. The concept of immaterial labour refers to two aspects of labour, according to Lazzarato. These aspects are: “1. as regards the ‘informational content’ of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labour processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labour are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication).’ 2. ‘As regards the activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as ‘work’-–in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and more strategically, public opinion.”
This article concerned itself with the second manifestation of immaterial labour, the production of “cultural content”. It proposes that we are seeing the emergence of a new type of immaterial labour, immaterial labour 2.0, which the authors claim is “a more accelerated, intensified, and indeed inscrutable variant of the kind of activity initially proposed by Lazzarato”. What the “2.0” addresses is the “free” labour that subjects engage in on a cultural and biopolitical level when they participate on sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Additionally, it refers to the corporate mining and selling of usergenerated content, which includes tastes, preferences and the general cultural content constructed therein. Their primary interest was in regards to how we “work” amidst the myriad of interfaces within information and communication technology and how the digital construction of our subjectivity/identity within such social networks is a constitutive practice of immaterial labour 2.0.
They suggest that we, as a society, have shifted from our roles as static couch potatoes to the more dynamic roles of websurfers and blogger. They further explain that capital has paid attention to this and that there has been a shift in what is being valorized. With the internet and specifically, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook the dynamic of immaterial labour is the links, the networks that people construct and participate in that comprise not a new audience commodity but immaterial labour 2.0. They note that the very notion of immaterial labour seems nonsensical unless you are willing to consider that there has been a conflation between production and consumption, leisure and labour and author and audience.
The authors present MySpace as being exemplary of immaterial labour 2.0 through its composition, management and regulation of the activities of its users and the use of usergenerated content to produce revenue. MySpace users continually produce free immaterial labour in the construction of their online subjectivity. MySpace exploits this freely given immaterial labour by selling the information gleaned from its users to third parties, who use it to micro target their customer base. The aggregate data collected is a highly useful and sought-after commodity for marketers, who compile extensive databases containing information on the users preferences from which they are then able to extract meaningful patterns and relationships.
I found the topics and concepts discussed in this article to be both very interesting and confusing. I never really thought about how sites such as MySpace and Facebook really benefited from me posting a profile or how what I was doing could constitute labour. I’m still not sure whether this new form of immaterial labour is exploitative or not. The relationship between the user and the site seems to be one that is very mutualistic. However, this is something that is usually true of most forms of organized labour. However, this does seemingly drive home the point that there is no longer a distinction between leisure and labour.
In what way would you describe the relationship between Web 2.0 users and the capitalist economy. Is this relationship parasitic, commensalistic or mutualistic?
Additional Resources:
Data Mining the Kids
http://utoronto.academia.edu/SaraGrimes/Papers/99368/Data_Mining_the_Kids_Surveillance_and_Market_Research_Strategies_in_Childrens_Online_Games
FACEBOOK: Federal Human Data Mining Program
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwnTWZ1-UWY
The Face Behind Facebook/Is Facebook your Friend?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPX2UrXcFpo&feature=related
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