COMU1130 Lecture 3 Digital Labour DEFINE: Digital Labour Digital labour is anything you do that produces digital artefacts or data, which creates value, culturally, socially, economically, politically, or otherwise. E.g. Social media, swiping loyalty card, submitting assignments on turnitin, wearing a fit bit etc. Marx Theory of Alienation (caused by capitalist greedtti Alienation from product: workers don't have input on design of product. Provide labour towards design that employers believe will generate the most money. Alienation from act of production: The labour that workers do provide is just small, repetitive motions in a way determined most efficient by the employer. Alienation from our Gattungswesen: "Capitalist Greed" changes our actions from being for the collective good into a commodity to be bought and sold. Alienation of worker from other workers: Employer has minimal amount of workers needed to produce product or service, no more. All work time is consumed so as to limit 'wasteful' interactions between workers Dallas Smythe's "audience commodity" Mass media does not produce a product to provide to an audience - they produce audiences to be sold to advertisers. Smythe: " ... the material reality under monopoly capitalism is that all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time". Marx and Digital labour Can we call this exploitation of labour we get a benefit that isn't money? Hesmondhalgh argues that providing free digital labour isn't any different to providing free non-digital labour.