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Digital labor


Digital labor or digital labour is a term for a schema of ideas focusing on exploring and understanding the high levels of cognitive and cultural labor associated with the replacement of jobs in the increasingly automated industrial sector, into globalized production systems embedded in high-technology, and into a knowledge economy. Digital labor also describes a series of affective and social activities within capitalist modes of production not typically viewed as work, including the increasing participation on social media websites, and the effect of social media on social patterns and communication and the collapse of work and play.

The notion of digital labor has evolved from the traditions of workerist/Operaismo, Autonomism, and Post-Fordist theory that grew during the workers' struggles in Italy, which included a substantial feminist movement in the Wages for housework campaign.

Digital labor as a field also includes consideration of the affect and the axiomatization of the body, collective intelligences, and the hive mind, semiotics and postmodernism, artificial intelligence, science fiction, gaming culture, hyper-reality, disappearance of the commodity, contested definitions of the "knowledge worker" in capitalistic society.

Digital labor borrows from understandings that the cognitive-cultural economy, and the rise of capitalism in the 20th century, has eliminated the previous separation that existed between work and play/entertainment.

The rise of digital labor can be attributed to the shift of human history from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, as production-based industries declined with the rise of a new digital and information-based economy. Multiple authors, including Christian Fuchs and Sebastian Sevignani, have linked digital labor to the theory of Marxism. Marxism states that capitalism creates a class struggle between the minority and the working class majority. Although this theory applies to the production economy of the time, it can be used to describe labor within the digital economy as digital labor replaces factory labor.


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