One of the central features of the contemporary digital labour environment, especially in the creative economy, is the incorporation of personality, affect, and interpersonal relationships into the workplace. Subjectivity itself has been “put to work.” This is certainly the case in the online creator industry which is associated with self-branding, self-promotion, and the conscious crafting of commercialisable identities. The work of influencers, OnlyFans creators, and TikTokers is thus often critiqued for being a process of commodification and consequently a site for the degradation of meaningful personhood. But is this really the case? Is there only disturbance and no delight in online creative labour? Drawing on ideas on her new book Digital Labour (2022; Polity Press), this talk will question assumptions about the existence of commodity relations in digital work. It will propose instead the framework of “assetisation” to explain the commercialisation of subjectivity in online creator work, with implications for how we understand all kinds of digital labour both as economic phenomena but also as sites of worker agency.
Dr. Kylie Jarrett is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is author of the Digital Labor (2022) and Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (2016) and co-author of #NSFW: Sex, Humor and Risk in Social Media (with Susanna Paasonen and Ben Light, 2019) and Google and the Culture of Search (with Ken Hillis and Michael Petit, 2013) as well as a wide range of articles exploring the commercial Web.
This event is organized by JCU's Department of Communications.
Негізгі бет From Commodification to Assetisation: Reconciling the Delights and Disturbances of Digital Labour
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