All culture involves cultural work and efects of cultural products in society (meaning-making). The production and communication of meanings, social norms and morals are work processes: they create cultural use-values. Culture requires on the one hand human creativity for creating cultural content and on the other hand specific forms and media for storage and communication. The creation of information and communication through language is specific for work conducted in the cultural system: informational and communication work. For having social efects in society, humans with the help of information and communication technologies, such as computers, TV, radio, newspapers, books, recorded films, recorded music, language, etc., organise (i.e. store, process, transport, analyse, transform, create) information and communication. Physical cultural work produces information technologies. Culture encompasses a) physical cultural work that creates cultural technologies (information and communication technologies) and b) information work that creates information and communication.
Think of the example of a piano player. Playing the piano as a human activity is not possible without a piano and without composed music. The activity of playing the piano therefore presupposes the work of the composer and the piano maker. Culture is a manifold production process that involves the work of the piano maker, the composer and the player. In the capitalist culture industry, the commodity form shapes all three forms of cultural production: a piano is a musical instrument sold as a commodity. Composers and musicians tend to be wage-labourers, who are employed by and exploited by large multimedia corporations, especially the ‘big three’ – Universal, Sony and Warner Music. And also audiences, who listen to music for example on YouTube or on commercial radio, tend to become audience workers when cultural corporations sell audiences and users’ attention and usage behaviour data is sold as a commodity to advertising clients (see Fuchs 2014, chapters 4 and 11).
2.2.11. Digital Work
The term digital labour emerged for understanding value-creation on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Weibo (see the contributions in Scholz, 2013). It would however be idealistic to limit the notion of digital labour to the exploitation of users’ online activities by commercial platforms that use targeted advertising or to the creation of digital content that is sold as a commodity. The creation of digital content requires a technological infrastructure that is produced and maintained by labour processes (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Digital labour is all paid and unpaid labour that helps creating digital technologies, content, and data that is sold as a commodity. It includes diverse activities such as slave-labour extracting minerals that form the physical foundation of information technologies, the labour of militarily controlled and highly exploited hardware assemblers who work under conditions of Taylorist industrialism, a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious digital service workers as well as imperialistically exploited knowledge workers in developing countries, workers conducting the industrial recycling and management of e-waste, or highly hazardous informal physical e-waste labour (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Such forms of digital labour form an international division of digital labour that creates the digital media industry’s profits (ibid.). Why is it important to have such a unified concept of digital labour? Nick Dyer-Witheford (2014, 175) provides an answer: ‘To name the global worker is to make a map; and a map is also a weapon’. So what Nick Dyer-Witheford points out is the political relevance of a critical theory of digital media: it names and analyses the problem and can thereby point citizens, classes and social groups towards what is wrong and what contradictions they face.
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Critical Theory of Communication