{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781349379743","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","uuid":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks","normalized_title":"mediaandnewcapitalisminthedigitalagethespiritofnetworks","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781349379743","isbns":["9781349379743","9780230106062"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":258,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Media%20and%20New%20Capitalism%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age%20The%20Spirit%20of%20Networks","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/search"},"page":{"printed_page":141,"pdf_page":144,"physical_index":144,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2462d908b2844715a03a9e755c824681fa0a69b51518536c9cdef6687d814c48"},"chapter":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age","content":"The network, according to the digital discourse, becomes the prime locus and axial coordinator of production, replacing the company, the workplace, and the assembly line. It facilitates new productive modes that are predicated on the ability to harness the working power of autonomous and dispersed nodes into the productive process. Moreover, network production is able to mobilize forces of production that have been hitherto unexploited and inaccessible (like free time), elusive (like joy and fun), or highly dispersed (like expertise and knowledge). From the point of view of individuals, these new productive modes allow more people to engage more meaningfully with, and to bring their skills, talents, and passions to bear more fully upon the productive process. The productive process becomes more democratic and collaborative and is geared more fully toward personal fulfillment (of the lifeworld), rather than toward the fulfillment of system’s ends. Finally, and crucially, network production makes possible the perfect fusion of the needs of personal emancipation with the system’s needs of capitalism.\n\nDEA<sub>L</sub>IENATION VERSUS EXP<sub>L</sub>OITATION\n\nWe should understand network production not simply as a description of a new mode of capitalist production brought about by technological networks, but as an analytical framework that at one and the same time also naturalizes and legitimates the new realities, and new constellation of power that this mode entails, specifically, in regards to work. These narratives amount to a discourse where the very notions of work, workers, and by extension the working class, are undermined. “Work” is reconceptualized as an eroticized, playful activity of production and consumption, involving creativity, deep engagement, interactivity, and interpersonal communication. Likewise, the category of “workers” is substituted by a new category of the prosumers: an individualized and independent unit of production, consumption, and entrepreneurship.\n\nThe discourse on network production legitimizes a shift to a post-Fordist organization of labor and production. The sites where the social organization of work during Fordism (and during much of industrialism) were contained and anchored—the company, the union, the guild, the professional, the cadre—are rendered obsolete with the emergence of the prosumer. At the same time that work becomes more meaningful and humane, allowing greater outlet for personal potential, and harnessing amateurish skills and leisure time into social reproduction, it also becomes more privatized and individualized, shifting more risks from capital to labor, and dismantling the social buffer zone offered during Fordism—a buffer zone that favored social equity and personal security over the development of individual potential (Harvey 2005). The discourse on network production legitimates a production process that is at one and the same time more democratic and engaging and undermines the institutional arrangements that made those processes more stable and protective during Fordism.\n\nNetwork Production\n\n141","previous_page":140,"next_page":142}