{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":20,"pdf_page":27,"physical_index":27,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"77bfeb1773a40d6c894548a7e38ee2769f7c6834a48ed23c79dbd7902c3f9e98"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Distributed Workplaces\n\nDistributed labor has been suggested as a way of describing the use of the Internet to mobilize the spare processing power of a widely dispersed crowd of discrete individuals. This should not be confused with an older use of this term to describe the business process outsourcing business model for coordinating geographically dispersed workplaces, whether from telecommuting or from distant nodes on a global production chain. That model was especially critical to the wave of whitecollar offshore outsourcing in the first half of the last decade, and it depended on sophisticated work-flow platform technologies to slice up, allocate, and recombine work. So, too, the new model should be distinguished from the distributed workplace known today as the mobile office. Business strategists advocate on behalf of the benefits to employee morale of allowing high-wage corporate talent to work anytime,anywhere, and on any device. But it is the boost to efficiency and productivity that commands the most attention in their reports. Untold revenue can be extracted from the steady erosion of the boundary between work and leisure time—a long-held dream of employers—which results from putting employees on an unforgiving24/7 leash.\n\nThe new kind of distributed labor does not need to be performed by payroll employees in far-flung branch locations, or by notebook toters in wired coffee shops, the default workplace for a generation of contract freelancers who forsake the privacy of their homes (Toffler's\"electronic cottage\") to work in public view, braving, or feeding off, the gregarious hum of society. Rather, it is done either by users who do not perceive their interactive input as work at all, or else it is contracted out online—through a growing number of e-lance service sites—to a multitude of taskers who piece together lumps of income from motley sources. As in the offshore outsourcing model, the dispersion of this labor is highly organized, but it is not dependent on physical relocation to cheap labor markets. Instead, the cost savings can be derived from either the latent talent of the crowd or the microdivisionof labor into puzzles, stints, chores, and bits, which, if they amount to anything more than distractions, require only fitful bursts ofconcentration.\n\nThe devising and parceling out of these microtasks is arguably only the latest development in a lineage of work management that derives from Taylorism. Taskers are effectively deskilled, dispersed, and deprived of any knowledge about the nature of the product to which their labor contributes. The coordinating manager, by contrast, is in complete control of the labor process. As for the donor labor of the crowd, that has a longer historical lineage since it owes a lot to the traditions of creative work, where sacrifices in monetary compensation are commonly made in return for job gratification or for the opportunity to test and advertise one's talent. This willingness to donate labor was referred to as self-exploitation when it first emerged as an industrial prototype in the formal employment offered by the New Economy or dot-com firms of the late 1990s. In the course of my own ethnographic research on these new media workplaces, for No-Collar, I recall that one of my interviewees told me herjob offered“work you just couldn’t help doing\"—a description that seemed to sum up the mentality of passionate, or sacrificial, labor.9 Subsequent ethnographic studies of knowledge and creative industry workplaces have shown that job gratification comes at a heavy cost—longer hours in pursuit of the satisfying finish, price discounts in return for aesthetic recognition, self-exploitation in response to the gift of autonomy, and dispensability in exchange for flexibility.to\n\n20\n\nThe ShiftingSites of Labor Markets","previous_page":19,"next_page":21}