{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","uuid":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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":325,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","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/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":5,"pdf_page":171,"physical_index":171,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"033a3bc085605593c1d8e741f33ff35d6ac17ec3a98a401b3f1b20ba00999c1b"},"chapter":"Digital Labor","content":"An extensive literature exists documenting the production of national identities through media and communication technologies. Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe is one of the best contributions to this research. Buck-Morss explores the mass identities of utopian and project-based states such as the United States and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century. She highlights the dreams and fantasies enabled by the movies, the imaginings of collectivity that film incited. For communists and capitalists alike, twentieth-century technological projects were also identity projects. Four components of Buck-Morss’s account are particularly compelling: mass media’s direct addressing of society, the way mass media change the nature of crowds, the spectacular function of mass media, and the compensatory logic of mass media’s organization of space.\n\nFirst, many have noted the ways mass media address, well, masses. Radio brought leaders’ voices directly into people’s homes, integrating leaders into their intimate spaces. Broadcast television likewise occupied a domestic space as it addressed its audience as personal members of a nation, perhaps imagined like a family (respected newscaster Walter Cronkite was afectionately referred to as “Uncle Walt”). But film in particular, with its large screen and grand scale, organized and spoke to the masses as a collective. The nation as national society is produced through the media address (whether newspaper, radio, television, or film), with no existence as such prior to this address.\n\nSecond, in a nuanced reading of the role of film production in the United States and in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Buck-Morss observes,\n\nWhereas the radio voice allowed mass identification with political leaders, cinema, traveling to towns and villages to meet audiences halfway, represented a moving image of the masses that allowed audiences to recognize themselves. Such mirroring can be important in transforming the accidental crowd (mass-in-itself) into the self-conscious, purposeful crowd (the mass-for-itself), with at least the potential of acting out its own destiny.<sup>9</sup>\n\nUnlike the moving carnival whose spectators aggregate and disperse, cinema organizes, locates, and seats its spectators. Their attention is directed to a single place, to the screen. The unity of the screen produces out of the disunity of persons a singular audience that can see and recognize itself as a collective: “we” are watching this movie. For the Soviets, the films of Sergei Eisenstein played a particularly powerful role. Eisenstein captured and glorified intense scenes of revolutionary masses, images that became the memories of the October Revolution. Buck-Morss writes:\n\n5","previous_page":4,"next_page":6}