{"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":6,"pdf_page":174,"physical_index":174,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3a21309da25da6cba2c87d1660c88f79689b583f02cf2b781d95d835f579cc04"},"chapter":"Digital Labor","content":"What fantasies, what possibilities, what kinds of subjects, do multiply intersecting and increasingly personalized media and communication technologies stimulate? Diferently put, how might changes from the media constitutive of projects of national utopian imagination lead in the direction of whatever beings? The pleasures of parallels with Buck-Morss’s discussion of film and national mass identities suggest that answers might be found in at least four domains.\n\nFirst, if mass media addressed society directly, organizing and speaking to masses as collectives, contemporary networked communications have multiple addressees—addressees known and unknown, friends and strangers. Bloggers may write for others who they imagine share their interests, a group of the uninformed they might enlighten, or future versions of themselves. The set of friends who receive my updates on Facebook, my network, are uniquely mine. Each user’s network is diferent, even as they overlap and intersect. Blogs and social networks do not provide broadly shared symbolic identities from which we see ourselves. Blogs don’t address society writ large. They invite singular readers to consider what they have on ofer. Or they just make themselves available to be found by search engines’ crawlers. Unlike mass media’s calling of collectives, publics, and nations into being, blogs don’t unite bloggers and readers. To this extent, they are more like pencils than cinema. They remain specific in their multiplicity.\n\nSecond, whereas mass media made crowds visible to themselves as a unity, providing the crowd with an imaginary collective body, networked communication and entertainment makes particularities visible to themselves as particularities. I can tweet my current location, update my friends on my current mood, check what’s trending. With multiply convergent and turbulent media, I don’t have to settle on any one direction or theme. I can live in the momentary. Not only do these multiple, circulating impulses incite in me a kind of permanent indecision or postponement, a lack of commitment—what else is out there?—but the fragmenting, networking thrust of drive turns my particular body, my very face into a montage: a wrinkle here, a bump there, a nose too large, lips too small. Fortunately, I can update my photo at any time—and I can animate it, too! There is no us. There is no me (although I can google myself to see if I turn up). Buck-Morss argues that “Cinema creates an imagined space where a mass body exists that can exist nowhere else.”<sup>16</sup> My point is that blogs—standing in for the networked information and entertainment media of communicative capitalism—not only do not create such a space for a mass body but dissolve any sense of it. They dis-place it, producing instead ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, and feelings. Blogs cannot be counted; they resist inclusion into sets or categories. Yes, cinema still exists, and sometimes it lets us feel ourselves as something like an us— and then I can tweet about it. Blog-mapping projects attempt to make multiple disparate blogs appear as a sphere, a collective, as points in a shared space. But the space they map is in the imaginary of the researcher, not in bloggers’ presence to themselves as a collective.\n\n6","previous_page":5,"next_page":7}