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Digital labor or digital labour is a term for emergent forms of labor characterized by the production of value through interaction with information and communication technologies. Examples of digital labor include on-demand platforms, micro-working and user generated data for digital platforms such as social media. Digital labor describes affective and social activities within capitalist modes of production not typically recognized as work, including the increasing participation on social media websites, and the effect of social media on social patterns and communication and the collapse of work and play.

Digital labor is rooted in Italian autonomist, workerist/Operaismo worker's rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the wages for housework movement founded by Selma James in 1972. The idea of the "digital economy" is defined as the moment, where work has shifted from the factory to the social realm. Italian autonomists would describe this as the, "social factory."

Contents

 * 1Precedents
 * 2On-demand platforms
 * 3Social Media
 * 4Microwork
 * 5Digital economy
 * 6See also
 * 7References
 * 8Bibliography
 * 9External links

History of Digital Labor[edit]
(I need to better recontextualize the history of digital labor, this entire section is confusing. This article names too many people without explaining why they are important)

Digital labor borrows from the understanding that the cognitive-cultural economy, and the rise of capitalism in the 20th century, eliminated the previous separation that existed between work and play/entertainment.

The rise of digital labor can be attributed to the shift of human history from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, as production-based industries declined with the rise of a new digital and information-based economy. Multiple authors, including Christian Fuchs (sociologist) Sebastian Sevignani, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greg de Peuter have linked digital labor to the theory of Marxism. Marxism states that capitalism creates a class struggle between the minority and the working class majority. Although this theory applies to the production economy of the time, it can be used to describe labor within the digital economy as digital labor replaces factory labor.

Digital Labor on Platforms[edit] ]
On-demand work has been rising since the years 2008-2010. It follows the development of Internet access and the spread of mobile devices, which allow almost everyone to be in touch with this kind of platform, including children and teenagers. Such platforms cover a large field of domains : rental (Airbnb, Booking.com), travel (trivago, tripadvisor), food delivery (Uber Eats, Grub Hub, and Postmates), transportation (Uber, Taxify, Lyft), home services (Task Rabbit, Helpling), education (Udemy, Coursera), etc.

Workers on such platforms are often not considered as employees, and aren't well paid. For example, an Uber driver earns between $8.80 and $11 per hour after expenses.

These platforms act as data producers because both consumers and workers produce data while using the service. This data can then be used for improving the service or can be sold on the market. Business model of such companies is often centered around data. Digital labor has been concerned with the topic of disintermediation, where digital labor has taken away the job of the mediator in direct, social, communication.

Social Media[edit]
Studies of the digital labor market present on social media platforms were some of the first analysis done of digital labor. This included scholarship like, "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" (Trebor Scholz), and "From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City" (2010). (Andrew Ross), Tiziana Terranova and others developed a working definition of digital labor, drawing from the idea of free labor, and immaterial labor.The notion of digital labor on social media arise from the fact that most of the value of any social media platforms is created by the users. Therefore they can be considered as digital workers on the platform. On most platforms however this work remains unpaid. Some exceptions include video and music sharing platforms. This is linked with the notion of participatory culture, "a term often used for designating the involvement of users, audiences, consumers and fans in the creation of culture and content".

User labor, common to social media platforms, refers to the monetization of user generated data which contributes to the financial gain of the company while users receive no compensation. It is based on the production and exchange of cultural content, and the collection of users' metadata. Microwork tasks can be completed before using the platform, which indirectly trains algorithms (such as text or image recognition when creating an account).

Controversies
Current debate over digital labor examines whether or not society's capitalistic economy has prompted corporate exploitation of digital labor in social media. Social media has developed as a means for people to create and share information and ideas over the Internet. Because social media are typically associated with leisure and entertainment, the monetization of digital labor has blurred the line separating work from entertainment. Proponents argue that exploitation occurs as typical social media users do not receive any monetary compensation for their digital content, while companies are able to take advantage of this freely accessible information to generate revenues. Studies of social media sites such as YouTube have analyzed their business models and found that user-generated digital labor is being monetized through ads and other methods to create company profit. Criticism against exploitation centers around people as prosumers. Scholars argue that exploitation cannot occur if people are both producing and consuming their own digital labor, thereby deriving value from their own created content.

Microwork[edit]
Micro work is defined by individuals digitally completing small tasks for a company and is a form of digital labor. A widely used example of a digital market that utilizes digital labor is Amazon Mechanical Turk. Digital labor markets are websites or economies which facilitate the production, trade, and sale of digital content, code, digital products, or other ideas or goods emerging from digital and technological environments. The development of micro-working platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk created new forms of digital labor. Micro work is defined by Micro-work platforms are used in the field of machine learning, for AI training or AI verification and rely on individuals to accomplish tasks that cannot be performed through an algorithm. By performing simple tasks, individuals make on average about 2 dollars an hour and only 4 percent of workers make above 7.25 an hour.

Internet users can also contribute to a form of "user labor", in which the user is asked to perform an action which produces data in order to use a platform. As an example, the ReCAPTCHA service developed by Google uses human identification as a way to transcribe books or to label image sets.

Digital Labor Rights[edit]
Computer scientist Jaron Lanier, in the books You are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, argues that the open source approach contributed to the social stratification and widening of the gaps between rich and the poor, the rich being the major stakeholders in digital companies, who own the content of the content creators. A digital labor critique of the open source software movement is that peer production economies rely on an increasingly alienated labor force, forced into unpaid, knowledge labor. In this way, the so-called "gift economy" is an essential part of the reproduction of the labor force within late capitalism.