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Digitial Labor is a term for a schema of ideas focusing on exploring and understanding the high levels of cognitive and cultural labor associated with the replacement of jobs in the increasingly automated industrial sector, into globalized production systems embedded in high-technology, and into a knowledge economy. Digital labor also describes a series of affective and social activities within within capitalist modes of production not typically viewed as work, including the increasing participation on social media websites, and the effect of social media on social patterns and communication.

The term immaterial labor was coined by sociologist and independent Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato and expanded upon by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosophers, in their books Empire (2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), which describes a burgenoning knowledge economy. Immaterial labor was used in the discourse and texts of the autonomist,workerist / operaismo movements, and the ongoing feminist organizing in offspring groups like Wages for housework, in Italy and abroad.

The concept of Digital Labor has evolved from the traditions of Workerism, Autonomism, and Post-Fordist theory that grew during the worker's struggles in Italy. Digital labor borrows from autonomist understandings that the Cognitive-cultural economy, and subsequently the burgeoning “digital economy” have eliminated the previous separation that existed between work and play, labor and entertainment.

Digital Labor also encompasses other writings about: affect and the axiomatization of the body, collective intelligences, and the hive mind, semiotics and postmodernism, artificial intelligence, science fiction, gaming culture, hyper-reality, disappearance of the commodity, Contested definitions of the “knowledge worker" in capitalistic society.

Field of Digital Labor
Some of the first inclinations for the term “digital labor” Andrew Ross, Tiziana Terranova essay "Free Labor" and Trebor Scholz & Laura Y. Liu's “From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City” (2010). Pthers developed a working definition of digital labor, drawing from the idea of free labor, and immaterial labor. Other scholars include: Trebor Scholz, Christian Fuchs, Lisa Nakamura, Frank Pasquale, Christian Fuchs, Andrew Ross, Jaron Lanier.

Digital Economy
The idea of the “digital economy” is defined as the moment, where work has shifed from the factory to the social realm. Italian autonomists would describe this as the, “social factory." Additionally, that the Gift economy is an essential part of the reproduction of the labor force within late capitalism.

The Digital Economy has been written about by both those critical of the contemporary geo-political net sphere and those interested in how to exploit the new features digital economies.

Digital labor is also interested in emergent digital subcultures including: community forms, blogs, digital organizing tools, and the way these platforms can be potential generators of cultural goods subsumed and incorporated into globalized networks of cultural goods.

Digital labor markets
Digital labor markets are websites or economies which facilitate the creation of online information. A widely used example of a digital labor market is Amazon Mechanical Turk.

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.

The concept of the digital economy has been applied to the onset of the Peer production platform economies, like Free and open-source software projects like Linux/ GNU, Free and Open Source projects like Wikipedia. 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.

Conferences
Various conferences have helped to shape this discourse: Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory at the New School in 2009, Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens (Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, 2009), Invisible Labor Colloquium (Washington University Law School, 2013), Towards Critical Theories of Social Media, Uppsala University, (Sweden, 2012), Re:Publica conference (Berlin, Germany 2013), and the Chronicles of Work lecture Series at Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, Germany 2012/2013). Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, Barricades (#DL14), was held at the New School 2014.