Pros And Cons Of Digital Labour

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The term free labour presents commonly in the digital era. In Terranova’s (2004, p73) idea, it is an essential source of value in advanced capitalist societies which is not acknowledged yet. After Web2.0 gradually took the place of Web1.0, numerous digital industries were actively seeking and absorbing user-generated contents to satisfy their commercial needs which mainly contributed by free labourers. The collaboration between unpaid digital labour and digital industries further discovers new possibilities of human intelligence and this precious fruition facilitates the development of digital economy. And nowadays, social media platform is not the only playground for free labour now, creative culture industries and online retailers gradually …show more content…
One of the challenges is unwaged digital labour can’t be controlled by the digital industries due to their massive and continuous reliance on the contents generated by the free labourers. They can’t control free labour in the way they control traditional types of labour. Digital industries can only try to guide free labourers as they won’t be able to fully control their action because it is always unpredictable. This can be the uncertainty in the production …show more content…
According to Marx’s (1976, p125) theory, commodity is a good or a service produced by labour which satisfies any of human needs and is traded in the market. Referring to Marx’s theory, free labour is exploited because it is applied to carry on commercial activities or traded as capital to facilitate collaborations by digital industries as commodity, but they are not paid with any remuneration. As what Fuchs (2011, p298) argued, this was considered as hyper-exploitation and was ‘one of one of infinite over­exploitation ... an extreme form of exploitation’. Although in reality, the fact of exploitation is always hidden by people’s joy of being connected and interacted. But in long run, people will find out what is truly happening and at that time, the idea of free labour will fail to operate in any

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