Assignment 05- “In Search of the Lost Paycheck”

Angeline Henriquez

Digital Media and Society

Assignment 05

October 6, 2015

 

Throughout this chapter Ross explains how the rise of digital media has given way to what he describes as “token-wage” labor. “In most corners of the information landscape, working for nothing has become normative, and largely because it is not experienced as exploitation.” (17) One way in which corporations have used digital technologies to reduce professional pay scales, is by monetizing the “cognitive surplus”.  Corporations are taking advantage of all the free time people have by promoting tasks that feel like fun, thus blurring the line of work and play. One example of this is crowdsourcing. To make his point, Ross directs us to the popularity of the “Comments Section” not only on social media platforms but also in popular news sites, where users that post their comments become a source for extracting ideas, images, and information for little to no compensation. Why pay for a creative team to come up with new ideas for articles when the users can provide them without demanding a salary? “Readers will be gratified to participate” (19) is the underlying principle.

Another aspect of the “corporate race to the bottom” is the distributed labor technique. In this occurrence, the micro division of labor into bits and pieces allows for cost – saving. “Taskers are effectively deskilled, dispersed and deprived of any knowledge about the nature of the product to which their labor contributes” (21). At the same time, this reinforces long-held believes about and among creative types, about sacrificing monetary compensation in return for job gratification. About this Ross writes, “This willingness to donate labor was referred to as self-exploitation”. However Ross, emphasizes that new media is not to be blamed for this token-wage labor economy. In turn he states that “while digital technology did not give birth to the model of free labor, it has proven to be a highly efficient enabler of nonstandard work arrangements”.

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