From the self-made celebrity of the Instafamous to the personal live-streaming of gamers, online sites of spectatorship are the emerging playgrounds and assembly lines for the 21st-century worker. We shop, share, and produce online 24/7. As we do we alter the processes of how we work, what is viewed as a product, and our sense of self. PLAYBOR rethinks the role of the worker as they draw on internal resources and self-made networks to develop new avenues of pleasure and survival.
Through our screens, a language of likes, comments, and friendships enable many of us to engage in numerous bottom-up communities, channels of self-promotion, branding, fan cultures, and consumer lifestyles. We voluntarily offer up our frameworks of knowledge and social relationships to create cultural standards, consumer tastes, fashion and opinion. At an internal level, burgeoning industry of cognitive and neuro industries work with data brokers, programmers and advertisers to design interfaces to elicit emotion, target us through consumer profiles, and track and predict our behaviour online.
As the worlds of play and labour blur, what are the instruments, agents and infrastructures operating at personal and internal scales in the emerging worker’s playground?
BIOGRAPHIES
Dani Admiss is a curator and researcher exploring the phenomena of world-building across art, networked cultures, digital and design. She is cofounder of PHUNC, an art and design unit engaged in community-centred neurocapitalist research. She is currently a researcher at the faculty for New Media Art at Sunderland University. She has curated and produced projects at Abandon Normal Devices Festival, Digital Asia Hub, Hong Kong, Somerset House, Barbican Centre, and Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Portugal.
Dr Jamie Woodcock is a fellow at the LSE and author of Working The Phones. His current research focuses on digital labour, the sociology of work, the gig economy, resistance, and videogames. He has previously worked as a postdoc on a research project about videogames, as well as another on the crowdsourcing of citizen science. Jamie completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has held positions at Goldsmiths, University of Leeds, University of Manchester, Queen Mary, NYU London, and Cass Business School.