How is labour changing in the age of computers, the Internet, and social media such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter? In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs attempts to answer that question, crafting a systematic critical theorisation of labour as performed in the capitalist ICTindustry. Rely- ing on a range of global case studies-from unpaid social media prosumers or Chinese hardware assemblers at Foxconn to miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo-Fuchs sheds light on the labour costs of digital media, examining the way ICT corporations exploit human labour and the impact of this exploitation on the lives, bodies, and minds of workers.
Christian Fuchs is professor of social media at the University of Westminster in London. He is the author of more than 200 academic publications in the fields of Internet studies, social media studies, critical social theory and information society studies. He is the editor of the open access online journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Among his publications are the books Internet and Society, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies, and the collected volumes Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media and Critique, Social Media, and the Information Society.