Venture Labor| Conclusion: Agendas for Studying Communicative Capitalism

Authors

  • Gina Neff gina.neff@oii.ox.ac.uk

Keywords:

theory, political economy, risk, communication technologies, media production, media industries

Abstract

This short essay concludes a Special Section on the book Venture Labor and reflects on the directions for future research for media and communication scholars. The essay argues that new ways of studying the political economy of information-intensive industries stretch the traditional scope of media and communication studies. This “informational economy” relies ever more on the production and circulation of commodified and monetized values emerging within the media industry and media practices broadly construed. This essay concludes a collection of articles proposing theoretical frameworks and empirical examples to deal with the transformations of work and economic value within the media and communication field. Collectively, the authors in this special issue address how media workers are responding to technological and economic change and how new communication technologies influence the production of economic value. This essay argues that the field of media and communication studies can help scholars understand the practices of the informational economy, the status of workers within this economy, and their resistance to its exploitative tendencies.

Author Biography

Gina Neff, gina.neff@oii.ox.ac.uk

Associate Professor, Sociology Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet InstituteUK

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Published

2017-05-09

Issue

Vol. 11 (2017)

Section

Forum

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