9. Digital Economies

In this session of Digital Geographies we consider the political economics of our digital world.

We continue the conversation begun on the lecture about ‘work’, but instead shift register to think about ‘labour’. This distinction may seem arbitrary but is not – whereas ‘work’ signifies the effort we put into achieving goals (in much the same way as ‘work’ can signify the amount of energy to move a given mass in physics) – labour signifies the capacity of the worker to sell their ability to work within a given economy. As Karl Marx had it – the Labour Power of a worker is their ability to sell their capacity to work within a market in exchange for wages. Labour thus becomes one of the pillars of market capitalism (alongside assets, resources and the means of production) for producing commodities.

Understanding ‘digital’ labour matters to wider understandings of the importance of ‘the digital’ for economies in a number of ways. First, it gives us a way to delineate between work that is paid for and work that is not, which we will explore in relation to ‘attention’ in the second half of the lecture. Second, the place of work comes into question with the untethering of labour from particular workplaces, such as offices and factories, and is the context by which such changes may be explored. Third, ‘digital labour’ lies at the heart of contemporary debates concerning productivity – what kinds of work we are all doing and how it generates value.

In the second part of the lecture we explore the commodification of human attention through digital media. A significant element to the contemporary digital economy is the ways in which many forms of digital media are concerned with capturing and retaining attention. With so much ‘content’ online, and so many apps and platforms, that are always growing but with a more finite number of people and their capacity to watch, listen and click – attention is a scarce resource.

When we understand attention as a resource, when we think about it as ‘work’, then we can understand it as having economic value. Even when apps and platforms are ‘free’ we ‘pay’ through our attention, and the associated advertising revenue or audience exposure that might represent.

In the lecture for this session we will explore attention as a resource that advertisers and technology developers seek to capture and sell. We will consider the effects of this approach to our capacity to attention on the development of digital technologies and the kinds of meaning and value we associate with them.