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From Playgrounds to Sweatshops

By Holly Willis
November 3, 2010
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Is updating your Facebook page labor? Or pleasure? Who benefits? And how does this activity connect - or not - with the work performed in sweatshops?From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City, the latest pamphlet in the Situated Technologies series published by the Architectural League of New York, is just out, and discusses these questions with a compelling conversation between Trebor Scholz, an assistant professor in Media & Culture at the New School in New York and founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity, and Laura Y. Liu, an assistant professor of Urban Studies, also at the New School. The pair discusses the complexities of labor, exploitation, social networks and urban space, replacing the frequently gleeful celebrations of online participation with a more sober assessment that consider our activities in the context of work. They ask us to be more aware of the kinds of work we perform online in trade for various services that seem to be "free," noting that nothing is free. "We are all tenants on commercial real estate and our land-fee is paid for - almost inscrutably - with out attention, data and content," comments Scholz. Liu, in contrast, focuses on what she calls the "sweatshop city," a place "dominated by a spatial hierarchy of work that is unevenly visible and intentionally obscures certain relations of work." Their conversation underscores the fact that understanding how value is generated online and in the shifting landscapes of today's urban spaces constitutes a new literacy, but one that remains relatively unnoticed.
(Image: from Alex Rivera's film Sleep Dealer, shown on the cover of the pamphlet.)

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