Content Creation and Commodification of Lived Experience: What if life becomes a work of its production as a ‘content’?
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | In an advanced phase of capitalism, such as our digital age, the demarcation line between “work” and “life” is disappearing, posing a serious challenge to the functioning of modern democracies that presuppose the public-private distinction. This paper unfolds “digital content creation” as an emblem of this disappearance, insofar as in it life itself becomes the very object of work, which is constantly formed and produced as “content”. IIn fact, work in modernity is not a fixed category. Under capitalism, the range of activities that enter into the economic realm of capital valuation, i.e. the creation of surplus value, is constantly expanding. The expression “work-life balance” therefore has its meaning not only in balancing the “time” one spends in public activities, which have meaning only as a means to a wage, but primarily in balancing the “expansion” of the realm of commodified, depersonalized activities by another realm that is considered personal and exempt from commerce. In short, if work can be balanced by life, it means that life is conceived as the antipode of work under capitalism. It was precisely Marx's expectation that this dichotomy would be overcome by increasing labor productivity through machinization, because he assumed that this would create time for more people to engage in artistic, scientific, and general intellectual education. My argument is that Marx was correct in anticipating the increased time available to many for such activities in later modernity, but he could not foresee that this “time” could be rearticulated with capitalism by stimulating a demand for a hitherto unimagined form of service: production of lived experiences. What impact can it have on today's discontent with democracy that life itself is now reduced to raw material for content to be produced, and thus to a never-ending “work” of creating, marketing and enjoying more sensational, more unusual lived experiences? |
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