The Young
Digital Creative Labour
in South Korea
King’s Asian CCI Research Society Seminar
24 October 2014
Yeran Kim (yeran@kw.ac.kr)
Perspectives
1. Contextualization
Away from an individualistic behaviorism and
functionalism of “produser”
To
“outernet”(Terranova, 2000):
cultural, economic and political complexities embedded
in the phenomenon of the young people’s enthusiastic
involvement in digital communicative activities.
Perspectives
2. A Combinative Narrative
: subcultural capital and creative labour
in the account of the life and work of the
younger generation in the contemporary
post-capitalist and post-modern era.
Socio-economic Background:
in Contradiction
The young people in their 20s and
universities students in South Korea:
1) Children of the affluent consumer society
2) Joblessness and loss of hope
3) Precariousness and risk
in the age of the post-capitalist and
neoliberal austerity.
Rates of employment and
unemployment (aged 15-29)
Self-clamed Social “Residual”
1) The young people’s self-perceived
precarization
2) Self-called ING-YUE (‘residual’):
young people feeling themselves as useless
and marginalized in the society.
ING YUE
Multiple and Contradictory Aspects
of the Younger Generation (20s)
O Affluent and sophisticated
cultural consumers
O University students
O Digital natives and
technologically savvy
and yet
O Precarious.
4 Great things for university
Students to do during summer
vacation ???
http://blog.naver.com/dlgusrl9238?Redirec
t=Log&logNo=70171641522
4 Great things for university
Students to do during summer
vacation
http://blog.naver.com/dlgusrl9238?Redirect=Log&logNo=7017164152
1. Marketing public competition
2. Supporters and social communicators
3. Management and improvement of the
one’s own health and beauty
4. Trip around the nation
Qualifications for Social
Communicators
1. To Love Sports and Fashion
2. Passion for On/Offlines Participatory
Activities
3. Capability for Producing Digital Contents
4. To be Self-confident and Enjoy
Challenges
Digital Creative Labour
A self-entrepreneur as an amateur - expert
on cultural topics(arts, fashion, cosmetic,
cultural event etc.) with (sub)cultural
capitals.
Utilizing social media for self-branding and
expanding social networks.
Digital Creative Labour
1. Pragmatism and Hedonism
A: I am a marketer and editor (of an online
magazine). I report certain events and news of
the trend shops. The sponsors do not have to pay
us. I get a voucher (app. 300 US $) from the
company then I buy my clothes with it. I am
certainly used by them but I keep right my track
too. So I am living happy life. … I happily enjoy
this work in compromising many hurdles.
Digital Creative Labour
2. Capitalization of social relations
B: Above all, I do this because I am enjoying this. I
love to meet people through my work, who share
the common interest with me. Also I can learn
something new from them. What is best for me is
that I can talk and share with a variety of people
on the topics I am interested in.
Digital Creative Labour
3. Commodification of Labour
B: The company gives me new items. They do not pay me
salaries or any fixed amount of money for my work. For
example, these pants and shoes I wear now were given by
them. I would not work only because I can get the new
goods but because the items offered by the companies after
completing a good deal of work bring me a certain feeling of
achievement.
Digital Creative Labour
4. Becoming a Human Capital
: Career building
B: Furthermore, although I am currently
keeping this work just because I am
interested, these work experiences may help
my career building in the fashion industry in
the future.
Digital Creative Labour
A culture of labour which is, in mediation
of digital communication technologies,
based on the ethos of freedom, autonomy
and creativity but situated in the
neoliberal, post-capitalist regime in which
the problems of precariousness and
instability in life and work have become
aggravated.
Digital Creative Labour
A critical concept which ultimately
pursues a possibility of the cultural
invention of other forms of life and work.
 Ambivalence and indeterminacy over
freedom/subordination, creation/control,
flexibility/precariousness.
Digital Creative Workers
1) enthusiastic and informed consumers of
cultural commodities.
2) struggling with the difficulties of unstable
and precarious life conditions.
3) free labors (Terranova, 2004): diligently
and voluntarily produce personal data and
digital contents thereby providing surplus
values to the major digital media
corporations and culture industries.
4) potential self-entrepreneurs based on the
ethos of freedom, autonomy and creativity.
Digital Creative Workers
5) Normatised self-precarization (Lorey,
2011): with (or despite) their own belief,
desire and aspiration for the freedom and
autonomy, they voluntarily subject
themselves to the exploitive control
powers of corporate capitals and the
neoliberal order of governing creative
labor.
Types of Digital Creative Workers
1) Running self-employed companies (e.g.
online shopping malls, online magazines)
2) Joining in community-styled
independent online groups (e.g. cultural
magazines, collective pod-casting,
cultural events)
Types of Digital Creative Workers
3) Selected as ‘supporters’ and ‘social
communicators’: recruited into major
corporations in creative industries
O On/Offline marketing, networking and
promotion activities
O Co-operation or Exploitation ?
Strategic Interests
of Digital Creative Workers
Symbolically,
building up reputations and self-branding.
Strategic Interests of Digital
Creative Workers
2) Practically, if unpaid,
Contribution to the CV.
Networking (potential opportunity to get a
job at the company in the future)
Given brand-new cool goods
Self-Governmentality of Digital
Creative Workers
1) Biolabour (Morini & Fumagalli, 2010)
: to keep their mind and body well-managed
2) Cultivation of Communicative Skills:
deliberately designed rhetoric of writing and
visualizing skills
A blood type B man’s stories,
who lives hard to eat well.
•
http://typeb3.blog.me/
“I intentionally eat nothing during the day,
so that pictures of foods look far greater.
This is because the more hungry I am, the
more enthusiastic for food I become and the
photos I am taking in hunger come to have
more impact”.
Self-Governmentality of Digital
Creative Workers
3) Systematic Management of Everyday Life
Self-Branded Fashionist DINDI
http://blog.naver.com/tlswlgprjt
Self-Branded Fashionist DINDI
Self-Branded Fashionist DINDI
“ Sometimes I feel scared to produce
contents and upload them to publicize
myself regularly on time. But I push myself
to do this because this is a promise to myself”
Self-Governmentality of Digital
Creative Workers
4) Online networking as service labour:
visiting and responding others’ sites on
social media as part of insurance and
investment
5) Self-satisfaction and evaluation by the
companies
A Social Marketer
– PUMA Sports wear,
BARAGI Eye Wear
http://blog.naver.com/12341234ok
A Social Marketer
– PUMA Sports wear,
BARAGI Eye Wear
A Social Marketer
– PUMA Sports wear,
BARAGI Eye Wear
“I would like to express myself in more
diverse postures. I feel myself proud to see
that my appearances in the photos have
become more natural”
The Ethics of Work
: The Spirit of Capitalism
1) Max Weber: The cultivation of rationality
in human economic activities (perpetual
labor, accumulation of wealth and regular
investment based on frugal life-style and
asceticism).
2) Albert Hirschman:
Modern capitalism was possible through
the modulation and transformation of
passion to interests.
The Ethics of Work
: ‘The New Spirit of Capitalism’
(Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007)
A new mode of ‘homo economicus’ (Michel
Foucault)
Compromise between the conflicting
situation of economic hardship, futureless
desperation and social polarization & their
own ambition for self-enterprise and
fantasy of big shot someday.
Subjectivity of Digital Creative
Labour
The reformulation of neoliberal economic
rationality & passion for freedom,
enthusiasm, hedonism and fun as the postcapitalist hegemonic affective structure.
The integration and embodiment of
emotion/rationality, passion/interest,
cultural creativity/economic
Conclusion
A new mode of ‘homo economicus’ (Michel
Foucault): to invest and capitalize the self,
his/her life(bio).
Conclusion
O The formation of labour ethics, combination
of emotion/rationality,
cultural creation/economic strategy
passion/interest.
O The attitude of self-precarization is wellsuited to the governmentality of neoliberal
regime (Lorey, 2011), in which the values of
social equity and stability is forcefully
replaced with the catch-phrase of flexibility,
mobility and dynamism of innovation.
Thanks!