Labor and Materiality in the Digital Age

This list was originally drafted back in 2011 and as of this writing, in 2015, it’s a bit out of date. However, if you’re interested in this list, you might be interested in the class that emerged from it, which I taught in winter 2014 at UCLA: Digital Labor, Materiality, and Urban Space. And here’s a more extensive Zotero library on this topic.

Addelman, Ben, and Samir Mallal. Bombay Calling. National Film Board of Canada, 2006.

Alexander R. Galloway. “The Unworkable Interface.” New Literary History 39, no. 4 (2008): 931-955.

Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Ascher, Kate. The Works: Anatomy of a City. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.

Baichwal, Jennifer. Manufactured Landscapes. Zeitgeist Films, 2006.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Blanchette, Jean‐François. “A Material History of Bits.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (June 1, 2011): 1042-1057.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (October 1, 2001): 1-22.

Center for Land Use Interpretation. “The Center for Land Use Interpretation Land Use Database”, n.d. http://ludb.clui.org/.

Center for Land Use Interpretation and Matthew Coolidge. Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.

Ceruzzi, Paul. Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005. Cambridge  Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2011.

Frank, Thomas. Boob Jubilee: The Cultural Politics of the New Economy. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2003.

Funari, Vicki, and Sergio De La Torre. Maquilapolis: City of Factories. Independent Television Service, 2006.

Graham, Stephen. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Gulati, Sonali. Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night. Women Make Movies, 2008.

Hayles, N. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Historypin. “Dreams of a City: Creating East Palo Alto”, n.d. http://www.dreamsofacity.org/.

Hustwit, Gary. Objectified, n.d. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/objectified/.

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge  Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.

Light, Jennifer S. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455-483.

McPherson, Tara. “U.S. Operating Systems at MidCentury: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” In The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Mendehlson, Ben. Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors, 2011. http://vimeo.com/30642376.

Montfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge  Mass.: MIT Press, 2009.

Nakamura, Lisa. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 2 (June 2009): 128-144.

———. Race after the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Pitti, Stephen. The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. Princeton  N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Ross, Andrew. “Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property.” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2006): 743-766.

Smith, James Allen. Floored. DVD, Documentary. Typecast Releasing, 2009.

Smith, Ted. Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

Starosielski, Nicole, and Craig Dietrich. “Surfacing,” n.d. http://vectorsjournal.org/projects/surfacing/.

Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Electronic Book Review (June 20, 2003).

Ullman, Ellen. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents: A Memoir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.

Virno, Paolo. “Grammar of the Multitude.” Text, 2004. http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm#%20GrammarOfTheMultitude-div1-id2866923.

Weber, Steve. The Success of Open Source. Cambridge  MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

One Reply to “Labor and Materiality in the Digital Age”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *