Vincent Manzerolle – författare

Mobile technology is now firmly situated in the operations, both formal and informal, of modern labour and workforce management. This book focuses on how the interests of corporations and governments to embrace a "new economy" have served to drive the development and uptake of mobile/ubiquitous media. Touching on topics including unpaid labour and big data, surveillance, AI, the global smartphone market, telecommuting, automation, and more, Manzerolle offers readers an astute and timely investigation into digital labour, mobile media, and political economy which may hint at the future of work.

This edited collection comprises foundational texts and new contributions that revisit the theory of the «audience commodity» as first articulated by Dallas Smythe. Contributors focus on the historical and theoretical importance of this theory to critical studies of media/communication, culture, society, economics, and technology – a theory that has underpinned critical media studies for more than three decades, but has yet to be compiled in a single edited collection.The primary objective is to appraise its relevance in relation to changes in media and communication since the time of Smythe’s writing, principally addressing the rise of digital, online, and mobile media. In addition to updating this perspective, contributors confront the topic critically in order to test its limits. Contextualizing theories of the audience commodity within an intellectual history, they consider their enduring relationship to the field of media/communication studies as well as the important legacy of Dallas Smythe.