New research on the new work practices of the ‘technobohemians
We are reproducing the announcement on this new publication:
Network Notebooks is a series of publications on recent new media theory. Network Notebooks nr.1 is a publication by Rosalind Gill.
Title: Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? New media work in Amsterdam a decade after the web
About the publication
Accounts of new media working draw heavily on two polarised stereotypes, veering between techno-utopianism on the one hand, and a vision of web-workers as the new ‘precariat’, victims of neoliberal
economic policies and moves to flexibilisation and insecurity on the other. Heralded from both perspectives as representing the brave new world of work what is striking is the absence of research on new media workers own experiences, particularly in a European context. This report goes beyond the contemporary myths of new media work, to explore how people working in the field experience the pleasures, pressures and challenges of working on the web. Illustrated throughout with quotations from interviews, this research examines the different career biographies emerging for content-producers in web-based industries, questions the relevance of existing education and training, and highlights the different ways in which people manage and negotiate
freelancing, job insecurity, and keeping up to date in a fast-moving field where software and expectations change rapidly.
The research is based on 35 interviews carried out in Amsterdam in 2005, and contextually draws upon a further 60 interviews with web designers in London and Brighton. The interviews were carried out by Danielle van Diemen and Rosalind Gill.
About the author
Rosalind Gill is a teacher and researcher based at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is author of The Gender-Technology Relation (with Keith Grint) and her new book Gender and the Media has
just been published by Polity press. She carried out research on new media working for the European Commission in 2000 and published some of the results relating to new inequalities in this field in an influential article entitled ‘Cool, creative and egalitarian?’ She is currently preparing a book about women and the web, and completing analysis of 180 interviews with web designers in London, Brighton and L.A.
For more information please visit: www.networkcultures.org/networknotebooks.
A pdf is also freely available at www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/17.pdf.