Interaction Labor
Description
Kate Eichhorn (Assistant Professor in the Media and Culture Department at The New School and Adjunct Professor of Communication and Culture at York University.):
"Commonplace books and other encyclopedic forms in the 16th century would regularly go through multiple editions, often with substantial additions and corrections provided to printers by readers/users. Reflecting on how readers/users were directly involved in generating content for printed commonplace books, encyclopedias, scrapbooks etc. in previous eras also seems essential to understanding “interaction labor” in the present. Of course, labor and capital were understood along completely different lines in the 16th century so one needs to avoid any simplistic analogues here, but I do think that print culture’s collaborative genres are relevant to this discussion. I’d argue that interaction labor is not new but simply happening on a different scale in our current economy."