Martin Roberts
Bio
| I teach film and media studies in the Bachelors Program in Liberal Arts and Eugene Lang College at the New School. My research interests focus on the cultural dimension of globalization and the relation of transnational media to these processes. My work explores questions such as the role of media in the production of national identities; transnational cultural imaginaries; and the transformation of television from a public-service medium into an instrument for the governance of consumer society. I am currently working on a book which studies the implications of globalization for subcultural identities. |
Abstract
Productivity Is Fun
With regard to the concerns of the conference around digital labor, I'm interested in the relation between labor and leisure, and the disappearance of the distinction between the two: if labor in the digital economy is often characterized as a form of play, the flipside is that leisure has become a new form of labor. The contemporary discourse on productivity continually exhorts us to make even what little free time remains to us to become more productive citizens. Within this context, I'm interested in the deployment of the concept of FUN in the contemporary discourse on productivity. Historically, fun is an experience of pleasure which has tended to be associated with spheres of experience *outside* labor time: its archetypal example remains Coney Island, a kind of benign inversion of industrial production in which decommissioned coal trucks are converted into adventure rides. The very concept of an "amusement park" seems antithetical to everything the factory stands for in terms of production, commodified labor, and clocked time. In contemporary digital culture, a proliferating chorus of voices insist that productivity is "fun," or explain how we can have fun while also being productive. Contrary to such assertions, I'm interested in exploring new forms of non productive fun, and dedicated to the idea that fun is by definition non-productive. Updating Veblen, I'd suggest that we need a contemporary theory of the productive class, which would consider amongst other things how productivity has replaced leisure as the basis for social distinction in postmodern society.