Working-Class Network Society Reconsidered: From Information Have-Less to Network Labor?

Speaker: Jack Qiu, Chair and Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Abstract: This talk revisits arguments from the 2009 book Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China. It extends key ideas such as existential informational needs, social innovation, and network labor to the contexts of East and Southeast Asia, while updating them in the era of gig economy and AI. Processes of economic and social transformation continue to shape class and class consciousness, although seismic shifts are taking place in the realms of globalization, urbanization, and industrialization. Today’s working-class network society has become more pervasive, more polarized, and more ephemeral. But openings for change persist, in Asia and the Global South.

Bio: Dr. Jack Linchuan Qiu is Chair and Shaw Foundation Professor of Media Technology at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has published more than 130 research articles and chapters and 11 books in English and Chinese including Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (University of Illinois P, 2016), World Factory in the Information Age (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013), Working-Class Network Society (MIT Press, 2009), and co-authored book Mobile Communication and Society (MIT Press, 2005). He is a recipient of the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy, and an elected Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA).

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IPaT: GVU Lunch Lecture Series