Demanding Media: Platform Work and the Shaping of Work and Play

Justine Humphry

Abstract

Most of us have had the experience of dealing with problems, errors and failures of code in one or more of the vast array of digital devices, applications, online systems, cables, plugs, cards and other media we consume on a daily basis. This ‘platform work’, a concept that builds on Bogost and Montfort’s (2009) definition of a media platform, is a new kind of labour that arises from the highly mediated environments in which we live, work and play. Rather than assessing these errors and failures simply as aberrations, a nuisance and waste of time, this article takes up Parikka and Sampson’s (2009) argument that accidents are expressive of the experience of use. Just as importantly, they shape the spaces and times in which we work, live and play.

This paper introduces examples of platform work from a study on professionals’ digital media use and juxtaposes these with corresponding activities performed by game players and artists. Some of the products of this work - the workarounds, glitches and mods - are considered in terms of whether and how these are granted value and in what way this assignment contributes to the construction of the boundaries between work and play. Platform work is experienced differentially by users, with varying levels of access to and ability to mobilise skills and resources - as well as varying opportunities for formal recognition. The paper concludes that media platforms and the work performed on them as much as through them have become key nodes of struggle in a culture and economy premised on knowledge-creation and user-production.

Introduction

At one time or another, and sometimes more often than we’d like, most of us have had the experience of dealing with technological problems, errors and failures of code in one or more of the vast array of digital devices, applications, online systems, cables, plugs, cards and other media we consume on a daily basis. This work of maintenance and repair of media infrastructures is one of the many new demands of users arising from the highly mediated environments in which we work, live and play.

The shift to a knowledge society and processes of mediation are bound up in the blurring of the boundaries of the circuits of production and consumption. Concepts like “produsage” (Bruns 2008) and “participatory culture” (Jenkins 2009) point to the user activity and culture that unfolds with this blurring. As Henry Jenkins writes of this shift: “knowledge culture alters gradually the ways the commodity culture operates, in which the unfinished aesthetics of commodities represents also a constant starting point for ongoing creation” (2006: 144). Yet, within this paradigm, the celebration of a culture of user creativity can potentially obscure new forms of user labour that provide the necessary support conditions for this culture to be sustained over time.

In this paper, I investigate one of these forms - the largely hidden work of repair and maintenance that users perform on their media platforms on a regular basis. I call this ‘platform work’, taking up some key concepts and research in the field of platform studies (Bogost & Montfort 2009), and distinguishing it from the parade of newly discovered forms of digital labour such as ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato 1996), ‘hope labour’ (Corrigan & Kuehn 2013), ‘free labour’ (Terranova 2000), ‘co-creative labour’ (Banks & Deuze 2009), ‘virtual work’ (Huws 2003), ‘affective work’ (Hardt 1999) and so on.

Identifying and examining ‘platform work’ is important for a number of reasons. It can make a contribution to an area of research well underway in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) by highlighting the new demands of support for a growing digital workforce: knowledge professionals, creative and cultural workers, whose work is increasingly taking place through the internet and on the move. A national survey of ‘digital work’ found the number of Australian workers using the internet to work away from the office was 51% of the total workforce, with 28% working while travelling (Gregoria 2013). In addition, the concept highlights the efforts of ordinary users towards working configurations of media as an increasingly normal feature of what Mark Deuze (2012) has described as our “media life” - a new relationship we have towards media as our everyday activities become completely intertwined with and supported by media environments.

Identifying this new relationship, which includes the new demands to keep media platforms working, addresses a major gap in the digital labour literature. To date, this work has failed to recognise the non-deliberative and accidental aspects of the current digital media environment as generative of new kinds of social and capital relations. Rather than assessing errors simply as aberrations, a nuisance and waste of time, I take up Jussi Parikka and Tony Sampson’s (2009) argument that these be thought of expressive of the actual experience of use, with potential for creating new knowledge, skills and innovations as well as for shaping the boundary between work and play. At the same time, users have varying capacities to mobilise skills and resources towards their media platforms and opportunities to have their efforts recognised, making it largely a hidden form of labour.

The relationship of visibility to invisibility, one of the main concerns of this special issue, is itself a work of definition and what counts as visible may be challenged and redefined. As researchers found in situated studies of use of early computer systems in the workplace, the work of supporting new technologies is often not identified or credited, despite it involving considerable skill and knowledge (Clement 1991, 1993; Star 1991; Star & Strauss 1999; Suchman 1987, 1995). These authors argue that all work is subject to a politics of visibility, with some work more readily captured and officially recognised while other work is discounted, remaining invisible to formal organisational accounts.

On the other hand, there may be good reasons for certain forms of labour to remain in the background. Mitchell Whitelaw’s (2009; 2011) concept of ‘transmateriality’ is useful for appreciating this point. Whitelaw refers to a plethora of material conditions and states as the necessary foundation for digital media systems. It is by virtue of their invisibility that these systems are able to maintain their generality, allowing them to transduce, to make events happen across different layers and platforms with relative ease and transparency.

Like code, the work of repair and maintenance on media platforms forms part of transmateriality. This user labour (often performed in tandem with non-humans as well) not only supports the generality of digital systems, it is vital for a range of new social and creative expressions and productions. Yet this labour struggles to be defined and valorised for the very reason that it is an embedded feature of everyday life. With the centrality of code in contemporary cultures (Bentley 2003; Dodge & Kitchin 2005) and the redistribution of production beyond the organisation, there is a need to disembed this work, to identify and examine whether and how users’ work on media platforms is assigned value, and consider its generative capacity for creating new knowledge and shaping cultural domains.

To investigate platform work and respond to these issues, I present examples of technological practices from my research on mobile professionals and juxtapose these with corresponding activities performed by game players and artists. I explore some of the products of platform work, the workarounds, glitch exploits and mods. The comparison of platform work by distinct communities of practice has been selected to display the widespread nature of this phenomenon and its common characteristics across life spheres. This is not to say that platform work and its products manifest or are treated in exactly the same way within these communities of practice. However, its pervasiveness is one of the forces further weakening any clear separation of the categories of work and play. As Joyce Goggin has observed,

We are currently witnessing a progressive mixing of these two categories… work and play, to the extent that they were formerly thought to be stable, discrete categories have, in numerous contexts from office management to online game worlds, somehow changed places or come together to form striking hybrids. (2011:357)

This mixing might in part be a function of new forms and modes of knowledge-creation and user-production that help to break down previously separated spheres of production and consumption. It might also be a case of the new demands of media, which call for a new set of practices and skills and which bring about opportunities for challenging and re-defining these spheres. I start by situating platform work alongside other identified forms of digital labour.

Labour in the digital economy

A number of key contributions addressing the rise of a digital economy have been helpful for understanding the online activities of users as operating within a set of new or changed labour relations.

In developing her concept of ‘free labour’, Tiziana Terranova (2000) starts with a counterpoint to Barbook’s definition of the ‘digital economy’ as a mixed economy of public, market-driven and gift elements that combines new technologies with new types of digital workers. Using Lazzarato’s concept of ‘immaterial labour’, Terranova argues that the digital economy is better understood as an area for experimenting with and capturing new forms of cultural and affective labour. Labour is everywhere in Terranova’s account - requisite for sustaining the constant production and updating of the internet - but it is not all waged. Indeed, much of it is ‘free’ in the sense that it is contributed without financial reward and sometimes for pleasure. Terranova points to volunteer maintenance of mailing lists and open source software as examples of free labour, which she sees as intensifying and becoming central to late capitalism.

The online activities of users are also foundational to new labour relations as conceived in the literature on “digital labour”, a concept that has specific usage and meaning for authors such as Burston, Dyer-Witheford and Hearn (2010), Fuchs (2010) and Scholz (2012). Here the exploitative nature of capitalist labour relations is given more emphasis than in Terranova’s ‘free labour’ account. Users engage in the creation of online content such as blogs, social networking sites, wikis, microblogs and location-based services, which in turn create value for owners of commercially operated sites and platform who commodify this content for targeted advertising opportunities.

The strength of these accounts is that they show, that with the breakdown of the circuits of production and consumption, it is not that production disappears, but rather that production is transferred and distributed, with users taking up a larger share of the overall workload. However, what they fail to capture are the circumstances where this work occurs as an expression of the limits or failures of digital media platforms. Terranova’s ‘free labour’ explicitly covers aspects of infrastructural support, for example, in the coding of open source software. Curiously, however, there is little to no discussion of the kinds of activities that fall outside of the rational goals of work but which nevertheless exist in their service. Another way of describing these activities is the work required to complete primary work objectives but which may shift registers to become the primary objective under certain conditions (Brodie & Perry 2006). Digital infrastructures rely on a vast and usually hidden reservoir of these secondary activities.

There is now a mature body of work in CSCW exposing the practical requirements of supporting digitally mediated work, particularly the repair, adjustment, articulation and maintenance performed by the increasing numbers of mobile professionals on the move. However, one of the most striking changes since the mass popularisation of the internet and rise of social media is the way in which creating and maintaining working configurations of media technology is now a regular feature of use and no longer restricted to elite knowledge professionals. Users direct significant efforts towards making their platforms work - either to some planned action or existing pattern of activity. Moreover, users are recruited into the ongoing production and development of these platforms - customising, installing, bug checking, error reporting and updating. In other words, we are not just living what Deuze has described as a “media life” - we are also producers of it; we are “prosumers”, referring to Ritzer and Jurgenson’s (2010) use of the term to identify a new form of user-generated capitalism.

Platform work

A platform, according to Bogost and Montfort (2009), is any sort of computing system on which further computing development can be done. Though the definition is a general one, the application has to date been focused on the way in which platforms, (as hardware, software or a combination of the two) are used to support creative work. One of the strengths of this definition is that it offers a path through the prickly hedges of the debate on technological determinism while opening up enquiry into the operation of specific technologies and arrays of technologies once in use. This definition also helps to identify a long-term pattern in the development and marketing of digital media: as potential for users self-expression and creativity.

As Jussi Parikka (2012) remarked in his keynote address at the inaugural CODE conference, Apple is one maker of computing platforms that makes the idea of user creativity central to their computing vision, a move which can be an effective means to differentiate their products from those of their competitors. In the ‘Get a Mac’ series of TV commercials that ran from 2006 to 2009, starring John Hodgman as ‘PC’ and Justin Long as ‘Mac’, Apple products are presented as not only providing more creative uses than their PC counterparts, they are also used by more creative people.

A platform such as a general desktop or laptop offers the potential for creative activity but, as the ‘Get a Mac’ campaign identifies and exploits, the products and associated activities may not necessarily be thought of as ‘creative’. As Justin Long, representing ‘Mac’ and the offerings of iLife, sarcastically drawls in response to ‘PC’s’ retort of a clock and calculator bundle: “sounds like hours of fun”. Sarcasm aside, whether a work’s identity is deemed to be ‘creative’ is ultimately socially and discursively assigned and this assignment is multi-factorial; dependent on the domain of activity to which it belongs (whether for leisure or work), the kind of work including the associations, expectations and limitations of those who perform it and the representation of that work including whether it is perceived to be a productive activity.

Marc Andreessen argues that platforms are reconfigurable: “if you can program it, then it’s a platform. If you can’t, then it’s not” (cited in Bogost and Montfort 2009). This is what makes platforms flexible and imminently creative. Yet, at any one time platforms also demand to be configured, and not just by developers programming in software or machine code. Rather, configuring covers an enormous gamut of activities performed by users to stabilise their media platforms to preserve the potential for creativity and, in some instances, to create new potential. Users respond to glitches, errors, failures and limits of their platforms and the surrounding media environment with a range of modifications, customisations and adjustments - these configurations are not usually represented as the creative products of media use but rather, exist as the oftentimes hidden work that is performed on them.

The definition of a platform developed here retains the emphasis on systems that support further computing but does not only cover those systems used to produce what are commonly thought of as ‘creative works’. Rather, platforms support the creation of all kinds of informational artefacts that gain their identity and value through their production, exchange and consumption in a culture and economy increasingly oriented towards and driven by knowledge. This is a systemic phenomenon, its development and growth driven by digital media platforms that support new forms and modes of knowledge-creation and user-production. As work is mediated through these new forms, in a new paradigm described by network society theorist Manuel Castells (1996) as “informationalism”, it increasingly takes place in and through media. This is platform work.

Examples of platform work

I’m now going to share with you some examples of platform work conducted by professionals and compare these with corresponding activities that are performed by artists and game players. As mentioned, these have been selected to identify how platform work is a widespread phenomenon across communities of practice. They have also been chosen to illustrate Terranova’s (2000: 42) point that in a digital economy, the emergence of new labour relations is a whole-of-society phenomenon with varying degrees of intensity, despite the continuing influence of pre-existing hierarchies of knowledge. The aim here is to show some of the activities that constitute platform work across the work/leisure divide, opening up lines of comparison and points of difference, in order to challenge commonsense notions of ‘creative work’ and consider the ways platform work mediates the whole media environment, including the boundaries between work and play.

The source of many of these examples is research I conducted over 2006 and 2007 on the use of media technologies by professionals in a council in Sydney and a telecommunications company or ‘telco’ (in shorthand), in Melbourne. For 18 months prior to the study, a group of telco employees were involved in a trial of a smartphone in development for the company’s line of mobile and wireless products. These employees frequently travelled for business and as part of the trial, were encouraged to stay away from the company headquarters and provide feedback on their use of the smartphone. Ethnographic research methods were employed to gain a comprehensive snapshot of daily media use: face-to-face interviews, participant observation and personal recordings in a ‘technology diary’ which participants kept for two working weeks. Pseudonyms are used throughout this article in reference to participants.

As well as recording problems and when, what and how technology was used, individuals were asked to reflect on diary entries through personal comments and drawings. The diary provided a way to reveal interactions with technologies, functioning as a tool for de-routinising normal habits and routines (Sofoulis 2005). Observations and shadowing enabled work to be followed beyond the workplace and added a visual understanding of how spaces and resources were organised and assembled for work. For comparison, this article sources additional examples are from game player blogs, YouTube videos, glitch art and user game modding and development. Investigations of everyday practices commonly utilise a range of mixed methodologies (Scott 2009). The approach taken here, combining ethnographic data with analysis of online textual examples and secondary texts, helps to reveal the taken-for-granted and routinised actions of users on their media platforms. It also helps to illustrate the range of responses and products that emanate from these actions. These textual examples are also meaningful in the context of their production and circulation (Lee & Poynton 2000). It is telling that within the gaming and art worlds, many of the products of platform glitches and code hacks are well documented - a signal perhaps, of their value and place as part of a broader critique and reassessment of the way valorisation regimes have, in the past, been defined and driven by formal industries and institutions.

User configurations: workarounds, exploits and mods

For mobile professionals in the smartphone trial, configuring was an activity performed to assemble together multiple objects, putting them in relation in meaningful and useful ways. These objects were largely made up of digital media - their prototype smartphone, laptop, Ethernet cable, USB - but also extended to a host of other supporting artefacts, like pen and paper, and conditions, like a place to settle over time, to concentrate, get out of the glare and so on. It was this ensemble of media, objects and conditions that made up a working office platform.

At other times, configuring was a response to an unexpected result or glitch while assembling or using their office platform, requiring extra efforts of repair. Rosa Menkman, in her ‘Glitch Studies Manifesto’, defines the glitch as having “no solid form or state through time; it is often perceived as an unexpected and abnormal modus operandi, a break from (one of) the many flows (of expectations) within a technological system” (2009/10: 341). In this situation, repair is directed at reinstating the flows that preserve the potential for doing and creating work through the office platform.

It was during travel that staff in the trial of the smart phone experienced the most difficulty assembling their office platform, coming across glitches frequently. At these times, staff encountered enormous variability in the conditions that were necessary for their work, as well as in how their use of the smartphone was received by those around them. Paradoxically, this variability was compounded by the very technology that allowed staff to be dislocated in the first place. For even though the smartphone enabled these staff to access the company’s information and communication services and the internet when they were away, it also meant that staff were more contactable in places where there was little or no support for their work activities.

Configuring was directed towards overcoming or working around the limits of the spaces in which they found themselves, the complexity of their technologies and the extra requirements of being more highly connected and contactable. Since the smart phone was commonly used with a laptop and in a variety of settings, the number of parts involved in configuring was significantly increased. This meant that at any moment one of its components could fail, go missing, be incompatible or simply be unavailable. In these situations, platform breakdowns were commonplace as Jan, the Business Development Manager, told me:

I think it’s become more complex. There’s a lot more to absorb now, lot more interaction, lots more complexities in the way things work. And if things go wrong then, it’s no longer a simple matter of turning it off and turning it on, and hoping for the best...

Professional workers, especially those on the move, are very resourceful at coming up with strategies for repairing their work platforms and overcoming extra demands of work on the move. One of these was pre-trip planning practices, or ‘planful opportunism’, such as printing out documents or carrying extra cables. Brown and O’Hara (2003: 12) discovered similar practices used by the mobile professionals in their study in the UK. Other strategies included splitting tasks, allocating tasks to different times and locations, selecting media to generate specific effects, configuring on the fly and maximising the affordances of places. Indeed, places that provided an already partially-configured office were quickly identified and integrated into future travel plans.

Workarounds like these had a highly ambivalent status. Despite allowing staff to, in their words, “save time” and “get things done”, telco staff were loath to describe their repair as “real work”, instead describing it as a “waste of time”, creating “inefficiencies”. Moreover, employees found it difficult to separate out their platform work from the glitches they encountered. Once incorporated into daily routines, these workarounds tended to disappear and were only able to be excavated when there was a breakdown or with a tool like the technology diary. Yet, these workarounds were a new form of knowledge - even if a tacit one. They existed as “techniques of the body” in the sense proposed by Marcel Mauss (1973) as the way the body moves and acts in ways that vary between cultures and to the available instruments of a culture. Building on the work of Mauss, Jean-Pierre Warnier (2001) suggests that motricity - the motor habits developed in given materialities - needs to be re-worked into an understanding of how subjects are formed including their sense of self. This approach concentrates on material culture not as an exterior means through which subjects are formed but, as Warnier proposes, “a mediation embodied in the subject”:

We know that incorporated material culture reaches deep into the psyche of the subject because it reaches it not through abstract knowledge, but through sensori-motor experience. (2001: 10-11)

Configuring is one such motor habit or technique by which technologies of work are physically incorporated into the self, generating a ‘know-how’ rather than a ‘know-what’, a knowledge regime developed in more detail by Glen Fuller (2013) in ‘Towards an Archaeology of “Know-how”‘. These small but considered acts of configuring not only made mobile work possible, they also endowed users with feelings of technological competence and readiness. They are one of the means through which workers gain entry and maintain their membership into their specific professional culture.

The work of configuring media platforms and responding to glitches is not limited to mobile professionals. In the gaming world, re-drawing the limits of media platforms is a more formally recognised feature of gameplay. Players take advantage of or exploit program limits in the system to create new experiences and results. One quite famous example in the Pokémon game series is a software bug or glitch in the original mid-1990s Game Boy games that, once exploited, enabled users to catch the secret 151st Pokémon, ‘Mew’. Mew was known as an uncatchable Pokémon, impossible to obtain through conventional play techniques and selectively distributed at game event promotions, for example, to trainers who provided Game Boys and Pokémon Game Paks at Nintendo Power events and Poké conventions (StrategyWiki, Wikia, Bulbapedia, Pokémon Elite 2000).

Though the endings of all games are pre-programmed and thus set, glitches, like the Mew glitch, produce unexpected results, creating the possibility for new games and experiences. Introducing some of the most famous World of Warcraft glitch exploits, Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace write that these “can be among the most interesting ways to experience a virtual world, in part because they enable residents to take actions that weren’t intended to be possible” (2007: 179). Actions in response to glitches can also produce new creative works in the form of cheat walkthroughs, YouTube instructional videos or cheat devices like Gameshark, which supplies cheat cartridges for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and Sega game platforms.

As Menkman (2009/10) documents in her previously mentioned ‘Glitch Studies Manifesto’, glitches can become the source of artistic practice; she points to the “glitch art” of Gijs Gieskes in his Sega Mega Drive 2 (2007), Paul Davis in Codec (2009) and botborg’s Live at Ars Electronica Festival video (2007). For Menkman and glitch artists, glitches are interruptions to be embraced rather than shunned, they challenge the normal uses of a platform and allow for a reconfiguration of its internal logic (Menkman 2009/10). From this perspective, and returning to the notion of a platform as programmable, we can say that glitches represent a challenge to the internally defined parameters of the platform and what should be able to be programmed within it.

Workers, gamers and artists approach the glitch differently - and thus there are different potentialities represented by the glitch and the glitch response. Workarounds, for example, preserve the potential flows built into the platform, upholding the built-in Taylorist logic of efficiency, whereas glitch exploits and glitch art can potentially subvert the internal logic and create new flows and experiences. These differences are framed in some part by the physical domain in which the glitch occurs, be it in the workplace, at home or at a game tournament, for example, but also by the situated demands, expectations and perceived limitations of systems, including those belonging to organisations. This is illustrated in the diary entry where one of the participants expressed a certain amount of frustration that the organisation’s IT department had purchased what they thought was a software system bound to “fail” - the “kid car instead of the BMW”.

In his ethnography of building mechanics, Henke (2000) found that repair is as much about re-normalising expectations and an understanding of the work setting as it is about repairing technology. For staff in the smartphone trial this meant restoring ‘faith’ in the promises of their mobile office - for instance, in its portability and the sense of ‘freedom’ achieved through gaining movement and personal autonomy. It also meant fixing norms and expectations that others had of them and of the environment in which they worked. What is the correct response though, is often highly variable, and often negotiated on the fly, requiring new verbal strategies of repair as well as technical strategies for preparing in advance for the future context of use.

One of the main findings of my research was that new practices and demands of working on the move, in combination with the need to configure media platforms to support this work, sometimes lead to the need to re-establish or create a new line between work and leisure. We know from the contributions of Christena Nippert-Eng (1996) that these categories are conceptual territories and codes as well as spatial domains. In my research, I encountered a range of new practices and techniques used to reconfigure these boundaries. This included physical compartmentalisation - such as placing the mobile device in a cupboard or drawer - and rules and regulations governing configurations with the help of screening aids and filters, such as the ‘out of office’ reply, voice mail and the ‘Freedom’ app, which blocks access to the internet. In one sense these innovations were designed to stop the encroachment of work into life and to “keep work at bay”, part of a general trend in contemporary cultures of work to put the onus on individuals to manage their ‘work-life balance’ (Gregg 2011). In doing this, they also revive the categories of ‘work’ and ‘play’, giving them new relevance even as they are simultaneously collapsed and transformed.

In some instances, responses to glitches might result in a user-created addition or modification known as a mod. In the gaming world, Counter-Strike is a well-known example of a total conversion mod, an entirely new game created by Minh Le, which was originally a modification of the first-person shooter Half-Life (Kücklich 2005). The modification enjoyed such success that it was later marketed as a standalone title for both Xbox and PC (Kücklich 2005).

Through configuring ‘mods’ or modding, game players can be recruited into the long-term development of game platforms. Julian Kücklich (2005) documents how the game industry sometimes uses modding as a software development strategy, pointing to games company Valve’s venture through its distribution platform Steam, where mod teams are offered a “$995 engine license plus royalty to allow them to distribute their mods over Steam”. Kücklich thus identifies modding as an important part of gaming culture as well as an increasingly important source of value for the games industry (2005).

Ordinary users are also recruited into long-term product development, sometimes unknowingly, for example, through beta-testing and bug reporting. Peter Bentley observed that this is an industry strategy in response to the complexity of software, arguing that software has now become so complex and unwieldy that it simply doesn’t work (2003: 34). Software is no longer delivered as fully operational but instead needs continuous updating with service packs and upgrades to deal with bugs in the original code. In this situation, Bentley suggests, “the only options are either to reduce the complexity, or find a different approach to writing code” (2003: 34).

But to what extent is the platform work of users recognised by industry as writing code? Kücklich points out that modding “struggle[s] to free itself from the negative connotations of play: idleness, non-productiveness and escapism” (2005). User-developers can enhance their social status through modding, gaining a reputation as a community leader or ‘pro’, but only very few receive formal recognition and monetisation for their work.

Mobile professionals similarly struggle with the negative connotations associated with the work of repair and maintenance on their media platforms. Since these workers are bound to organisational metrics of performance and time, and are often working without an officially sanctioned culture of play and experimentation, these negative connotations are amplified. Though some workers do have their customisations or workarounds formally recognised as an organisational contribution, these gain their value because of their alignment with the internal logic of productivity and efficiency, rather than for their potential to disrupt this logic and add a new kind of value - for example as decoration or art. This not only creates a new line between work and play, it can also reproduce traditional gendered divisions and associations of work. For example, I observed a number of examples of configuring in my research involving decorating media devices such as smartphones, desktop computers and laptops. These activities provided a great deal of pleasure for employees and promoted a sense of wellbeing that often extended into the larger social context, yet these were rarely considered ‘real work’ by workers or managers, providing few opportunities for recognition or promotion within the organisation.

Conclusion

Different meanings and values are ascribed to platform work and its products based on whether they are recognised as productive and generative of knowledge; what domain of life they are associated with (work or leisure); traditional gendered associations or divisions of work; and the demands, expectations and limitations of others in overarching systems and environments of use. These categories continue to structure the way that platform work is valued and recognised. At the same time, platform work is a way that these categories and the boundaries between them can be re-worked. For mobile worker participating in the smartphone trial, the extra demands of repairing and maintaining their media platform and the lack of recognition of this work fed into an increased sense of time pressure and the need to establish a new line between work and non-work. For game players and ordinary users recruited into long-term platform development, platform work contributes to the blurring of this same line. While this presents users with new financial opportunities and ways to enhance their social standing as community leaders or ‘pros’, this comes at a cost. Only very few of the vast majority of modders, glitch artists and other user-producers receive formal recognition and monetisation for the work on their media platforms, creating a new form of ‘playbour’ (Kücklich 2005).

It is crucial to recognise that problems and errors with our media platforms and dealing with these are a significant feature of our daily interactions. As Norman Perrow (1984) has pointed out, unanticipated breakdowns are better understood as a normal aspect of systems in general. Perrow’s approach to complex systems has some parallels with a more recent turn in new media theory, for example by Parikka and Sampson (2009), concerned with reinstating anomalous objects and events as not merely interruptions or hindrances but expressive of their environments and contexts of use.

The benefits of this approach are multiple: for identifying new demands, experiences and support requirements of working with and on digital media, be it professional or otherwise; for recording new skills and innovations that arise from this work and which are themselves constitutive of knowledge; and for identifying some of the forces shaping the re-configuration of cultural domains and the new tensions and challenges they represent. And ultimately, to recognise that media platforms and the work performed on them as much as through them have become key nodes of struggle in a networked and knowledge-based society. If code is a central feature of our relationship to power and control, as Gilles Deleuze (1992) argued in his post-addendum to Michel Foucault’s work on the disciplinary society, and Castells (1996) asserts in relation to the ‘network society’, then failures of code and how these are understood and dealt with are crucial to the power dynamics and meanings generated in a code-driven and code-controlled society. This extends to the new skills and forms of knowledge we gain in working on our media platforms. Just like code, these form part of the transmateriality (Whitelaw 2009) of media. They are necessary for the operation of digital systems but they are also vital for the production of knowledge and the definition and placement of the boundaries of work and play.

Biographical Note

Justine Humphry is currently Research Fellow of Digital Media in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney and has previously taught at the University of Technology and Macquarie University. Her research interests include the discourses and practices of digital media with a focus on changing patterns of work, leisure and consumption. Her current research examines issues of social inclusion and participation in relation to mobile phones and mobile Internet amongst homeless families and young people. She continues to write about digital technologies and new media cultures in professional settings.