| As digital technologies have become a part of our daily lives, scholars have raised concerns that digital media are making us more isolated, alienated, and economically exploited. But in my research on the production, distribution, depiction, and reception of digital content in the workplace, I found that online culture is more dynamic. I argue that the workplace is an important location for the consumption and circulation of digital culture as well as an ideal context for understanding how digital technologies factor into the media industries. Following a "site-specific" ethnographic approach, I observed a dozen workplaces, interviewed a variety of creative workers, and found that assumptions about digital media have less to do with technological capabilities and more to do with the business strategies of the media industries and cultural anxieties about the proliferation of global capitalism. My findings show that digital technologies are revealing the relationship between cultural producers and consumers by externalizing behaviors and practices previously hidden. |
