ICTs and Immaterial Labor From a Feminist Perspective

In this article, I discuss an issue which lies at the core of today’s “political economy” of the domestic sphere. The issue in question is that human beings are pushed to “outsource” their emotions, information, communication, education, organization, and entertainment, while they are left with scarce new technological support with which to cope with the fatigue, stress, boredom, and complexity of housework. My question is “Why has technology which is related to the material aspects of housework ceased to develop, whereas the technology connected to its immaterial aspects (information and communication technologies or ICTs) has grown at an increasing rate?” For answering this question, I analyze briefly how the machinization of the domestic sphere has developed the technologies connected to material labor such as means of transportation and domestic appliances and those connected to immaterial labor such as mass media, ICTs, and new media. A double strategy has always been pursued: a specific strategy is applied to immaterial labor, involving a great deal of technology, and an opposite strategy, involving much less technology, is applied to material labor. This bifurcation is necessary to maintain a high level of value production in everyday life. Nowadays immaterial labor not only creates value in the process of reproduction of the labor force but also generates capital directly. One only needs to think, for example, of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and so on. They are basically enterprises which extract value directly from sociability, friendship, and emotion for producing capital.