- Title
- Future Creative Industries: media work in the Orgnet
- Creator
- Matthews, Benjamin
- Publisher
- Common Ground
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- Growing isolation and labour precarity in media work (Deuze 2007, 2011) has generated novel forms of collectivism and activism within the Creative Industries. This chapter discusses Enspiral (NZ), an entity that draws on a blend of digital literacies to mediate participant experience of unstable livelihoods and professional identities, whilst fostering social entrepreneurship. This organised network, or “orgnet” (Lovink, 2007; Rossiter, 2006; Lovink & Rossiter) has created relatively fluid, hybridised structures and practices to move beyond the rigid hierarchical interaction that characterises corporate organisations. An example is cloud-based software that permits cohesive, carefully governed and recorded horizontal — “democratic” — decision-making by a spatiotemporally distributed group. The stability of the network is performed in various modes that demonstrate consensus around ethical boundaries, and members write commentary and host and participate in public via a range of physical and digital platforms, reformulating activism as an interventionist narrative that promotes the global whilst valorising and nurturing the local. I begin with my inspiration: a career in the Creative Industries, starting in agencies before taking the leap with my own business and participating in the inspiring culture of coworking spaces. I then introduce Lovink and Rossiter’s concept of the “orgnet”, a move that permits me to explain the primary causes of uncertainty in a present and future world, whilst locating the discussion in the Creative Industries and tracing a genealogy for socio-technical and environmental conditions that have given rise to increasingly coherent and and stable organised networks of media workers. Here, global systems and conditions have generated labour precarity in the (proposed) geological epoch, the Anthropocene, and the post-industrial circumstances of contemporaneous media work. Finally, I describe Enspiral’s history, technology use and cultural features before drawing tentative conclusions about what this orgnet reveals of the future, and the growing importance of precarity to researchers and creatives alike.
- Subject
- future work; collaboration; social enterprise
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1479875
- Identifier
- uon:50401
- Identifier
- ISBN:97809493138120949313815
- Language
- eng
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