Fall 2020

Week 6: 1994–2005

Logistics: E-commerce and the Question of Free Labor

Materials

• Jiayang Fan, “How E-Commerce Is Transforming Rural China,” The New Yorker, July 16, 2018.
• William Barnett, Mi Feng, and Xiaoqu Luo, “Taobao vs. Ebay China,” Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2010.
• Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58.

Recommended

Further Reading

• James W. Carey. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. Routledge, 2008.
• Tiziana Terranova. Network Culture: Cultural Politics for the Information Age. Pluto Press, 2004.
• Ned Rossiter. Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. Routledge, 2016.
• Trebor Scholz. Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Polity, 2016.

Podcasts

• “The Box That AI Lives In,” The Secret History of the Future, September 10, 2018.
• “Jerry Yang of Yahoo on why he believed in Alibaba,” Sinica, January 17, 2018.
• “Alibaba,” Acquired, September 23, 2018.
• “The Birth of E-Commerce,” Internet History Podcast, 2015–2018.
• “Trebor Scholz: Platform Cooperativism,” Upstream, February 4, 2017.

Videos