Week 6, Fall 2020

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

“The Life of Taobao Couriers,” Alibaba Group, May 1, 2013.

“JD.com Fully Automated Warehouse in Shanghai,” JD.com, November 10, 2017.
“Amazon purchases to ship BEFORE you buy?” CNN, January 20, 2014.
“How Amazon Delivers On One-Day Shipping,” CNBC, July 15, 2019.
“Behind the scenes of an Amazon warehouse,” Fox 13 News Tampa Bay, November 26, 2015.