Digital Transformations in the Challenge of Activity and Work

12Digital Work, Disposable Work? When Opportunities to Explore Threaten the Meaning of the Activity

Attentive to the motives for commitment in work, this chapter points out the ambivalence of video game workers towards their digital, creative and collective work. After having exposed the mode of division of this complex digital work, we show the possibilities of exploration and management of its contingencies offered to the employees by the chronic indeterminacy of the manufactured product. However, we will also see that its digital nature, by allowing multiple iterations, also feeds the fear of disposable work and may weaken their commitment to the work.

12.1. Introduction

Digital technology is often presented as an autonomous, abstract and unrelenting process, threatening to destroy jobs and/or working communities. Consequently, it is evaluated in binary terms, as a factor of either the emancipation or alienation of workers (Bidet and Porta 2016). This naïve image is commonly associated with the idea of the substitution (with jobs or products) of a robot for one or more workers, and so hardly encourages us to look further into the concrete technicality of digital technology or digital work. Yet, for the most part, the digitization of goods and services does not mean a replacement but a transformation of the technical nature of human work, which is more widely mediatized: increasingly, it is a matter of acting with digital artifacts, that is, through “reading and interpreting ...