Onlife intersectionalities as flows of playbour

The case of women in gaming

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11267075
AutoresSine Nørholm Just (0000-0002-4179-2708, Roskilde University, autor de correspondencia), Kai Storm, Sandra-Louise Bukuru (Copenhagen Business School)
Año2023
Volumen45
Número5
Páginas899-915
Fecha de publicación2023-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMedia Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0163-4437 • E-ISSN: 1460-3675
EditorialSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/01634437231155345
OpenAlexW4322007980
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas50

Digital capitalism troubles classical notions of contextual singularity and agential unity and destabilises delineations of online and offline realities. Following Floridi, this paper applies the concept of ‘onlife’ for the ‘new experience of a hypermediated reality’, and we contribute to the understanding of this experience by highlighting the socioeconomic entanglements of users’ self-expression and technological corporations’ profiteering. We introduce the notion of onlife intersectionalities, where intersectionalities are understood as the enactment of identities at the crossroad of gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., and add the dimension of commercial interest to better conceptualise dynamics of empowerment and exploitation. Thus, we suggest that onlife intersectionalities are enacted in and as flows of playbour that produce surplus value through playful activity. Seeking empirical substance for these conceptual relations, we turn to the case of women in online gaming. Focusing on three individual women gamers’ onlife trajectories and flows of playbour, we show how these interact differently for each gamer, leading to more play with higher rewards for some and more labour with less compensation for others. With this analysis, we illustrate the exploitation-cum-empowerment of human subjects under digital capitalism

Capitalism · Class (philosophy · Compensation (psychology · Dimension (graph theory · Empowerment · Epistemology · Human sexuality · Lived experience · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology