Turning Leisure into (Unpaid) Labour. a Marxist Critique of Television “Watching” in the Web 2.0.

Watching television has been typically one of the most important leisure activities in people’s everyday life. In the contemporary convergence culture, where old media and new media collide (Jenkins 2006), this activity is being reshaped in quite new and unprecedented ways. Connected to and “watched” through mobile devices and social media, television screens are today sophisticated means of entertainment bringing to a radical change both at the level of consumption and production. Broadcasters are rapidly changing their productive and marketing strategies to tune in with the multiples places and practices “networked publics” (boyd, 2010) inhabit and share. While the "augmented" experience of television watching in times of Web 2.0 is undeniably symptomatic of an “active” audience, a Marxist critique of it, as developed in this paper, may give some interesting insights by arguing that in fact it may also be seen as a form of exploitation by a capitalist industry in search of ever-new markets and unpaid digital labour.