Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy by Trebor Scholz

Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy by Trebor Scholz published by Polity is a strong book about the digital labor and its reality and at the same time it's a stimulating book because you will learn everything about the most known web companies ruling the net-world-dimension, what it means copyright in the net, or labor, or just being there, supporting your favorite actor, or writing reviews of your favorite books and how companies are acting regarding it.

Sometimes the so-called digital labor is very underpaid or not paid at all.
Also the word labor is different from work. Work, as the author writes means a daily activity, working with hands and constantly. Labor is a medieval word meaning pain and toil. Classified under labors there are activities like writing a poem and growing up a baby adds Mr. Lewis Hyde.

But digital work shouldn't be considered after all as a different work from the common one "disconnected" by the net, but the story is still dramatically different in this society where it is also pretty difficult to define what it is leisure connected with work. Where start leisure and when work is implemented by it?

When we want to buy a book always more often we google the title on Amazon or other websites reading the synopsis and some reviews.
But what kind of world is this one of book reviewers?
A group of millions of passionate people and bookworms.

There is the shocking beauty story of ms.Harriet Klausner from Pennsylvania. This lady wrote more than 31000 reviews for Amazon while the author wrote this book and she is considered a sort of monument, taken in great consideration from newsmagazines like The New York Times, The Washington Post but she doesn't receive any buck for this work. The author wrote that if ms Klausner would have been paid 5 dollars per review, now she would have saved 155.000 dollars.

So there is to ask to ourselves: what motivate people to write? Why do they work for free?

Another interesting chapter is the fan labor, the one involving a saga, it could be Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, your favorite actor or the TV series you love the most. Again, in most cases it's a free work or very underpaid in the best lucky cases.

43 million of people writes the author, in the USA (a statistic of 2013) live in poverty and long-term jobs assuring a stability and a security for the future are disappearing.

Social networks? People, writes the author: "Are using Facebook for "free" while consuming a culture of their own consuming." Interesting also the sections dedicated to Instagram and other socials.

Students attending 4 year college in the USA work in stage for free most of the time at first. 77% of these people are women.
In Germany there are 400.000 underpaid or not paid at all academic students assistants working in university.
Why this?
Because they live in the hope of a better future and a better tomorrow. Not only but according to the author these young people starts to develop psychologically a "self-denigration" behavior.

That the net has changed the cards on the table of our daily life is evident. With the time appeared more than clear that the net created discrepancies talking about work as well.
In this book Uberworked and Underpaid the reader will enter in a paradoxical world where few privileged people with a great intuition earn wagons of money and the rest of them nothing or they are very underpaid.
What the book wants to do is to try to connect, after the big euphoria for the arrival of the net more than 20 years ago and the various societies connected with it and the high expectations of all the people for this new "life-platform" and this incredible way of communicating, all the workers around the world for trying to define a best future for all of them active thanks to the net and the so-called digital labor.

You must read this book. It's of great relevance, sometimes sad but dramatically true and very well done.

I thank NetGalley and Polity for this eBook.

Anna Maria Polidori