by Rosalind Gill

What are we to make of someone who says they love their job and cannot imagine doing anything they enjoy more, yet earns so little that they can never take a holiday, let alone afford insurance or a pension? How are we to think about someone who is passionate about the creative work they do for 70 hours each week yet feel fearful that they will not be able to have the children they long for because of the time pressures they face? How are we to reconcile the enormous enthusiasm for Web-work alongside equally palpable anxieties about not keeping up, missing out on the next big innovation, or not finding the next project? These are some of the questions that this research addresses. It looks in detail at new media workers’ experiences, in all their ambivalence and contradictoriness, and it turns a sociologist’s eye on a field that is supposed to represent the future of work, asking questions about how new media — well-known for constantly reinventing itself — might be reinvented to provide opportunities that still inspire love and passion, yet do so in ways that are sustainable, open, inclusive and egalitarian.

The experience of new media work is often summed up in one of two stereotypes. On the one hand is the image of ‘net slaves’, the ‘precariat’ or the ‘cybertariat’, which sees Web-workers as the victims of the move to more flexible, deregulated forms of working. On the other is the representation of the ‘digerati’, a new information elite, at work in a Web-based ‘e-topia’. These polarised stereotypes have taken hold because there is so little research into the actual experiences and working lives of new media workers.

In this research we set out to remedy this through a study of what
Web-workers themselves say about their work experiences. In-depth interviews were carried out with 35 largely Amsterdam-based new media workers by Danielle van Diemen — asking about the nature of the work, the reasons for choosing this field, and the hours, pay, pressures and pleasures of a life in new media.

The findings, published in this report offer a portrait of work in new media, a decade after the Web. It highlights the sheer variety of the jobs, skills and practices that are summed up by the general term ‘new media’ and point to the divisions within this field between artists and technical experts, designers and programmers, and, above all, between people who are freelance, on temporary contracts or self-employed, and those who work on steady contracts in traditional organisations. This division emerges as one of the most significant because it structures workers experiences of pay, conditions, working hours and benefits, as well as their ability to plan beyond ‘the next five minutes’. A key objective of the report is to disentangle the tangled relationships between the nature of new media work, and the kinds of contractual statuses workers enjoy — for example, to determine which experiences are due to working in new media, and which are attributable to the dominance of freelancing or self-employment.

The report offers a vivid account of the backgrounds and motivations of people who work in new media, their different career trajectories, and their experiences of both formal education and ‘learning on the job’. It highlights the extraordinary degree of creativity, passion and enthusiasm for this work, amongst the people involved in it. But it also tries to capture some of the difficulties and pressures associated with contemporary new media work, including long hours, requirements to ‘keep up’ and stay up-to-date in a field that is changing rapidly, and the financial and emotional pressures of managing job/workflow insecurity. The report asks questions about work-life balance, and about the sustainability (in terms of health and relationships, for example) of intense working patterns.

The key concern in the research has been to capture the diversity of different experiences within new media, and inequalities relating to gender, age and race/ethnicity are taken very seriously here. We hope that the report will contribute to new thinking about Web-working, and will inspire policies that support current and future generations of people working in new media.