ABSTRACT
The creative environment of Web 2.0, powered by user participation, democratizes production and gives agency to average citizens by connecting them to their community. The citizen-fill-in-the-blank embraces these roles as citizen cartographers, citizen scientists, and citizen journalists, using crowdsourcing platforms and social media. This production energizes hybrid research methods and creates vast stores of data as an object of study. And a marketable product to sell. As the digital economy of 2.0 challenges traditional business models, it shifts labour relations and creates new attendant practices. As more corporations, researchers, and governments look to this ‘lean production’ to capitalize on the efficiency of technology and the enthusiasm with which users adopt it, the value of labour is marginalized. Wage-selling actors compete with the free labour of willing participants.
