This week’s reading really makes me want to continue to read, it’s like I can forsee my future in this thousands of words. In this chapter, Lobato and Thomas shared that freelance writers work from home, getting paid 1 or 2 cents a word for roughly around 300-400 words passage, and that will be done in 20 minutes time (if efficient enough). So let’s say a writer manage to write a 350-word paragraph that costs 1 cent a word in 20 minutes time, in an hour he will be http://www.mediafactory.org.au/griffin-wong/wp-admin/post-new.phpearning only $10.50 an hour, which is considered as underpaid, and here is the question: is this situation still be considered as a job with flexibility or the employers are just exploiting the freelance writers? Thomas Frank (2010), Harper’s magazine journalist states that this is to be called ‘deprofessionalized journalism’.

I could totally relate to the part where it says that they are people who had been working for nearly a year unpaid in the art and media industry as I have also intern for 3 months during the summer holiday last year without getting paid to gain experience. It’s like young people who have talents and skills are trying to seek for a job that is relevant to what they’re studying and yet due to the lack of experience, they have no choice but to go for internship or voluntary jobs. This will cause the employers to make full use of their skills and talents to complete the tasks when the interns are contributing for free. The pros of this scenario: from the intern’s point of view, he will get more experience in the industry (that’s all); from the employer’s point of view, they are getting unpaid employees who are willing to contribute, and the cons of this scenario: the interns might always be an ‘intern’ only as the employers are not willing to keep them as a full-time employee (since unpaid intern works just the same as full-time employee), and this will increase the rate of unemployment among fresh graduates or young adults.

Jaron Lanier wrote the book Who Owns the Future? (2013) and it started off by saying Kodak the photography company started off strong with a lot of employers and was worth $28 billion but was bankrupt in the end. Also, when Facebook bought over Instagram back in 2012, it was reported that it only hired 13 people, and so he was asking where are all the jobs and how could the company possibly went bankrupcy when those middle-class jobs had contributed to the company (Lobato and Thomas, 2015). I personally think that technology nowadays is so advanced that has caused the unemployment rates to increase as a lot of things can be done online unlike the older days.