Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas’ reading for this week, The Informal Media Economy, talks about how there are a shortage of jobs in the media industry. “Labour is an increasingly prominent concern for media research.” According to Toby Miller, “there would be no culture, no media, without labour. Labour is central to humanity, but largely absent from our field.”

The reading talks about how there are alot of creative workers within various industries, but there are not alot of jobs within the media and creative industries. “One of the main concerns has been about the unpredictable and insecure aspects of work in the cultural, creative and media industries, and how this affects ground-level employees in these industries.” Lobato and Thomas states that there is a great divide between the fantasy of these creative workers from the reality of everyday work experience in these fields.

Now the question that resonated with me was this: where did this wave of interest in media labour come from?

“Precedents exist throughout communications research and sociology, but much of the recent scholarship emerged as a response to boosterist arguments regarding creative work and creative industries.” According to Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class (2003), today’s workers have broken the barriers of the old office tradition and now prefers the more relaxed, stressless way of sleeping. Florida claims that “today’s most in-demand knowledge workers ‘choose’ to work in a less routinized way than previously, enjoying a permeable boundary between work, private life and leisure.”