Esports gaming is a new subject within various fields of research. Typically, research explores the relationships between games and its players or the developers. By contrast this thesis examines the highest level of play within gaming, professional players. To do so, it utilizes the example of League of Legends. Created in 2009, League of Legends has rapidly grown to become one of the largest online multiplayer games with a massive Esports scene that matches or exceeds that of traditional sports such as Basketball or Baseball. But what factors contribute to this sudden rise in League of Legends Esports popularity and how have professional players adjusted over the years? This thesis explores these questions and the overall evolution of professional teams and League of Legends over the course of its Esports growth. It finds that League of Legends is unique in its use of the immaterial labour and digital labour of professional players. Through a concept called the “Meta”, League of Legends is able to mimic traditional sports and maintain interest in its game. Further for professional players the existence and evolution of the “Meta” sharply influences the need for organizational restructuring over the years. Players and teams become complex organizations in which players’ transition from gamers to become workers in Esports. Exploring the League of Legends Esports setting uncovers a unique combination of sport and work within a new digital context. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA) / The goal of this work is to explore the lives and labour of League of Legends professional players. Created in 2009, League of Legends rapidly grew to be one of the most played and watched Esport game in the world. Professional players are often heralded as celebrities and their decisions impact the larger League of Legends and Esports community. This work examines the realities of Esports for professional players. It further analyzes the structure and organization of play and work in the League of Legends Esports setting. For the developer, Riot Games, Esports serves a variety of purposes and this thesis explores this and the contributions of Esports professionals to the development of the game.

La thèse porte sur le travail des joueurs dans l’industrie du jeu vidéo. S’appuyant sur des études de cas et un matériau empirique varié (enquêtes de terrain, entretiens, observation participante et non-participante, analyse de vidéo, données fournies par des entreprises du secteur), la thèse développe l’idée selon laquelle la rentabilité du secteur est liée à une forme particulière de capital intangible : le capital communautaire. La thèse décrit la manière dont le secteur est passé d’une industrie de produit à une industrie de service, qui met la relation entretenue entre l’entreprise et les joueurs et entre les joueurs eux-mêmes au cœur des stratégies de profit des firmes. La notion de communauté, omniprésente dans l’ensemble de l’enquête, est largement discutée. En nous appuyant sur les travaux autour du digital labor, et le retour de la question de l’exploitation par l’économie des conventions, l’hypothèse est formulée d’une mise au travail des joueurs. Puisque les différentes interactions des joueurs sont centrales dans la profitabilité des firmes, il nous semble qu’il faut intégrer ces actes comme faisant partie du processus de production de valeur. Nous observons ensuite à partir d’un travail de terrain de long-cours ces dispositifs de mise au travail au sein d’une entreprise leader du secteur. Enfin, à travers l’analyse du streaming sur la plateforme Twitch, nous montrons comment certains joueurs peuvent se professionnaliser et obtenir un revenu (parfois élevé), en gérant eux-aussi leur propre « communauté ». Le cadre d’analyse que nous proposons dépasse le seul cas du jeu vidéo, et nous espérons qu’il sera heuristique pour rendre compte des mutations que le numérique engendre, tant du côté du travail que du capital. / This thesis frames players' activities in the gaming industry as labor. Based on various qualitative date (field studies, observation, case studies, video analysis, sectoral data), the thesis proposes that firms profitability in the gaming industry is based on the constitution and exploitation of a specific form of intangible capital coined as communitarian capital. The shift from a product to a service industry is described, putting the relationship between the firm and its users and between users themselves at the forefront of firms profit. The concept of community is heavily discussed. Using a framework based on the digital labor theory as well as economics of conventions, the hypothesis of players' labor is formulated. Because players' interactions is so crucial to understanding contemporary business models in the gaming industry, the thesis integrates theses interactions as part of the value production process. The devices used by firms to extract value from players are thoroughly investigated during a long-term field study in a leading french firm of the sector. The thesis concludes by analyzing the case of the Twitch platform, on which some players professionaze and gain revenues by constituting and managing their own communities. The communitarian capital framework this thesis proposes can be applied beyond the case of the gaming industry, and aims at understanding mutations linked to the digital economy, both concerning labor and capital.

This study examines how fanart users perceive image-generating AIs and AI fanart. The study examines ideas of agency by looking at themes in TikTok comment sections and discourses in AI fanart users’ communication when asked about AI fanart. Findings from the study illustrated how fanart users are confused about artist agency and AI fanart’s authenticity. Their ideas and arguments are contradictory and confusing. AI fanart is ultimately perceived as more exploitative than empowering by fanart users, presumably due to both fanart users’ subject position and AIs being a new emerging technology. The discussion of the analyses underlines different ways a contemporary technology, such as AIs, can impact the production of contemporary society and culture both positively and negatively depending on the actors involved. The findings furthermore exemplify how agency can be both enabled and limited by various agents and structures in the AI and fanart community. The conclusive results show that fanart users are unclear and confused about AI agency and AI fanart authenticity, which is mirrored in society. AI fanart may have both an exploitative and empowering nature but just which of the two will be dominant remains unclear and changeable.

This research study is an analysis of the intertwining concepts of collaboration, prosumption, and communication in the contemporary digital educational space. The major objective of this thesis is to understand the operationalisation of the collaborative production of free and open artefacts. For this purpose, a framework is established for investigating communication and interaction activities of the people involved and their usage of ICT supported communications. Three exemplary projects are then examined using this framework: Schulbuch-O-Mat, a pilot project in which an electronic OER schoolbook is created; Memrise, an online platform which offers a wide range of user-created learning courses in a variety of topics; and VroniPlag Wiki, a wiki in which dissertations are collaboratively examined in terms of plagiarism. Data for this study were collected in the form of a comparative multiple-case study using a mix of methods such as interviews, questionnaires, participant observation, and the analysis of documents. Using situational analysis, a comparative analysis was conducted in terms of the three main aspects of this study: prosumption, collaboration, and communications. The results show that a balanced mix of communication enabling tools and services facilitates high collaboration. It was also concluded that collaborative working procedures benefit from diverse ways to address participants. The obtained data support the view that less hierarchical structures simplify collaborations and prosumption. Further research should address the issue of digital labour and exploitation as well as the management of conflicts in prosumer orientated collaborations. As a further outcome, a system of categories was derived in the analysis part of this thesis. This categorisation system serves as a foundation towards an approach of analysing collaborative communication.

This study is set in the broad context of the changing world of work that is characterised by the dissolution of full-time stable employment and the emergence of precarious, insecure forms of work (see e.g. Gorz, 1999, Hardt and Negri, 2005, Huws, 2016, Lorey, 2015, Ross, 2003, Ross, 2009, Smith, 2001, Standing, 2011). As a response to these labour market uncertainties a growing number of individuals are managing multiple areas of the self as part of their work or occupation. This trend has been termed 'the new worker-subjectivity' or 'the entrepreneurial self' that is formed through practices of self-management (Bührmann, 2005, Lorey, 2009). Despite increasing awareness of the emergence of the entrepreneurial worker-subjectivity, research into practices of self-management has only focused on occupational groups in formal work. Knowledge about the trend in the context of virtual workers who operate outside of conventional working relations and have no publicly recognised work identity is largely missing. In order to address this gap, this study explores how entrepreneurial worker-subjectivities manifest in professional online poker players as an emerging online occupation. It investigates how these workers manage themselves in the absence of formal organisational control and socially recognised occupational norms, and asks what are the effects of this self-management on the quality of their working lives? The study is based on 39 in-depth interviews with people involved in online poker or other similar activities such as online gaming or trading. The interviews were conducted either face-to-face in Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania and UK or over Skype between December 2012 and May 2014. The study develops an analytical framework for researching entrepreneurial worker-subjectivities in the context of an emerging occupation and a three-stage-model of the trajectory that provides a basis for exploring the career paths of professional online poker players. Using these framework, the study finds that professional online poker players manage various areas of the self by following informal occupational rules and that their sense of professionalism is largely derived from various practices of self-management that help them distinguish from recreational players. The study also discovers conflicting relations of autonomy and control among the workers and a range of negative effects that self-management practices have on professional online poker players. It concludes that professional online poker is not a sustainable long-term career option. These findings contribute to a better understanding of virtual work, the emergence of online poker playing as a form of work and the development of the entrepreneurial worker-subjectivity.

This study explores the discursive construction of Chinese women in the Chinese reality show Sisters Who Make Waves, with a special focus on the discursive shifts and their relevance to the wider discourse of and about Chinese women. The analysis is carried out on two levels: the discursive construction of Chinese women in the said reality show and its recontextualisation across other discourses including in the public sphere and semi-private opinions of Chinese women.  This research discusses the discursive construction of Chinese women in the Chinese media field and the discrepancy between “top-down” and “bottom-up” discourse. The project uses a multi-layer theoretical framework situated in media and society, gender and media representation, celebrity culture and digital labour to explore the discursive construction of Chinese women. The study applies to the reality show as the primary context, media perceptions as the recontextualising context, interviews with female employees in the Chinese internet industry as the secondary context. In order to investigate the arguments and discursive strategies in different contexts, this study employs a multilevel model of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).  The findings discover that the said reality show focuses on the topos of age and the topos of beauty. These two main topoi cause different representations of social actors in Chinese media perceptions. As the representatives of female digital labour, the female employees in the Chinese internet industry construct three discursive strategies of self and relate their self-perception to those of other women. Furthermore, the study implies the discursive shifts in the discourse on Chinese women. This thesis contributes to understanding the discursive construction of women in the Chinese context, particularly the media and gender representations in the Chinese hybrid media system. In addition, this study stands outside the Western world and expands the understanding of the topic in a non-western setting.

This study is about voluntary productive activities in digital networks and on digital platforms that often are described as pleasur­able. The aim of the study is to relate the peer producers’ perceptions of their activities on a micro level in terms of play, game, work and labour, to their views on Wikipedia’s relation to capitalism on a macro level, to compare the identified ideological formations on both levels and how they relate to each other, and finally compare the identi­fied ideological formations with contemporary Marxist theory on cognitive capitalism. The intention is to perform a critical evaluation of the economic role of peer production in society.Qualitative and semi-structured interviews with eight Wikipedians active within the Swedish language version of Wikipedia con­stitute the empirical base of the study together with one public lecture by a Wikipedian on the encyclopaedia and a selection of pages in the encyclopaedia that are text analysed. The transcribed interviews have been analysed using a version of ideological analysis as it has been developed by the Gothenburg School. The views on the peer producing activities on the micro level has been analysed in a dialecti­cal way but is also grounded in a specific field model.Six ideological formations are identified in the empirical material. On the micro level: the peripheral, bottom-up- and top-down-formation, on the macro level: the Californian alikeness ideology, communism of capital and capitalism of communism. Communism of capital has two sides to it: one stresses the synergies and the other the conflicts between the two phenomena. The formations on the macro level conform broadly to contemporary Marxist theory, but there are important differ­ences as well. The study results in a hypothesis that the critical side of communism of capital and the peripheral and bottom-up-formation could help to further a more sustainable capitalism of communism, and counteract a deeper integra­tion of the top-down-formation with Californian alikeness ideology. The latter is the main risk of capitalist co-optation of the peer produc­tion that is underway as the manifestly dominant formations on the macro level are Californian alikeness ideology and communism of capital. / <p>©<strong> </strong>2015 Arwid Lund, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/</p><p></p>

This thesis challenges core assumptions associated with the peer production of culture using the web-based collaborative film production platform Wreckamovie to understand how peer production works in practice. Active cultural participation is a growing political priority for many governments and cultural bodies, but these priorities are often implemented without a basis in empirical evidence, making it necessary for rigorous scholarship to tackle emerging networked cultural production. Existing work portrays peer production efforts as unrealistically distinct from proprietary, market-based production, incorrectly suggesting that peer production allows distributed, non-monetarily motivated, collaboration between self-selected individuals in hierarchy-free communities. In overcoming these assumptions, this thesis contributes to the development of a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the complicated and multifaceted nature of networked cultural production. This theoretical framing extends Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and reconciles it with Becker’s Art Worlds framework, and further embeds and draws on Benkler’s notion of commons-based peer production. Concretely, this research tackles the emergence of new collaborative production models enabled by networked technologies, and theorizes the tensions and challenges characterizing such production forms. Secondly, this thesis redefines cultural participation and considers the divisions of labour in online filmmaking materializing from the interactions between professional and non-professional filmmakers. Finally, this study considers the social economies surrounding networked cultural production, including crowdfunding, and characterizes associated conversions of capital, such as the conversion of symbolic capital into financial capital. Methodologically, this thesis employs an embedded case study strategy. It examines four feature film productions facilitated by the online platform Wreckamovie, as well as the online community within which these productions are embedded. The four production cases have completed all production stages, and have resulted in completed cultural goods during the course of data collection. This study’s findings were derived from two and half years of participant observations, interviews with 29 Wreckamovie community and production members, and the examination of archived production-related discourses (2006-2013). Ultimately, this study makes concrete proposals towards a theory of networked cultural production with clear policy implications.

The diploma thesis describes the application of theoretical concepts of journalism into the environemnt of two most popular music websites Musicserver and iREPORT. In the theoretical basis for the topic are featured the basic characteristics of online journalism and the problematic nature of the term "ideal critic". Furthermore, there are at first theoretically established and afterwards analyzed the concepts of agenda-setting, gatekeeping, objectivity and bias, participative journalism, user generatec content, professionalism, hypertextuality and intertextuality, the usage of social networks, tabloidization and the analysis will also touch upon the issue of name transformation to fit the Czech language. There is also a semiotic and visual analysis of chosen samples performed. On the basis of concepts, the paper intends to explain the functioning of the websites, the aspects that are influencing their content, the factors that have an effect on the selection of the content, the means of working with the audience, the problems in terms of objectivity in the art criticism, the requirements laid upon the editorial staff members and the level of influence upon the readers. Keywords online journalism, theoretical concepts, Musicserver, iREPORT, music, agenda-setting, gatekeeping, objectivity,...

Les nouvelles technologies caractérisant la quatrième révolution industrielle engendrent, actuellement, une transformation du marché du travail à l’échelle mondiale. Notre mémoire s’intéresse à l’une de ces nouvelles technologies, les plateformes numériques et plus particulièrement, aux plateformes numériques de travail. Apparues il y a maintenant plus d’une décennie, des zones grises demeurent et persistent relativement à la situation des travailleurs de ces plateformes. D’une part, sont-ils liés par un contrat de travail entre un employeur et un salarié ou par un contrat d’entreprise ou de service entre un client et un entrepreneur ou prestataire de services? D’autre part, en raison de leur relation tripartite de travail, qui est leur employeur? Au cours des dernières années, différents États sont intervenus législativement pour encadrer le statut des travailleurs et des entreprises de plateformes en droit du travail. Un constat ressort de ces interventions : une sélectivité de droits est reconnue à ces travailleurs. Ainsi, dans ce mémoire, nous nous sommes intéressée à savoir si l’application des statuts juridiques existant déjà dans les lois du travail permet de protéger les travailleurs de plateformes en leur reconnaissant les mêmes droits que les autres travailleurs. Pour ce faire, nous avons procédé à une étude jurisprudentielle de deux systèmes juridiques caractérisés par des approches différentes : la France (modèle binaire) et le Canada (statut intermédiaire). L’analyse de la jurisprudence française nous a montré que les critères constitutifs du contrat de travail permettent de reconnaître, dans des contextes organisationnels précis, le statut de salarié aux travailleurs de plateformes. Au Canada, notre recherche nous a permis de constater que ces mêmes travailleurs peuvent être considérés comme des entrepreneurs dépendants là où ce statut existe dans la législation. Ces statuts permettent aux travailleurs de plateformes de bénéficier de protections. Cependant, le statut de salarié rattaché au modèle binaire est plus avantageux pour le travailleur puisqu’il donne accès à une large protection. / The new technologies describing the Fourth Industrial Revolution are currently causing a transformation of the labor market on a global scale. Our thesis focuses on one of these new technologies, digital platforms and more particularly, digital labour platforms. During more than a decade, grey zones remain and persist in regards to the situation of workers on these platforms. On the one hand, are they bound by an employment contract between an employer and an employee or by a contract of enterprise or for services between a client and a contractor or service provider? On the other hand, because of their tripartite employment relationship, who is their employer? In recent years, several countries have taken legislative action to regulate the status of workers and platform companies in labor law. One observation emerges from these interventions: a selectivity of rights is recognized for these workers. Thus, in this thesis, we are interested in knowing whether the application of the legal statuses already existing in labor laws makes it possible to protect platform workers by recognizing the same rights as other workers. To do this, we conducted a jurisprudential study of two legal systems characterized by different approaches: France (binary model) and Canada (intermediate status). The analysis of French case law has shown us that the constituent criteria of the employment contract make it possible to recognize, in specific organizational contexts, the status of employee for platform workers. In Canada, our research has enabled us to observe that these same workers can be considered as dependent contractors, since this status already exists in the legislation. These statutes allow platform workers to benefit from protections. However, the status of employee related to the binary model is more advantageous for the worker since it gives access to broad protection.