[Commlist] New book: The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy

We would like to announce a new publication from the University of 
Minnesota Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*The Digital Is Kid Stuff***

Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy

*Josef Nguyen***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517911140/the-digital-is-kid-stuff/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781517911140/the-digital-is-kid-stuff/>_*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*CSLF2021*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 30^th June 2022. Discount only applies to the 
CAP website.

*__*

*How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate 
anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America*

“The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that 
simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the 
next generation. In /The Digital Is Kid Stuff/, Josef Nguyen 
interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital 
generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles 
between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of 
too much screen time and a techno-utopianism that foresees these 
“digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, 
increased democratization, and national prosperity.

Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity 
through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media 
object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future 
creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of 
/Minecraft/, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while 
reading /Make/ magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to 
a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using 
design fiction.

Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, 
entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that 
contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to 
defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the 
precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century 
neoliberal America.

*Josef Nguyen*is assistant professor of critical media studies at the 
University of Texas at Dallas.

81517911140 | PB | £20.99**

*Price subject to change.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------