[1] Mayer's goal as an SE professor is to develop methods of bringing student and community voices into the public sphere through collaborative research, digital preservation, and open access.
She illuminates the “hidden labour” of individuals such as ‘soft-core’ cameramen, reality-program casters, 'do-it-yourselfers' and public-access and cable commissioners, who not only create content necessitated by the television industry, but also produce themselves in the service of capital expansion.
The empirical detail of these studies demonstrate labour as professional and creative work that essentially unsettles the industry's mythological account of a businesses driven by auteurs, manned by the executive class, and created by a talented minority.
For this reason, Mayer's book challenges conventional paradigms that ascribe creativity and professionalism to narrow tasks performed by an elite group, fulfilling her aim to “repoliticize the ordinary” (p. 186).
These conclusions reveal the paradoxical nature of the new media economy: a system that provides a wider range of access to production, whilst simultaneously offers workers less security, safeguards and stable employment.
The book is hence a useful lens to demonstrate the nature of modern labourers who, in an era where work invades almost every aspect of our social life, engage with complex exercises in attempts to make themselves as ‘marketable’ as possible.