McKinney Response

Something that I was stuck on in McKinney’s post is his mention of Marxist theory early on in the post. In the 19th century, when Marx was writing and theorizing, labor was quite clearly defined; in this day and age that includes the digital world, what exactly constitutes “labor”? McKinney, of course, moves on to argue that the real value is in “presence” (which he defines as “attention,” as “being there” and being recognized), not necessarily in labor itself, but it was an interesting thinking point for me. I can’t decide whether I fully agree with the amount of importance he places on presence–partially because I’m not sure I 100% understood his complete argument, and partially because I think he perhaps overstates the value of presence for companies that have websites (like page hits or clicks or whatever–I suppose you could say it’s good for ads, but most people I know avoid ads by installing ad-blocking extensions or programs).