In its most common uses, the term “labor” refers to either an organized system of exploitation or a personal source of pleasure. “Slave labor” relies on unfree populations forced into servitude, while a “labor of love” is a gift that an individual freely gives. These two usages are frequently conjoined, conflated, or compared to simply “work.” The orthodoxies that insist on using the word “labor” over “work” are less important than ways in which the word is deployed in these seemingly contradictory ways to explain centuries of media production and their producers. On the one hand, media labor refers to a human productive capacity. The ability to communicate, while universal to all, has a special aura in relation to media industries and their specialized technologies. Beyond simply the application of skills, media labor implies a process of self-actualization for workers to construct particular kinds of identities in society ([Mayer 2011](/media-studies/works_cited/mayer-vicki/)). Media labor typically requires collaboration, even if remotely, and thus places individuals within social networks that are frequently further defined by gender, race, nationality, and social class. At the base of these definitions of media labor is the understanding that symbolic production as communication is both different from all other...