Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy by Gabriella Lukács

Abstract

Reviewed by: Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy by Gabriella Lukács Nana Okura Gagné Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy. By Gabriella Lukács. Duke University Press, 2020. 248 pages. ISBN: 9781478005810 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). Having gained vast knowledge of television dramas, media technologies, and young women in Japan in her previous research, Gabriella Lukács embarked on her new project to unravel "the relationships between young women and digital technologies" (p. 1). Specifically, she focuses on how young women were drawn to the creative/cultural industries and how they used digital technology such as cell phones and website platforms to promote themselves quickly. Further, she illuminates how the cultural industries—including multimedia and advertising agencies—promoted these young women and facilitated their interests and dreams, creating popular fads/booms [End Page 388] that generated profits for themselves while deceiving and failing to pay the young women for their work. Lukács shows that despite these women's desires to be visible or popular or to find or pursue meaningful careers, many of them were doing invisible work. Thus, the book argues that the development of Japan's digital economy is an exemplar of Marx's labor theory in the digital age and that this new economy used young women's invisible, affective, surplus labor—that is, labor not directly calculated in workers' remuneration. Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan's Digital Economy is a challenging book that cuts across a range of issues, including the emergence of digital technologies, gendered career pathways, and aspirations for and exploitation by the entertainment industry. Taken as a whole, the book is not so much about amateur professionalism—how young women strive to pursue their interests to become professionalized in cultural industries—nor is it about workers in the platform economy, i.e. independent contractors using online platforms to get paid for tasks, who struggle to make ends meet in the ever-expanding digital economy.1 Rather, the book is primarily a critical textual analysis of the increasing massification, amateurization, and intensification of Japan's entertainment industry via digital technologies and young women's simultaneous attraction to and constraint by such phenomena. To be sure, men's and women's desires and pursuits in the cultural industries are not novel. As with other forms of labor in Japan, pursuing careers in the entertainment industry involves surplus labor, along with industry-specific challenges and varying degrees of affective labor or unpaid interstitial labor.2 New developments, however, such as increased widespread access to Internet technologies as a means and platform to cultivate fans, the lower age of entry into the entertainment industry and its related amateurization, and the faster turnover rate of popular fads/booms in the cultural industries, make Lukács's inquiry, theorization, and argument very timely and all the more important. The book draws from interviews with young women, editors, a software engineer, and an online platform employee—whom she discusses as part of the "techno-social assemblages" of the digital economy (p. 21). She combines these interviews with an examination of published interviews with successful women and "online diaries, blogs, novels, self-help books, and trading tutorials" (p. 24). The strength of Lukács's work is that each chapter captures the experiences of a few women, each engaged in diverse cultural industries, and skillfully connects the various agents and digital activities. The breadth of her inquiry sets her work apart from single case studies of popular media. By engaging with such a broad range of media, she sheds light on the dynamics and implications of the digitally mediated cultural industries and women's invisible labor in Japan's digital economy. Lukács starts her analysis with amateur female photographers Nagashima Yurie, Toshikawa Hiromi (known as Hiromix), and Ninagawa Mika, who jointly received the Kimura Ihei Award, a prestigious photography prize (chapter 1, "Disidentifications"). Through her interpretations of the artists' work and published interviews, Lukács challenges the discourse of gender and labor manifested by critic Iizawa Kōtarō, [End Page 389] who called their works "girly" photographs while dismissing their intellectual...