Book notes: Environmental Communication and Children: Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-Human World by Erin Hawley

Abstract

income. The key questions the book attempts to answer are: ‘how and under what conditions basic human information-seeking activities have been commodified and subordinated to capital in the first place, how search was transformed into a global industry that has accelerated the commodification and commercialization of the Internet and the accumulation of capital, and how it has turned into a new geopolitical focal point of the Internet’ (p. 3). The book is split into Introduction, five substantive chapters and Conclusion. Chapter 1, ‘Searching for Profits’, offers a history of search engine development and ‘shows that search engine technology itself did not inherently have economic value’ (p. 16). Chapter 2, ‘Situating Search’, discusses search’s place within the broader political economy of the Internet. Chapter 3, ‘Laboring behind search’, explores the division of labour behind the search engine. Chapter 4, ‘Digital Welfare Capitalism’, ‘extends the analysis of the labor process to an examination of the methods of labor management and control employed by Google, which sets the trends for the wider industry’ (p. 18). The author reminds us that Google has a reputation for motivating its workforce through giving its highly paid workers ‘unprecedented freedom and ... a voice in the company’ (p. 18). Yeo draws historical parallels to an earlier industrial era. The final substantive chapter, ‘Market Dynamics and Geopolitics’, investigates the transnational nature of Internet industries and the role of geopolitics and transnational capitalism. All in all, this is a fascinating book well worth a read.