From Friday to Sunday: the hacker ethic and shifting notions of labour, leisure and intellectual property

Leisure studies scholars have theorised how the Web is changing leisure experiences, and this essay continues that work by discussing the Web and shifting notions of leisure, labour and intellectual property. Much online activity is described under the umbrella term of 'piracy'. By discussing online cultural production in terms of what Pekka Himanen calls the hacker ethic, we can rethink rhetorics of piracy and better understand the positive and negative aspects of online activities. Rather than thinking of online activity as derivative, we can reframe Web texts as doing what all cultural texts do build upon the past. The ethic of the Web is built on a hacker approach to work, play, collaboration, intellectual property. Facebook applications and Wikipedia entries are just two examples of Web users' embrace of the hacker ethic. But is this labour or leisure? Is Wikipedia, a text edited and maintained by volunteers, the result of work or play? Himanen provides a new way to view online activities that sit in between the categories of labour and leisure. Further, the hacker ethic allows us to understand the contested terms of labour and leisure alongside a third contested term: intellectual property. This paper provides a framework to help us better understand the new immaterial aspects of leisure activity happening on the Web. A discussion of these activities in terms of the hacker ethic allows scholars to explore shifting notions of labour, leisure and intellectual property without resorting to rhetorics of piracy.