This paper deals with the questions: What is digital labour? What is digital work? Based on Marx's theory, we distinguish between work and labour as anthropological and historical forms of human activity. The notion of alienated labour is grounded in a general model of the work process that is conceptualized based on a dialectic of subject and object in the economy that we present in the form of a model, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical triangle of the work process. Various aspects of a Marxist theory of work and labour, such as the notions of abstract and concrete labour, double-free labour, productive labour, the collective worker and general work are presented. Labour is based on a fourfold alienation of the human being. After these concepts are introduced, they are used for discussing the notions of digital labour and digital work. The presentation is on the one hand general and on the other hand uses Facebook as a concrete case for explaining how digital labour functions. Digital work is the organisation of human experiences with the help of the human brain, digital media and speech in such a way that new products are created. Digital labour is the valorisation dimension of digital work. We conclude that we require the transformation of digital labour into digital work, a true social media revolution that makes "social media" truly and fully social. We also argue why in our view work is not the same as labour by discussing the concept of playful work and pointing out limits of concepts such as antiwork, postwork and zerowork.

This paper deals with the questions: What is digital labour? What is digital work? Based on Marx's theory, we distinguish between work and labour as anthropological and historical forms of human activity. The notion of alienated labour is grounded in a general model of the work process that is conceptualized based on a dialectic of subject and object in the economy that we present in the form of a model, the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical triangle of the work process. Various aspects of a Marxist theory of work and labour, such as the notions of abstract and concrete labour, double-free labour, productive labour, the collective worker and general work are presented. Labour is based on a fourfold alienation of the human being. After these concepts are introduced, they are used for discussing the notions of digital labour and digital work. The presentation is on the one hand general and on the other hand uses Facebook as a concrete case for explaining how digital labour functions. Digital work is the organisation of human experiences with the help of the human brain, digital media and speech in such a way that new products are created. Digital labour is the valorisation dimension of digital work. We conclude that we require the transformation of digital labour into digital work, a true social media revolution that makes "social media" truly and fully social. We also argue why in our view work is not the same as labour by discussing the concept of playful work and pointing out limits of concepts such as antiwork, postwork and zerowork.

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The political public sphere is important for democracy, and it is changing – this is how the quintessence of Jürgen Habermas’s monumental study on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) could be summarized in simple words. In the fields of political sociology and social theory, history, but also research on social movements, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, his conception of the public sphere as a sphere mediating between the state and civil society has had a decisive influence on the debate about the potential of collective reason for modern democracy. In this introduction we give a short overview of Habermas’s arguments on the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere, demonstrate the necessary link between the public sphere and democracy and, referring to the contributions to this special issue, sketch current transformations of the public sphere along three basic processes – digitalization, commodification, and globalization.

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