Introduction. The marketization of everyday life
Résumé
Why ordinary people who used to engage in domestic and leisure activities for free now try to make a profit from them? How and why do people commodify their free time? This book explores the marketization of blogging, cooking, craftwork, gardening, knitting, selling secondhand items, sexcamming, and more generally the economic use of free time. The development of web platforms, the current economic context and the post-Fordist values can account for this extension of market and labor to ordinary people. Three main results emerge: first, commodification only generates small amounts of money which may be perceived as pin money, savings or labor income. Second, the benefits of commodification are mostly non-economic. And third, commodification requires an intensive “extra work”.