Introduction: The Marketization of Everyday Life

Abstract

Why do 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 generates only 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.''