After studying management (HEC) and sociology, Patrice Flichy initially worked in the cultural sector (DEPS, Ministry of Culture) and the audiovisual sector (INA), focusing on cultural industries and new media (community radio, cable television, telematics). He subsequently founded and headed the sociology laboratory at France Télécom’s research centre (now Orange Labs) for some fifteen years. His research focused on technical innovation: the socio-technical history of communication tools in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the development of an interactionist approach to technical innovation and new uses.
He joined the University of Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée and the LATTS in 2000. Since then, he has worked primarily on digital technology. He analysed the origins of the internet in the United States through the lens of the imaginaries associated with this new network. In the 2010s, he studied the sociology of databases and took an interest in new activities practised through digital technology. Firstly, amateur practices (the democratisation of digital skills blurs the boundaries between professionals and amateurs), and then new forms of work. In his latest book, after analysing the complexity of the relationship between leisure and work since the early 19th century, he highlights the ambivalence of the relationship between work and digital technology.
Whilst digital technology enables the ‘integrated digital individual’ to combine their professional activities with their passions in rewarding forms of ‘open work’, it can also, particularly through platforms and their algorithms, serve as an instrument of subjugation and control, generating precariousness and new inequalities.
Patrice Flichy is also the co-founder and editor of the leading journal Réseaux.
