Communists Armed With Computers

Reading Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, I was fascinated by this point that he puts forward - 'The interface comes to play a crucial role in the information society... In this society, work and leisure activities not only increasingly involve computer use, but they also converge around the same interfaces. Both "work" applications (word processors, spreadsheet programs, database programs) and "leisure" applications (computer games, informational DVD) use the same tools and metaphors of GUI. In this respect information society is quite different from industrial society, with its clear separation between the field of work and the field of leisure. In the 19th Century, Karl Marx imagined that a future communist state would overcome this work-leisure divide... Marx's ideal citizen would be cutting wood in the morning, gardening in the afternoon, and composing music in the evening. Today the subject of the information society is engaged in even more activities during a typical day: inputting and analysing data, running simulations, searching the Internet, playing computer games, watching streaming video, listening to music online, trading stocks and so on. '
This train of thought made me wonder - has our current information society been the catalyst for the overcoming of the work-leisure divide - one of Marx's criticisms of the industrialist (capitalist) society where workers went to labour all day for someone else, working in an assembly line, creating only part of a product?
Information society has given us the tools and the abilities to create something from start to finish, whether it be designing our own website, composing a piece of music, authoring a blog, whatever. And as the article says, it also allows us to bridge that work/leisure divide.
At any given time, when I'm online, even when I'm at work, I have my emails open, I'm playing Scrabulous on Facebook, I'll be checking out what's on at the movies, what gigs are on over the weekend etc, etc.
My fiance, who owns an independent record label (www.sugarlicks.com) works out of our home. He commented the other day while working, 'It's amazing how much of my work I get done online now.' For those in the media, fortunate enough to be able to work for themselves, information society has provided them with their very own workplace, their office, all contained within the computer.
Again, as Lev Manovich explains, '...the computer's public image was no longer solely that of a tool but also a universal media machine, which could be used not only to author, but also to store, distribute, and access all media.' People are able to create their respective form of media from start to finish, distribute it, make a living from it.
The dichotomy of course is that the people who could most use the Internet to liberate themselves from oppressive, assembly-line-like environments, such as sweatshops, where the work they do is greatly exploited and the people who most need to bridge the work/leisure divide are the furtherest away from the advantages of the information society.
Perhaps the digital divide is the largest barrier in the materialisation of Marxist hopes. Perhaps all communists should arm themselves with computers...