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å September 2015
% Angeline Henriquez completed
Angeline Henriquez
Digital Media and Society
September 21, 2015
Chapter 2 Definitions- “Social Production”
Social Production is a term coined by NYU professor Clay Shirkly and it refers to the creation of culture by individuals scattered around the globe using digital technology “for the pleasure of it and without asking permission first”. It emphasizes the decentralization of the previous institutional model that reserved culture production only for a few and embraces a system that is open for everyone, using the internet and social media as a platform that allows for collaboration. On this decentralization, Taylor states “Barriers to entry have been removed, gatekeepers have been demolished, and the costs of creating and distributing culture have plummeted” (p.46). Other similar terms to describe this phenomenon are “peer production”, “crowdsourcing” and “wikinomics”. All terms agreeing that the intrinsic motivation to create culture or collaborate on its creation, trumps the quality of cultured made by professionals that are paid to produce it. “If people are intrinsically motivated to produce culture, and technology enables them to act on this motivation effortlessly and affordably and without financial reward, then amateurs are less compromised than compensated professionals and thus superior ”(p.47).
Although Taylor admits that the professional class is not faultless as she mentions the barriers they impose through licensing and credentialing, she is not completely sold on the ideas of the “new-media utopians”. First, she highlights the fact that new-media utopians assume that amateurs don’t expect any monetary compensation and that fame, admiration, and social status are as much as a reward. Second, she emphasizes that this theory doesn’t take into consideration production costs, which disregards that a decline in industry profitability affects artistic production. Finally, she states that “it is deeply cynical to deny professionals any emotional investment in their work”. How can passion be measured? The truth is most individuals exists somewhere in between amateurs and professionals, searching for a balance between passion and career.
% Janelle Figueroa completed
2.0 people, the new digital age generation. We are the people who have grown up with the understanding of new technology and how to use it most effectively. 2.0 people are different from those that came before them. This generation prefers having everything immediately at their fingertips.
They take in and process information differently. I like to think that most of this generation is well informed with the news but not by how a person would normally get it. For example, I get the most important news from being on social media. All the horrible events that took place in the last year or so, and the events that are still happening today, I find out about them through all of my social media platforms. I don’t have a news app nor do I watch the news. Surprisingly, the news found on there is very detailed and informative and more accurate than anything that is televised.
2.0 people are always connected to the Internet. If the elderly are having troubles with any technology, it is probably the 2.0 people they call to help them. When researching, 2.0 people are able to find what they need within minutes. The problem however might be finding the correct and accurate source. 2.0 people tend to like having things quickly, which can be a fault of the generation. The question of quality vs. quantity comes into play. Is it about how many different sources you can find or how much information can you find in one source?
This “digital native” generation is able to create whatever they please on all platforms and share their content immediately with one click of a button. There are no limits to what the 2.0 people can do with the Internet.
B Readings: Week 11-15
Turner, Fred (2006). From Cyberculture to Counterculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
B Readings: Week 6-10
Scholz, Trebor (Ed.) (2013). Digital Labor: The Internet as Factory and Playground. New York: Routledge.
% Deborah Markewich completed
The term “churnalism” was first coined in 2008 by BBC journalist Waseem Zakir. It refers to the trend in journalism where reporters cobble together stories from wire copy and press releases rather than doing the actual investigation, research and fact checking. They may add a few quotes or comments and then “churn” it out to their readers.
While not limited to digital media sites, Taylor explains that because of the urgency and speed of the Internet, more journalists resort to these shortcuts online than in traditional print media. Taylor interviewed Nick Davies, a journalist who has been outspoken about “churnalism,” who said that a study in Britain found that only 12% of material found in the British press contained original reporting (Taylor, 89). A report was done in Baltimore in 2011 found similar results. Most new information came from traditional print media – very little from online media.
The main cause is the pressure on digital reporters to produce stories at a faster and faster rate while spending less money. The dangers are many in that the more often a story is reposted the easier it is for facts to be distorted. There is a huge margin of error in this type of reporting. And when a person is linked from one story to another, quite often the linked article is not current, causing the reader to be misinformed, even if it was correct at the time it was first posted.
The Huffington Post boasts of publishing over twelve hundred items per day (95) and in order to do that they demand their writers spend very little time on each story. And because page views determine advertising revenue, editors are pursuing subjects that they feel will get the most page views. They study what is trending and then writers pull together whatever sources they can and then churn out an abbreviated article. The Huffington Post is a perfect example of “churnalism”.
Y Prof. Bullock’s response to Hybrid Assignment 02
Reading through your responses to Taylor this week, I found myself thinking about the relationship to labor that Karl Marx (1887) describes in Capital Vol 1. Many of you lamented the low value placed on creative work today. Some said the economy vacuums our creativity away while others argued it is the internet that alters creativity, making it less meaningful. I think it is helpful to review Marx’s concept of labor when thinking about the relationship of digital media to the new economy that Taylor describes. I’ve provided a short excerpt below. As illustrated in this passage, Marx wants us to remember that it is the act of buying and selling of human labor, its commodification, that differentiates “the worst architect from the best of bees” (345). This process of abstraction, of labor power from the human body, trains the efforts of the laborer (even a “creative” laborer) quite consciously on a preconceived structure–what the product of labor will be. Marx writes:
“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which ‘it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be” (345).
Marx’s understanding of the labor process involves a subordination of attraction to “the nature of the work,” a process he relates to imagining a product in reality. But Taylor wants us to differentiate the costs and risks of production inside the a web-based economy versus outside of it. As she writes, “[w]hile the economics of the Web might apply to remixing memes or posting in online forums, the costs and risks associated with creative acts that require leaving one’s computer behind have hardly collapsed” (2014:49). In this way, she seems to agree with those of you who argue that the internet makes creative work less meaningful.
But when we think about the relationship of the internet to creativity, it is interesting to return to Marx’s definition of the labor process. Because when we reflect on the examples that Taylor provides, that 85 percent of volunteer Linux developers are employed by large corporations or that publishing companies have learned to profit from fan fiction, it suggests a more fundamental transformation in the way we conceptualize politics and economy. In these cases, there is capacity for innovation that is being harnessed before the laborer enters the marketplace as a commodity (i.e., Linux developers and fan fiction writers are not engaged in a labor contract at the moment they are being creative, but wealth is being generated from this work regardless).
% elizabeth completed
Due by midnight Tuesday, September 22nd. You must complete both posts to receive credit
Post 1. Choose and define one of the terms below. [Tag this post as “Taylor definitions Ch2” or “Taylor definitions Ch3”]. Please make an effort to choose a term that has not yet been defined. (250-300 words)
Chapter 2: “complex creative labor” (41), “social or peer production” (46), “feeling bonds” (49), Keynes’s “art of life itself” (52), Florida’s “information-and-idea-based economy” (57), “networked amateurism” (63).
Chapter 3: “2.0 people” (68), Jarvis’s “epistemological shift” (76), “digital dimes” (80), “digital churnalism” (89), “online content farms” (97), “the bored at work network” (99), Milkman’s “want/should conflict” (100).
Post 2. Using one or two examples from “Chapter 5: The Double Anchor” to make your point, explain how digital media is complicating our relationship to copyright. [Tag this post as “Hybrid Assignment 03”]. (300-350 words)
w Presentation Schedule September 16, 2015
% Simone Glover completed
Taylor argues a valid point because the fate of creative people in this so-called new world order has been compromised by a Capitalist society. When it is all about “Buy and Sell”, a creative person, in a Marxist world, can’t be creative when limitations are placed on one’s ability to free their minds and bring productive innovative ideas to the forum of an environment that prevents an independent expression. Therefore, the fate of creative people, in the new economy, is to “exist in two incommensurable realms of value and be torn between them”, because they are torn between creative expression for the purpose of art and culture, and then are caught in a consumer based world where products are manufactured and sold. In a Capitalist society, products and services are considered more of an asset than that of the creative expression delivered as talent and freely expressed in an autonomous environment. As a result, the creative person is torn between the two worlds and is caught between the values of the talent vs. the value of the product.
In addition to the creative person such as artists; there are the teachers, activists and others who view their work as serving “the public good”. They too are caught in a similar catch 22. These groups of people are in positions to have strong voices in order to change a situation and circumstance, and teach those who are unaware. However, when there is no platform for creative expression and the learning forum is compromised because of bureaucratic commercialism, these groups are also torn between selling goods for labor, and are not able to be creative in expression for the purpose of being free to communicate without being compromised for capital gain.
After reading this chapter, I’ve taken a closer look at the purpose of it all, and I start to question, just how free am I in this capitalist society? When I think further, I realize that this is a kingdom of Capitalism perpetuated by Dictators who look at us as peasants who will use us to help them to gain more power.
Y New to WordPress
Hi Everyone,
I am new to WordPress and I am navigating around the system, hoping that I am in the right location and posting the right information. I am familiar with Blackboard, and never worked on WordPress before, so forgive me for the late post and if it appears that I am in areas that I may not belong! LOL
In any event, I would appreciate it, if you can give me some pointers on the do’s and don’ts to this system. I will take all constructive criticism and if I am in an area that I don’t belong, please tell me! I’m learning slowly but surely, but this is a strange looking site, especially with those digital faces, and the dashboard is throwing me off!
Thanks!
Simone
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Classroom
