Mechanical Turks and Vine Stars
I’m fascinated in particular with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system, a program that is a crowd-sourced marketplace for requesters and workers to bid on “tasks” otherwise known as piecemeal jobs that are not able to be completed by computers. Less exotic and more routinized, this program reduces those that bid on jobs or tasks to the very embodiment of alienated labor. Ross suggests that this and “other e-lance operations would not be thought of as remotely resembling temporary employees… leave no trace of their employment… [and function as] a discrete lump, or piece, or work that exists only for the duration of its fulfillment.” (27-28) These tasks yield not much more than cents to dollars per completed and accepted task per hour – which suggests that though this labor while in demand might also be something that someone performs as a supplement or when bored and using the web while at their other computer-based job (which is almost all jobs at this point.) E-lance (another terrible digital media portmanteau of electronic and freelance) labor, is not as attractive as it sounds. The lure of working as an e-lancer is the promise of self-determined workflow and that the only qualifications required are internet access and usage of the open source software is very appealing, but given the amount of work that one must perform in order make the time worth it, and that there is no guarantee of payment depending on the task hardly seems like all its cracked up to be. It sounds more like e-serfdom or the e equivalent of working in a nail salon (anybody read that NY Times investigative report this past spring?)
Ross also houses the model of the reality television show star as a participant in the volunteer or amateur economy, which he identifies as “a degraded labor sector.” (32) That this highly successful phenomenon emerged long before web 2.0 says more about the entertainment industry than it does about technological innovation. However social media is the perfect vehicle for an even cheaper and more rapidly deployable or accessible reality based entertainment industry to flourish. While Ross doesn’t explicitly name or make connections about particular apps (I’m thinking of Vine) its worth investigating the efficacy of how these user based networks and apps as they utilized by old media or corporate interest at verily no cost to generate viral content. For the average person wanting their 15 minutes of fame or in the case of Vine, 6 seconds, this technology could totally be used to catapult a career as a reality television personality. Youtube is another popular favorite – ever take note of the amount of page views or video plays certain personalities have garnered? What amount of unwaged labor did these people have to perform in order to rack up the hits? How base or humiliating must some content be in order to acquire the necessary amount of views that put a youtuber on the radar of a reality television production house? Subscriptions and followers don’t come cheap, and in many ways it appears that these venues function as no pay internships for aspiring reality television personalities.
