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felizabeth has 46 post(s)
% elizabeth completed
Due by midnight Tuesday, October 6th. You must complete both posts to receive full credit.
Post 1. Choose and define one of the terms below. [Tag this post as “Ross definitions”]. Please make an effort to choose a term that has not yet been defined. (250-300 words)
Ross: “attention economy” (26), “distributed labor” (29), “donor labor” (30), “amateur economy” (33), the “feminization of labor” (34), the “social factory” (36), “precarious work” (37), “false consciousness” (37), “Taylorism” (40).
Post 2. Ross (2013:22) argues that “it would be wrong to conclude that in the realm of digital labor there is nothing new under the sun. On the contrary, each rollout of online tools has offered ever more ingenious ways of extracting cheaper, discount work from users and participants.” Referencing at least two examples noted by Ross, for example on crowdsourcing, white collar / no collar interns, reality TV show contestants, or the rise of self-service, describe the cheapened and discounted form of labor that Ross affiliates with the rise of digital media.
Y Prof. Bullock’s response to Hybrid Assignment 03
Last week we reflected on Taylor’s (2014) discussion of the “value” of creativity in the digital era. As many of you asked, both in class and on our website, does the Internet lower the value of creative work? I noted in response that we should consider as well a value for creativity that is not mediated by the labor contract. We find ourselves returning to this topic in chapter five with Taylor’s discussion of copyright.
As many of you note, Taylor notes the fundamental ambiguity of the word “free,” as it refers to what is considered inherently “public” as well as to commodities that are given away. Quoting Richard Stallman, she (144) explains “[t]here’s ‘free’ as in speech and ‘free’ as in beer.” Relative to this ambiguity, Taylor discusses the two sides of the “Copyright Wars.” On one side, we have those who argue that all art and culture should be free and open to the public and, on the other, those who believe culture and art are inherently forms of property that should be vigorously protected.
Relative to this divide Taylor notes a fundamental challenge to cultural ownership presented by the Internet as works of culture and art are “decontextualized, remixed, and mashed up.” She (2015: 145) writes:
“Artists who share their work with the world (or find it leaked) see it repurposed in ways they didn’t anticipate. The minute a film is released or an essay is published, it begins to race around the Internet, passed through peer-to-peer networks, posted on personal Web sites, quoted in social media streams. In one sense, therefore, any ownership claim is essentially fanciful, since, in practice, people’s creations circulate in ways they cannot control.”
On this point, Taylor (144) emphasizes a capacity of the Internet to decrease the value of creativity. She describes the Internet as a kind of copy-making machine, noting how we have moved from a creative economy of scarcity to one of abundance. The point underlined here is that the availability of culture and art online is diminishing our understanding of what these things are worth.
There is another question I would like to raise connected to the value of creativity as voluntary or leisure-based rather than resulting from contractual labor. Keeping in mind that Marx’s theory of value is focused on the social dimension of value production, his theory of value is quite different from Adam Smith’s “paradox of value” wherein diamonds are more valuable than water because they are less abundant. The value of a commodity for Marx is the amount of the socially necessary labor time crystallized in the commodity through the labor process. If value fluctuates, it does so because the social conditions of production change, not because a commodity is scarce or plentiful.
The reason why it is interesting to raise this point is because Taylor seems to be indirectly pointing to a more fundamental change that has come with the emergence of digital media. This is a change in how we conceptualize a commodity that is produced by labor that is not or not always contractual. More still, consumption now comes with forms of adoption and reconfiguration that suggests we, as users, are altered by the process of commodification.
% elizabeth completed
Due by midnight Tuesday, September 29th. You must complete both posts to receive credit
Post 1. Choose and define one of the terms below. [Tag this post as “Taylor definitions Ch4” or “Taylor definitions Ch5”]. Please make an effort to choose a term that has not yet been defined. (250-300 words)
Chapter 4: “hyper democracy” (105), “second level digital divide” (109), “the structureless group” (118), “preferential attachment” or “‘Matthew’ effect” (121), “the myth of independent creators” (123), Pariser’s “filter bubble” (131), Lomax’s “multi-channeled electronic communication” (135), Zuckerman’s “imaginary cosmopolitanism” (136).
Chapter 5: “free” (143), “cultural ownership” (traditional / nontraditional) (145), “limited monopoly privilege” (148), “copyright event” (150), “access to content” and “distribution networks” (154), “pirate politics” (160), “copyleft” (168).
Post 2. Taylor (205) argues, “[w]hile many hoped the Internet would help create a more varied cultural landscape, advertising dollars continue to distort the market by creating perverse incentives, encouraging the production of irresistibly clickable content.” Taylor describes this cultural landscape as an “attention economy.” Defining at least two of the following terms in your response, describe what is circulating in this economy: “e-waste” (183), “reputation silos” (190), “native advertising” (194), “tastemakers” (203). [Tag this post as “Hybrid Assignment 04”]. (300-350 words)
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
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Classroom
