fjessie.salfen has 19 post(s)

Ross uses the example of television show contestants to explain that media’s use of exploiting the efforts of amateurs for little or no compensation is not a practice new, or limited to, new digital media. Old media television has used the premise of contests to avoid paying professional actors. These reality based television shows, whether they be cooking, singing, dancing, quiz, or “reality living” themed are thinly disguised 30-60 minute scripted commercials, the contestants unpaid except (perhaps a very small handful win a prize) the chance for notoriety for post-show ventures, similar to the “compensation of reputation” of online freelancers. This is not a recent development either, as TV game shows and other reality based shows like COPS with low production value but high revenue return have been around for decades.

Online, businesses do similar acts to entice amateurs to engage in work without compensation by similarly holding contests or making the efforts seem like fun, therefore giving the illusion that it is not “work.” It is more often that the laborer does not know or think of themselves as a laborer, engaging in the given task as a fun puzzle, a task designed to engage professionals when they are not at work, or is completed by an out-of-work professional engaging to keep their skills sharp. This is known as crowdsourcing and this type of distributed labor is cast out wide to many individuals by behind the scenes content hosts and data miners looking for wage-free production. The work is spread thin so that any one person’s efforts does not directly affect the outcome, nor does the laborer necessarily understand the planned outcome, though the unseen coordinating manager does and uses many pieces to make a full finished product, the results of crowding together the small efforts of many individuals

These concepts of giving labor without realizing it can be contrasted with the devices on which making these online efforts so easy. The production of the electronic devices, from phones to tablets, are made in China by people who are also being exploited and manipulated into working for a pittance. These all inclusive factories have eliminated competition by completing all aspects of production and have moved to the most rural areas of the country so that there are no other jobs available or competition for better working conditions. Similar to freelancers of the creative sector given the opportunity to work for free or not work at all, at least the freelancers can try to work to make a name for themselves, something the electronics factory workers of China do not have the option to do.

In his definition of feminization of labor, Ross states women are inherently more likely to take on more work in the white-collar, no-collar, unpaid internship role because the around the clock efforts of these jobs are similar to the work schedule of a housewife. A housewife’s duties generally have no distinction between keeping home (working) and being at home (not working). As the duties of keeping home do not hold the traditional hours of an office, a housewife’s tasks take place both day and night intermingled with every day’s pleasures. So therefore, in attempt to explain feminization of labor, Ross implies that by simply being women they are attuned and inclined to the work-ethic of having no clear distinction between work time and leisure time, compared to their male counterparts. While I personally find this connection to be assumptious and furthering the gendered divide, there is no denying that the majority (77% according to Ross’s research) of unpaid internships are held by women in which their efforts exceed the formal model of a 5-day, 40 hour work week. Perhaps it would be better to examine the reasoning behind the gendered imbalance by interpreting women’s extra efforts in the workplace as striving to disprove discriminating assumptions of being the inferior sex, working harder than male counterparts to dispel gendered inequality but consequently creating a new gendered assumption that women are more readily open to being exploited in their effort and time in the new mobile labor sector.

In addition to the feminization of the creative industries, like those in tech and corporate American unpaid internships, another feminization of labor is taking place in the physical workforces that produce the electronic devices for upon which creative industries utilize. Ross explains that these factories that create devices in countries like China are employed almost fully by rural female teenagers receiving little compensation for long work hours. The remote locations of the factories partnered with little competition of other work and few opportunities for women in general, make possible the exploitation of this class of women.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.” – Jeff Hammerbacker

The production of irresistible click content has created a cultural landscape in which every day we are baited in an “attention economy.” In this attention economy, value is based solely on our internet use: the more the better, the shorter our attention spans the better, the more advertising funded websites we visit the better. Sadly, our internet use – all of our internet use – circulates this economy.

Most of the most frequented websites have adopted “native advertising” practices in which articles are covertly written with the intent to inform the reader of a brand sponsored product rather than unskewed information. These bankroll sponsored posts are intentionally written in the voice of the website’s usual non-sponsored content so that the reader is lured into the advertisement, unaware of the intent. Not only are these articles written in the voice of the website in which they are embedded, they are composed by the website’s staff members, sold as perk package service to would-be advertisers.

Furthering this circulation of the attention economy with major negative consequences to the individual user, is the unauthorized sorting of personal usage profiles into “reputation silos.” This categorical method, solely based on your choices in internet usage, determines what content is presented to you and steers you along a path based on the likelihood of future interests or invoking those would-be interests by presenting them to you. The results are so refined that each user generates different results. What is so disturbing about this prediction based profiling is that companies that do not have permission or even legal right to know personal information about you, like banks knowing your race, gender, or religious affiliation, are using third parties to assess your social media and the makeup of your reputation silo. It is not that this online practice is legal, more so than it is not illegal since online regulations are so inadequate. Regardless, companies are making assessments of you, without your permission, based on your internet usage and gently and subvertly guiding you to more of the irresistible click content that further perpetuates the attention economy.

https://youtu.be/zdA__2tKoIU

Limited monopoly privilege is best described as the first version of copyright. Modeled after Great Britain’s Statute of Anne to manage book trading, limited monopoly privilege was developed reluctantly by Thomas Jefferson and the farmers of the Constitution who recognized that the concept of cultural property, though difficult to define, required some form of regulation. To put protective law on intellectual property is difficult because ideas are intangible. Where thoughts lack a physical being like that of a printed book or a chair, they do have tremendous potential and could spark even greater ideas that could, potentially, greatly benefit society. If a creator feared exploitation of his or her idea by others, they were likely to simply not publish or share their work. It was then decided that to provide creators with temporary exclusive rights and legal protection to their creations would encourage further creation of new cultural entities. Limited monopoly privilege was stressed to be an interim period, establishing monetary support to cultural creators for a window of time before their work, and ideally additional work, became free to all and part of our collective heritage. Until 1978 copyright in the styling of limited monopoly privilege was in practice mostly for books, charts and maps until a new definition of copyright’s scope was expanded to “apply to any ‘expression’ that has been ‘fixed’ to any medium” and even further deviated from the intended limitations, allowing copyright to extend to 70 years.

It isn’t that digital media is complicating our relationship to copyright, its that we have always had a complicated relationship with copyright and the Internet is just the latest method in which the issue has become even more convoluted. Taylor makes it very clear that the concept of ownership of ideas and creative work has been an argument for hundreds of years. Every introduction of new technology that distributes creative work- books, records, radios, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and now the Internet – recreates a panic claiming that piracy by use of the new media will infringe on the rights and profits of those who legally own the art (though the legality of ownership versus distribution rights is another matter.)

The two major opposing views of the copyright issue can be generalized in one group as those who feel all culture should be shared freely as it was created by being influenced by existing culture. The other group are those who feel that something created is something owned and to be profited upon. Granted neither of these groups uphold or represent the views of most artists who wish to create their work for all to have access to it, but also want to pay their bills and have the means to create more art. The creators themselves are not often present in current legal debates about copyright law.

Digital media has further complicated this debate of ownership of content as the Internet, which does not actually produce a physical product, makes the ability to share information and media easier and faster than media (vinyl, cassette tapes, etc) of the past. More media is being shared without compensation than ever before. Internet platforms have also created new ways to profit via distribution that cut the artist from ownership of their own art. These media companies justify their actions by threatening to not distribute the artist’s work at all, cutting them off from any potential profit however minuscule.

Katherine Milkman’s “want/should conflict” explains the multilayered push-pull relationship of the user’s desire of immediacy and desire for quality content with the user’s willingness to compromise quality (the “should” self) for immediacy (the “want” self). The web is more than eager to play into this compromise and offer immediate content, pulling the user into a cyclical engagement of continued clicks on low quality websites and web products. The web’s competition for most timely posts to attain the most clicks means it prioritizes new posts over quality material. A news story time stamped five minutes ago that only summarizes an hour-old original post with more information will generate a higher ranked search result despite not having as much information. The web urges us to click on the most timely material, not the most substantial.

The overlaying layer of conflict is not between the user and what the web so readily offers, it is the user’s choices in web use and need to recognize that, as Taylor puts it, “we have… multiple selves and they want different things.” Though our choices on the web define a version of us through algorithms designed to offer us more based on past consumption, it cannot define us by knowing what we do not tell it. The internet will not offer us the opportunity to see past ourselves and engage in what Milkman calls the “should want.” We need to be aware of web use, how it uses us, and mindfully engage in thought out topics and activities rather than blindly consuming what the web offers.

The economic activity associated with straightforward selling of goods or labor implies that, and supported by NYU professor Clay Shirky, that to be paid you should be engaging work that you do not enjoy. Thought she is opposed to it, Rebecca Solnit has made a similar observation in that the “conventionalized notion of work as the forty hours of submission to another’s purpose snipped out of your life (and leaving a hole in your heart and mind).” Why do feel that to make money, our efforts should not be toward something fulfilling, or is it that we make excuses for our own choices? Those who enjoy their work, bakers, firemen, and others who create but not categorized as “Artists” seem to be exempt from criticism as those who write, create, play, implying that their crafts are not “work.”

The elevated forms of value we associate with art and culture, we need to promote that our culture needs support through the arts and tear down the misconceptions that artists do not work hard and that their efforts are important and worthwhile. By setting the economic bar lower and lower for artists, it is creating a new expectation on the part of the artist and, particularly those who titter between amateurism and professionalism, as there is no clear divider other than the continuation of not being paid. This pattern leaves the artist to feel that their work should only be beheld as amateur, or that the industry has changed so that they should just be happy with what they can get. And this new expectation does not only sit on the heads of the artists, but on the viewer/reader/listeners as well. The more that media users feel they are entitled to the free reproductions of art that the internet makes so easy, the more they distance themselves from understanding that making the art costs a great deal.

Though the argument for “the little person” to have the support over the “professional” is valid at a glance, when it comes to the people who do their work to help other people and contribute to our culture, I believe their work, their art, their teaching, their helping, should be supported. If the economy isn’t sustaining their practices, we need to have another look at the distribution of wealth and to our government and start to make change that makes a difference.

Cooperative Ethos

Cooperative ethos is brought up by Taylor on page 19 of chapter one as a comparative concept, a third theory to contrast’ “techno-skeptic” social factory, digital feudalism ideas of Lanier and Scholz in which social media users are being used to feed the social economy with due compensation. Cooperative ethos is a concept of “new media cheerleader” Kevin Kelly who sees this new social use of technology as a positive cooperative, a new version socialism – a digital socialism. Kelly interprets the cooperative efforts of users not as exploitative, but a cooperative in which users who make the content should also regulate it. Advertising would not exist as it would mean promoting ourselves to ourselves. In other words, there would be no wealth to share as all profit would be reabsorbed into the cooperative effort. Those in the cooperative are invested in what they do and the reward of maintaining their efforts is the continuation and perpetuation of their media platforms.

Taylor may see the concept of cooperative ethos as an ideal, if not wishful thinking. It disregards the existing free market individualism and centralized authority currently established in our online society, though Kelly feels his concept, if adopted, would make they for-profit establishment non-existent. There is no talk of tearing down, or how to tear down, the current system in order to embrace the utopia of a cooperative ethos.

Taylor is discussing that the arguments we most often hear about technology are put into basic, black and white -good versus bad- terms rather than people on an individual basis taking a deeper than superficial investigation of the who/what/why behind our media use and its true purposes. I believe Taylor is saying that it is good that we are starting the conversation by asking broad questions, but we need to dig deeper and really look at how our day to day actions and behaviors using the internet and using social media are adding to new trends in how we are targeted online by those looking to profit. Saying that as an individual that we cannot make a difference in changing how things are is only securing yourself as a part of the larger problem of the internet being dominated by corporations that control our social structures.

Taylor also brings up impact of technology on our culture and in this we can look to how so many internet users have a lack of concern in granting faceless, nameless companies permission to access our private information, who then use, save, or sell it for reasons not made clear to the public. It is these simple actions that so greatly contribute to technological cultural impact, meaning that we are handing over exactly what researchers are looking for to make our online behaviors more compulsive. It is easy to not think about exactly how our identity, internet use and locations are being tracked because we don’t see immediate consequences of what our thoughtless finger-click is actually compromising about ourselves. Why do we so blindly allow the technologies that are such a huge part of daily lives be controlled against our best interest? Why don’t we demand more transparency and honest practices?