5 Hybrid Assignment 05

Nowadays, digital media has overtaken in all forms on how things are done. From industrialized to digitalize, from freelance to e-lance. Ross states that crowdsourcing refers to a way in which knowledge is often collected and collaborative and how this has served to be used to contextualize the rise where users a often the one who are doing the work indirectly. It is seen that as mentioned by the author “ The crowd is not only smarter than trained employees, you don’t need to make social security contributions to take advantage of its wisdom or put up with wayward personalities of the creative on payroll”( 30). Obviously we encounter it everyday even if is not our desire. When we access websites such as Youtube and like the videos, when we like pictures on facebook and Instagram we are sometimes coming across the work of talented individuals who are photographers, reporters, and individuals the successful ones are quickly snatched up by the likes of gigantic corporations as mentioned before. Also another form of crowdsourcing is when individuals use hashtags. As Ross mentions big social media companies such as twitter, groupon, zynga, linkending and tumblr, these companies use a “ free, or token wage, labor is increasingly available though a variety of channels: crowdsourcing; the explosion of unpaid, near-obligatory internships in every white –collar sector”(24).

Marisa Chung
Hybrid Assignment 05
10/06/15

In this week’s reading, Ross explains the cheapened and discounted form of labor that affiliates with the rise of digital media by sharing many different examples throughout the chapter. One of the examples that stood out to me most was the white collar / no collar interns. I can personally relate to this because this is something I also experienced, as well as many people that I associate myself with. From my personal experience, I feel as though internships have become the new entry-level job that consists of the same responsibilities and basic experience, except it is only without one of the most important factors; without compensation or benefits. I absolutely understand that getting an internship is a great opportunity to learn and build experience, however I also think that unpaid internships requires as much hard work and effort as a real “job”. In addition, internships do not guarantee an individual with a job when the internship is finished. Therefore, I believe that it is extremely unfair for interns to work hard without getting paid for their work. Unfortunately, as Ross mentions in the chapter, Corporate America takes advantage of this system and gets a “$2 billion annual subsidy from internships alone”.

Ross also mentions that the financial profile of some companies are extremely high. According to Ross, Facebook alone took in an estimated $4.3 billion in revenue in 2011, and almost 1 billion of that was net profit. The firm only had a little more than 2,000 employees on payroll. And how do companies such a Facebook make a huge financial success? It is through the subscription base of Facebook’s half a billion users. (Us) Ross adds that the users are not consumers in any traditional sense of paying customers. They make their money by what we share, as well as from advertisers or behavior market vendors. The users become the “products being sold”. Everything has become business related which in many ways seems unfair. Facebook claims to be “free” but it really isn’t.

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.

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 Ross’ argument where he is focusing on the digital media’s ability to “extract cheaper and discounted work from users and participants,” we can quite clearly see, in  the examples of “crowdsourcing”, “white collar/no collar interns”, and “reality TV”, the relationship to his argument.  By exploring the concept of “crowdsourcing”, we see that many people are tasked with smaller components related to a project and/or problem.  The work derived from these smaller components, are then compiled by a managing entity that is the only one who knows all of the various parts, to create the final desired outcome and/or solution.  In many instances, if at all, the compensation to the many participants is minuscule at best.  In the now higher popularized “white collar/no collar internships”, many companies exploit the free labor of their interns.  In most cases, interns receive no to little financial compensation, while being tasked with producing professional quality work for their employers.  In many fields now, these internships have seem to become the way to build a professional resume, garner experience, increase social/professional connections, in hopes of being able to find a position in a chosen field; particularly, in a field like media.  Education alone is no longer enough to transition from the academic to the professional spheres.  The rise in the popularity and diversity of “reality TV” shows, is another example of this in the field of media.  Many of the related fields to the production of television and film projects, use interns instead of established professionals (who are usually unionized and are guaranteed much higher, industry standardized wages).  It has become a way of increasing the profit margin, while/by cutting production costs (and in most cases, production value).  Also, these same people are aware that there is little to no job security related to this kind of work, which contributes to concept of “precarious work” environments.  These production companies have no contractual obligation to the staffers and they can be replaced at any time (usually with/by someone willing to do the same work and/or more, for less).  These productions do not utilize professional actors or writers.  Instead, they use “regular” people and the writers engineer situations and/or circumstances that generally lead conflict to be exploited for ratings and sound bites for promotion.  It is clear in these examples that digital media has indeed been able to “extract cheaper and discounted work from users and participants.”

In this long winded and extensive chapter, Ross is addressing the various ways the internet and technology have affected the ways we work and earn money.  One example, that at least to me, eloquently summarizes this argument is the use and description of the term – “Precarious Work”.  This idea bespeaks of the situation many professional and non-professional people are finding themselves in.  For many, the traditional ways, means and fields of work have been systematically impacted by new technologies and how these technologies have changed the way people work; and thus, causing a lot of people to no longer be able to work in/or spend their entire work career employed by one life long employer.  This has lead a lot of people to have to seek many short-term, temporary, or even piece-meal types of employment situations now becoming more popular in the larger capitalistic work-force, to eek out an existence.  This type of  work situation has also encroached on what use to be considered leisure time.  People are finding themselves working longer hours, even requiring them to produce in their private time, in order to, meet the requirements and in some cases, quotas of production, for meager compensation.  Also, this term relates to and encompasses the notion that, there don’t seem to be many fields that still follow the traditional paths to employment.  It has become increasingly the responsibility of workers, to seek new and creative ways of distinguishing themselves, making themselves stand out and building notoriety, in order to find permanent employment in their chosen/desired fields.

In this chapter Ross discusses cheapened and discounted labor that he believes is a result of digital media. He uses the example of reality tv show contestants and white collar/ no collar interns to demonstrate his point. To the public, it may seem like these two examples are simply the result of changes in our society, but Ross highlights the corporate strategy behind both of these. First, reality tv became appealing to the TV industry not because it was simply something new and exciting to present to the public, but because it benefitted the TV industry first and foremost. Ross states “The production costs of these shows are a fraction of what producers pay for conventional, scripted drama. They are so cheap to make, that virtually all the production costs are earned back from the first network showing; syndicated or overseas sales are all profit.” This move to reality television was really done to keep the Writers Guild of America out of reality programming, by claiming there is no need for writers since reality television is unscripted.

Secondly, interning in America has become, in the words of Ross, “the fastest growing job category of recent years for a large slice of educated youth trying to gain entry into workplaces.” He addresses the fact that internships are argued to provide workers with experience and skills, and as a prelude to employment, but in most cases, employment never actually happens. It’s the smartest way to get people to work for free; by giving them false hope of employment into the field they desire to be in. He states ” Corporate America enjoys a $2 billion annual subsidy from internships alone, and this sum does not include the massive tax dodges that many firm execute through employer misclassification.” So while corporations are making it seem like the benefit is to the intern (because he is gaining experience by working for free) the true benefit is to the employer and the corporation because they get a supply of people eager to work hard for no compensation.

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.