í Assignments

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.

In this chapter, Ross touches on the topic of the feminization of labor, which has to do with the fact that certain jobs (mostly low paying or non paying jobs) have been branded as “feminine” jobs in our culture today. He addresses the fact that American culture has seen an increase in unpaid internships within the last few years, and that women make up the majority of these unpaid internships. Ross states “Most trades remain male strongholds and less than 10% of registered apprentices are female, with women dominating the most precarious sectors of white collar and no-collar employment.” He believes that the intern economy is a reflection of the feminization of work, because most of these positions are filled by women. His statistics go on to show that these internships rarely transition into a permanent job placement, which in turn brings to light the inequality that women face in the workplace. Ross states “the sacrifices, trade offs, and humiliations entailed in interning are more redolent of traditional kinds of women’s work, whether at home or in what used to be called the secondary labor market.”

I agree with this assessment because more and more I see positions that are traditionally filled by women (such as secretary or admin jobs) being offered as temp jobs, but rarely,(if ever), do you find a male dominated job position for SVP or Managing Director being offered on a temporary basis. If we do a critical assessment of the jobs that offer unpaid internships or temp jobs, they tend to predominantly target the female population. We come to believe that internships provide the necessary training in order to be qualified for a position, but we do not realize that it is an illusion created by the corporate giants, one that has provided them with the ability to get workers for free.

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.

This is a big chapter – Taylor goes in on marketing and the loss of public privacy, the ecological devastation that springs from the overconsumption of gadgetry, and the undermining of cultural value due to overproduction and planned obsolescene of the materials and tools the consumer engages with, and the emergence of the branded self as the marker of cultural capital. To get right to the point, I believe that what Taylor set’s up for the reader in chapter 6, is an understanding of what the web’s swirling economies and landscapes are actually made up of – much of the same stuff that is fueling the flesh world -hierarchical systems of inequality and waste. Referencing Marx’s “hidden abode of production,” which as many of us at this point would gather is typically revealed to be factory floor spaces or other places where the actual labor is taking place, Taylor spends the chapter bringing the “weightless rhetoric of digital technology” to a visible ground. By pointing to the “people and resources on which these systems depend” in order to de-romanticize the opaque openness of the cultural commons, Taylor breaks down what it is she means when she speaks of the “material reality [that] supports the digital commons… hardware, infrastructure, and content.”

Emphasizing the ecological impact of our consumption, Taylor argues that the hidden costs of our first world desires for the latest and greatest gadgetry position ourselves and the people who labor on these gadgets in places of victimization, although several tiers removed from one another. E-waste is not just that out of date smartphone that gets tossed in the trash – it’s the chemical components that go into its making (from minerals mined by enforced labor) and these chemicals eventually leach out into the earth and into the hands of poorer neighbors in the global south who scavenge these materials for scraps. E-waste is almost sounds like junk mail but that’s the allure of the web, this idea that even your trash will be airy and ephemeral. What is true is that here in the U.S. we do not really evaluate the long standing implications of where all that waste goes, until it shows up in our own backyards. I remember watching a documentary a few years ago that featured footage of mountainous piles of junked cellphones in a village in China, children climbing around it and playing all the while as a strange neon colored liquid seemed to stream out from the base of the pile. That’s the ecological and human impact of E-waste – mysterious neon ooze with zero regulation around it and devastating future health implications. This link highlights the impact:

http://usuncut.com/world/12-horrifying-photos-of-the-tech-industry-apple-never-wants-you-never-see/

On the other end of things, in our first world bubble, one of the primary ways that these corporations drive their products and the demand for such cultural capital to the dizzying height that it’s reached is through measuring the impact of the self as a commodity. “Combining the logics of engineering and capitalism, the self has become measurable and maximizable, tallied through metrics such as the number of contacts and Web hits, retweets and reblogs, five stars, ratings, likes, notes, and comments.” The logic follows that the more you participate in online platforms where your brand is cultivated, the more the agencies that calculate your value as someone who will be able to shill their products for them in the most un-shillable way. “The goal, always, is to get more – more friends, more fans, more followers…”

These people are the Tastemakers – “celebrities” propelled forward by their willingness (or in some cases ignorance of how their contribution will be manipulated) to create content that endorses products and brands that will continue to market to their targeted audiences. Their social capital is their branded self. As if there weren’t enough levels of social stratification to contend with – this is the definitely the most transparent reading of what effect these marketing strategies and tech innovations are enabling in our rapidly developing society – further inequality that alienates and separates people from doing the thing that Facebook was supposedly created for – connecting.

Pirate Politics describes the actions of political parties established to advocate for the ethics of online piracy. With the rise of peer to peer services and torrent sites, file sharing has become a global phenomenon and was eventually conflated with an individual rights struggle. The Swedish version of the party is perhaps best known due to widespread cultural tolerance for piracy in Sweden (even allowing for a religious protection under the Church of Kopimism). The German Pirate Party has enjoyed the most political success owing to its upstart Parliamentary wins.

The party characterizes itself as neither left nor right leaning and focuses its energies primarily on promoting government transparency, online and offline privacy and copyright reform (Taylor, p.160).

Pirate politics elevate to a human right the ability to share anything, be it ideas, content, government data or formulae for life saving patent protected pharmaceuticals. The ethic is both anticapitalist and fundamentally reliant on the production of the capitalist system, without which there would be considerably less to pilfer. While there is an economic justice slant that couches piracy in redistributive terms, there does not seem to be a call for an outright abolition of private property. Instead, the goals seem limited to more esoteric concepts such as liberating creativity and equalizing access. There is as much an affinity to creators of content as there is a contempt for big business as the intermediator of content, which leaves piracy enthusiasts in an awkward position as those same companies they revile are responsible for granting wealth to  the creators they celebrate.

In chapter 6 “Drawing a Line”, Astra Taylor talks about advertising in our digital time. Advertising is everywhere no matter what you do or where you go. Now our days all advertising posts online, when before most of it was in newspapers, magazines and TV. I don’t know if it is still exist, but few years ago it used to be a newspaper, which was only for advertising.

Now, if you go online to do something, it is always advertising popping out. Crazy part is that it remembers what sites you visited and what you checked. Later advertising just comes up in a random time and usually it is something similar what you have been interesting in or saw before. It is like someone watching you behind the screen. Here comes the term “reputation silos”. This is sort of a profile made by our personal information like gender, race, religion, age and etc. “We are been sorted into “reputation silos” that can be surprisingly difficult to get of”. The bad part about it that it is illegal for the companies, for example, has all this information.

Of course we can go anywhere without our gadgets. Here is another term comes as “e-waste”. Our time is moving very fast, that’s why it always something new coming out. Every year comes lots of different gadgets. For example as soon as Apple iPhone comes out, everyone trying to get it as soon as possible. But the question is where goes all this gadgets that we don’t use any more or the one we don’t buy. This is all “garbage”, but the problem is that all this hundreds of million gadgets not recycling by people. “And so our mountains of e-waste grow three times faster than the piles of the regular garbage accumulating all around us”.

While Taylor makes some good points in this chapter, the advertising schemes she decries are not exactly new to the digital landscape. The techniques of tailored market research and targeted advertising have existed in television and print advertising for at least the last half century, perhaps most notably through Nielsen’s data collection methods for television and via survey informed advertorials in newspapers and magazines. Today these tactics simply fall under new names such as SEO and Native Advertising. What distinguishes the actual application of these new technologies is that they are individuated and tend to have a cumulative effect as the number of data points to identify a user increase. While native advertising is certainly a disreputable way to make a living as a journalist, in a way it’s an evolution of a well established practice within the field. It can be argued that this more personalized advertising has more utility for the reader, the ethics of it are highly dubious as the reader may believe they are reading earnest product or service reviews. Again, the problem here seems to have less to do with the tools in the digital milieu than it does with the normalization of exploitative practices toward consumers so prevalent in American society.

More disquieting is the creation of reputation silos within the personas created by our aggregate searches. These silos, which label users into categories of targets or waste reinforce inequality by beginning their search result steering using a fairly comprehensive, but uncritical set of data including our social relationships, our geography, our demographics and our (online) behavior. Again, however, these tactics are not new as the credit industry has used analogous methods in determining who can participate in the economy practically since its inception. What is threatening about this practice online is that it will inevitably insulate certain users from experiences in the name of personalization. Further, the lack of forgetting online means there is little opportunity to rehabilitate one’s online persona short of using private browsing services. Tailored search is useful, and in e-commerce, almost preferable, but algorithms can sometimes produce baffling results that alienate rather than reassure users.

Taylor defines “Free” in two different ways, first in a cultural way, free refers as belonging to everyone and something that no one can own; it belongs to all “knowledge cannot be owned and we have a responsibility to share it” (Taylor, Loc 2210).

Free is also referred as cognition that is public property. Moreover, in the digital world free can be perceived as “ free access”, “free download”, “openness”. According to the software programmer Richard Stallman, Free has two sides “ There’s ‘free’ as in speech and ‘free’ as in beer, as the famous” (Taylor, Loc2241), meaning, that is free culture is for the people to enrich from it, however there is a public ownership. As an example, Taylor states that “ art and culture are nonetheless vital, essential eve, to what it means to be human, yet digital abundance diminished our sense of their work” (Taylor Loc.2252). Free, is about keeping culture open meaning that since no one forces an artist to release their work, once they do release it, it should really be free to spread.

Group: Giselle Lopez, Yauheniya Chuyashova

The scary thought of the computer tracking us, seeing what we like and what we search often is described to us in Chapter 6. It becomes a disturbing reality when we see all the ways this is happening in our “attention economy.”
Taylor points out that we are in “reputation silos” (190). This means that we are labeled by what we do on the Internet and this in turn, manages what we are exposed to and what products or information we are given. This economy that we experience in the computer world is solely based off us. An example that occurred to me was when I was looking online for items to get for Mother’s Day. I was deciding on whether to get a jewelry box or earrings. After questioning my options, I had enough and exited the browser. The next day I open up to Facebook and the first thing I see as soon as I scroll down my feed is an advertisement for the same exact jewelry box I was looking at before. It was like my computer had decided for me. Skip a few months after and I still see it pop up today, like a constant reminder of that day.
Another thing that is circulating in this economy is the idea of “native advertising” (194). It’s summed up as a post that allows readers or viewers to be able to enjoy their content while also receiving a message from advertisements. In the book it states that BuzzFeed is the leader in bringing out this idea. As a dedicated viewer of BuzzFeed videos, I can say this is absolutely true. Just the other night one of the ads, on a BuzzFeed video, was a BuzzFeed video that took three couples and showed us how they drove. It was an ad for a specific car brand, but it was done in a way where you actually want to watch the ad instead of skipping it. It’s definitely eye-opening to read about the ways we get trapped in this “attention economy.”