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% Simone Glover completed
October 13, 2015

 

Native advertising

 

I have to agree with Taylor when she argues that “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” because I am one of many who thought that this would be the case.  In fact, as I click on today, I am bombarded with “unnecessary” advertisements that interrupt my reason for visiting a site.  Taylor’s definition in the book of “native advertising” explains how a site like Buzz Feed, a person would be hit with many advertisements with many different messages in order to market their product to a consumer, who may not necessarily be interested in the product but is forced to view the brand and its content in an attempt to coerce the consumer in to buying.

 

Tastemakers

 

Another example of unnecessary advertisement or public notice would be companies collaborating with one another to form double messages that may not pertain to each other’s business, but like native advertising, force their products or services on to the reader.  Tastemakers will coerce the reader of a site to see both ads and send a message that (although not connected) will have the viewer believe that both products are doubly good and therefore should be consumed.  Taylor explains that Tastemakers are often partnered with Brands in order to sell things to readers.  She states that “this kind of corporate saturation has long been the dream of free market acolytes” which only means that ads are being marketed freely, with or without the permission of the reader or viewer.  It often puts me in the mind of television commercials, when (we) the viewer of television are interrupted by ads, yet we pay for cable television and should watch freely without interruption since we’ve paid.  So, I often wonder, if we are paying cable, and the advertisers are paying cable, who wins and what are we getting as consumers, since the advertisers are getting their products and services out there, what are we actually getting.

Y Late Posts
October 13, 2015

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% Simone Glover completed
October 13, 2015

 

“access content and distribution networks”

 

According to Drupal.org, Content Access is a module that allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows you to specify custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you can enable per content access settings, so you can customize the access for each content node.  After reading Taylor’s chapter, my understanding of access content is when Capitalist are able to manage data online and regardless of permissions and content types, are able to change the content and delete permissions for each content type.  Therefore giving the Capitalist the ability to customize the access for each content type and putting a person’s information or property in an unsafe realm where property is unprotected and vulnerable to thievery.  In other words, data is shared, stolen and sold to the highest bitter, and the person of the property is unaware and ill-informed about rights and protection. A distribution network is a form of sharing this unsafe, unprotected information to big business that would use your data to market and sell.

 

Taylor breaks Access Content and Distribution Networks in two different groups of Capitalist who make money by selling, and those who make money by controlling.  She explains in the chapter that those companies are like Google and Facebook are the Capitalist that control what people are distributing and make their money by this format.  Where the content sellers are so vulnerable and not fully protected under copyright laws, but are in the business of selling products like music and perhaps movies

Y Prof. Bullock’s response to Hybrid Assignment 05
October 8, 2015

B Midterm Exam
October 8, 2015

Y New report on lack of diversity in Silicon Valley
October 7, 2015

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% Yauheniya Chuyashova completed
October 7, 2015

In this chapter Ross talks about feminization of labor. Free internships are very popular now our days and it is growing very fast. Internship gives you big opportunities in life but it doesn’t give you any guarantee for your future. Ross talks about how free labor and women are connected. The majority of the unpaid internships are women. Most not paying or law paying jobs and internships belong to women. What people want from free internships is to get a job they like but you have to be very lucky to be able to move into some stable job. I feel like females open to do different types of jobs when men you usually see in finance area: The difficulty for women: “While less than 10% of registered apprentices are female, women tend to dominate the most precarious sectors of white-collar and no-collar employment, and it is no surprise that they are assigned the majority of unpaid internships – 77% according to one survey”. Internship labor “blurs the line between task and contrast, between duty and opportunity and between affective and instrumental work. Women are disproportionately burdened when these kinds of boundaries are eliminated”.

This is very sad but it is a reality. I know a lot of people who have good diplomas from different collages, who did internships but still don’t have jobs. Unfortunately they have to work as waitress and in different clothing stores until they will get lucky and find what they have been looking for, the paid job.

 

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% Diami Virgilio completed
October 7, 2015

Ross makes an interesting case for the deskilling of labor due to the influence of digital media. When describing the “no collar” volunteer corps that serves as the backbone of much of the digital media industry. These workers would seldom identify as workers because much of their contributions happen in their leisure time and they participate not because they are compelled to for survival or because they are seeking even entrepreneurial success, but rather because they have a passion for the type of work they are doing or are using it as part of a larger patchwork of creative odd jobs. This no-collar labor force is unbound by geography or workspace and participates from code to content level in keeping major websites and projects operational. Sometimes the work is digitally crowdsourced, adopting strict project management parameters for set objectives while in other circumstances, it is simply the act of contributing content to enlarge or enrich a digital experience that serves as an uncompensated form of labor. The content creation in question is often written off as hobby so participants in its creation don’t even see a way in which they could not do the work. This identity entwinement leads to easy paths to exploitation, and is particularly insidious when coupled with high unemployment. Ross makes the case that the consequence of the economic downturn was the growth of a segment of the population eager to gain new skills or keep busy with old ones who came to value opportunities for crowdsourced piecework.

In addition, this culture infects traditional workplaces which allow work from home set-ups in the name of balance, but are in reality promoting anything but, as labor is essentially on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, shackled to emails and other messaging to create small contributions to creative products at the drop of a hat. As usual, the question arises; who benefits? From the perspective of Ross, it seems clear that the answer is nuanced as free labor invariably benefits big corporations, but “can be seen as a kind of tithe we pay to the Internet as a whole so thay expropriators stay away from the parts we really cherish,” (Scholtz, 31) particularly through keeping networks nonproprietary.

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% Joyce Julio completed
October 7, 2015

In the “Computers Are Not to Blame chapter”, Andrew Ross stated that, “There is no doubt that new media, which has the technical capacity to shrink the price of distribution to almost zero, is hosting the most fast-moving industrial efforts to harness the unpaid effort of participants” (Ross, p. 32). One of the examples that Ross used to show the cheapened and discounted form of labor associated with the rise of digital media was the rise of self-service. Before, when people needed to make phone calls, they have to connect with a telephone operator first. But now, we dial by ourselves. When we call customer service, we often listen and respond to automated voice messages and “robo-voices” instead of an actual customer service representative. It is still possible to speak with an actual representative, but still, it’s a robo-voice who answers the call first. Actual customer service representatives are also outsourced in other countries for lower wages which allows companies to save on costs and reap bigger profits. Another example that Ross used was the reality TV show contestants. They are not considered actors, so they do not receive the same benefits the professional actors do. Even other members of the team working on the reality TV programming such as production assistants, drivers, technical crew, and others are not paid equally as those team members working on scripted movies or shows. They work long hours without meal breaks for the price of half of what the employees on scripted shows are paid without any health or other benefits.

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% Diami Virgilio completed
October 7, 2015

Post 1.

“Taylorism” (40).

Taylorism is the system created by Frederick Winslow Taylor to analyze and manage the methods of labor engaged in by workers with an eye toward increasing efficiency and production. Taylor termed his methodology scientific management as it entailed tactics such as measuring the distance a worker swung his arm back when operating a hammer, designing the work space so a laborer took a specified amount of steps and keeping a worker moving until all of the day’s labor was complete. Astonishingly, Taylor believed his system was benefiting workers by taking some of the guesswork out of their actions and providing a methodology suited to the limits of the human body. Unfortunately, this system incentivized pushing said body all the way to ninety to a hundred percent of its limits rather than allowing workers any form of non micromanaged freedom of expression. Taylor believed that at heart workers were lazy and that their “soldiering” or loafing led to great losses of production. A system wherein their every moment was controlled would increase production and also inculcate in the worker a routinized form of completing his job that was without guesswork.

Within the digital realm, this is replicated through processes such as mechanical turking where workers perform compartmentalized duties alienated completely from their product accoriding to gamified work specs that really only value low cost micromanaged completion of tasks, not valuation of labor or room for innovation which is typically the province of the management or outsourcer..

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