Trebor Scholz – What the MySpace generation should know about working for free |
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Driven by hormones and a sea of desires, millions are sucked into networked screens for hours on end. For the media and news industries these are the heydays of participatory cultures. Cultural anthropologists study “interactivity,” and the networked sociality of teens, fans, and bloggers of all ages who are trying to impress their friends or seek a platform for their ideas. Rather than balancing affordances and pitfalls (democratizing effects such as the massification of voice and harmful aspects such as addiction and continuous partial attention), this essay focuses on creative labor from the perspective of the MySpace generation. |
My parents spend hours reading the newspaper and their stupid magazines, so what’s the big deal if I spend hours reading messages from my friends? The hypocrisy really gets to me.
– Jassa, 17 (p. 1)
Some of my friends have MySpace parties. Basically, a bunch of kids get together with their laptops and all sign on to MySpace and start surfing it together. The party takes off when they start surfing kids’ profiles who aren’t present. You can imagine what a gossip scene it is.
–Tara, 16 (p. 78)
“I definitely was addicted to MySpace. I would spend hours sprucing my page, commenting to people I see every day, and filling out worthless surveys.”
–Wanda, 16 (p. 25)
The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.
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(2) The term “social factory” goes back to the Italian autonomists.
(4) MySpace has more than 100 million profiles but not all people who created accounts there are running active sites. Out of all time spent online by U.S. Internet users, 11.9% was spent logged on to MySpace.com. This makes it THE website where U.S. Americans spend the most of their time online in terms of a single website.
(6) The estimated market value of sociable spaces is illustrated by the very large profits of net giants like Google.
(7) Lawrence Lessig, in October 2006, wrote about The Ethics of Web 2.0. More concerned with sharing practices rather than ethics, Lessig, groups the sociable web into fake sharing sites (YouTube) and true sharing sites (Flickr, blink.tv). YouTube does not have a true sharing mechanism as part of its system. It makes it very easy to reference a video on YouTube but the file itself is not shared. Blip.tv is designed for actual sharing of content
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June 24th, 2008 at 20:30
Although I find true intuitions in your post, I still think that the word “labor” is non appropriate. The fact that users create added value for the site does not imply there is “labor”. TV viewers also provide added value, etc…
I think that the common factor that unifies TV, My Space, Google, etc.. and creates alienation is “free, with advertising”.
Please check my post in my blog (unfortunately in french, so I give you a Google translation): http://translate.google.fr/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fthierry-klein.speechi.net%2F2008%2F04%2F06%2Fgoogle-web-20-et-les-autres-mefiez-vous-du-gratuit%2F&hl=fr&ie=UTF8&sl=fr&tl=en
August 16th, 2008 at 14:43
xcellent post. Yesterday, I was just taking action on this matter here, [http://tinyurl.com/6aysva].
Shortest and most direct response to your post: I might request to please help us create market mechanisms that ensure that the value created by labor accrues to labor. Not a popularity contest model, but a weighted model of micro-payments that have been the holy grail of many, for decades. We still haven’t cracked this tough problem, but it’s time that we did. Markets only really suck worst when inefficiencies and failures permit and encourage, then perpetuate such absurd resource skews.
Markets CAN work, if participants of conscience band together and take action. Unfortunately, lack of conscience is a massive market distortion factor that utterly fails to appear on tidy economic depictions of supply and demand graphs. In fact, hundreds of powerful market-moving “externalities” are completely dismissed as inconsequential, for the real or perceived lack of discrete quantifiability. However, give just about anything a cool looking Greek variable name and a range of values, and watch the new equations fill the textbooks with a new generation of myth-perpetuating pseudo-science.
During a radio interview yesterday, Danny Glover mentioned that 75% of Americans are only 3 paychecks from homelessness. Seventy Five Percent. How is that a “middle” class? It’s clearly and mathematically not, and more and more of those 75% have become sufficiently educated to understand that the fictional middle class never did exist and is less credible than ever. Sadly, not enough are motivated enough to do anything about it, so long as they have enough distractive technologies around them to keep them occupied.
This makes no sense to me when a similar metric shows that 70% of the Net Wealth of our nation is held by 5% of the population [http://tinyurl.com/y6zst6]. Some of us are considered pretty close to that upper percentile, yet the gaping discontinuity between the very top 1% and those tenuously perched in the neighborhood of the 10th percentile makes even this apparent proximity to “the top of the food chain” effectively meaningless.
That is to say, we are conditioned that we ought to feel “privileged” to be better off than 90% of our fellow citizens, but instead we only feel outraged at the fact that even the 10th percentile, it does not purchase the financial security required for anything even resembling a state of LIBERTY, let alone JUSTICE for all.
This is what I mean when I say that intergenerational Market Failures have perpetuated Malignant and Unsustainable Resource Skews. Markets made this mess and markets can fix it … however, ONLY if market participants of conscience innovate and enact the market tools and methods to make the necessary corrections.
To the comment that TV viewers provide added value, I don’t think so. In fact, the only value TV viewers contribute to the broadcast ecosystem is when they contribute at the cash register in response to advertising. I’d be quite surprised to find any rational argument by which you can successfully transubstantiate shopping into labor. The comment almost qualifies as trolling.
LABOR is an intrinsic human creative behavior, not something dependent upon the exchange of trinkets or slips of arbitrarily valued paper. Slavery is definitely LABOR, and not a dime changes hands, right? When We The People are THE CONTENT and the CREATORS of CONTENT that platform owners utilize as the primary means to attract ad viewers, it is patently obvious that the creators of content are being exploited; not compensated for the value that they alone uniquely create, aggregate, and accrue.
I’m infinitely happy to see someone other than myself finally begin illuminating these crucial perspectives with significantly more intellectual rigor and focus than I’ve mustered. Thank your Trebor. Fantastic.
Other fragmented thoughts:
Trebor wrote, “The mere presence of Tara and her friends on MySpace creates value.” AND attracts Tara’s friends who want to be like Tara, which brings EYEBALLS to the embedded Ad Party.
I’d suggest the bracketed text, here: “You create and give away for free (or for a sum that is [an infinitesimal fraction of] the value that you generate), the advertisement that is aimed at yourself. Such companies do in fact exist and they are thriving.”
When you say “pleasurable cultural production and sociality is turned into capital,” this is precisely what I mean when I say *WE* are the CONTENT [http://tinyurl.com/5g6a2f]. Thank you for articulating this so clearly.