This course is taught by David Crane in Spring 2009.
Christoph Girard's presentation will consist of a close reading of the last two paragraphs of Tiziana Terranova's Free Labor: Producing Culture for a Digital Economy in which useful terms and categories from that text will be identified and preserved, even as we might seek to update her analysis by examining the ways in which the "work" preformed by net-workers, and free labor in the context of high technology more generally, has been all the more fully circumscribed by capital during the ten years since the publication of Terranova's text. Recourse will be made to web 2.0 networks like Yelp.
The Internet is a collective of connected human minds.
Tiziana Terranova's Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy starts out with a critical interpretation with an anecdote of the problems of free labor as an uprising from chatroom operators for AOL who were unpaid to monitor rooms.
We have Donna Harraway’s Cyborg manifesto and its critique of Marxist labor practices, a.k.a. the “humanizing” of labor and the way, “fifteen years” after this article was published has seen the drive to move to a posthuman intelligence.
Corporate leaders and politicians believe the commodification of information is believed to be the next step of capitalism which has proven itself over ten years. The knowledge of users of the Internet cannot be managed but what they incidentally view and write can be by statistical marketing in social networking sites, which is helping stuff the pockets of “multinational capitalism.”
The importance of updating this article comes to the realization that it touches more on capital then I believe the author, leaders or politicians could foresee ten years ago when this article was in the process of being written and published. Capitalism didn’t stay outside of the network, as maybe it was more elusive ten years ago according to the author, it is omnipresent on the net today.
While I see it problematic that we are referencing an article that represents an Internet of ancient history with unforeseen practices of web mining or mining information directly to marketing/advertising of then-Facebook/Myspace/Yelp and other Web 2.0-related ventures, I believe the author does touch on the notion that the idea of free labor could eventually move towards capitalism. I don’t believe she recognized how fast it would move. As a sidenote, there seems to be a problem with the publishing of articles on paper about the Internet; it seems like a lot of these ideas need updating.
The creation of information from various users makes this labor questionable, in part, some users are getting paid versus generating free content and the information serves the same purpose, which is to keep the user occupied and logged on as long as they can. It is the spectacle of changing labor behind the website that keeps the user coming back. So, there is a reliance of users as the providers like Yelp.
Yelp, for example, is a profitable business that is dependant on the reviews of users of various businesses. If a business doesn’t have reviews, it will appear as nonexistent. Similarly, if a business has negative reviews, it will appear unfavorable; likewise, the opposite. I was promoted as an Elite member for 2008 and then for 2009 and got over the website. I am currently now being prodded by the cool and outgoing 30-year-old curly haired women with smiles and long earrings who are paid moderators of Yelp to “Write More!” and attend Elite gatherings by patronizing cool bars that sponsor the website with advertising revenue. The Elite status is a way to compel users to contribute more free labor – write more and more and more and never stop.
Web 2.0 is dependent on labor. Café Brasil, for example, is a business that has a strong presence by its favorability and number of reviews, whereas website with other similar search functions don’t have Café Brasil listed. Happy Cow which is a website similar to Yelp for vegan-friendly dining, has no record of Café Brasil on their website as a vegan-friendly place because of its lack of users using the website. Similarly, if Café Brasil was situated in a town or city on Yelp that didn’t have many reviews, it might not be detected.
The idea of mining was introduced to social networking websites only a few years ago, which is relatively recent as they’ve been around for over ten years now. The process of mining is the taking of individual bits of information to save for marketing purposes and customize an ad for you to see. In other words, crawlers will more likely reference data you add, internal mining and other miscellaneous robots then that Internet friend of your dreams. For those with information and who are logged in the page, it might have been an unwelcome and creepy feeling to see your interests reflected on a clickable ad. For example: if you’re Catholic, interested in women and hip hop music. Click ads could appear for one, or a combination of all three. Click here to find other Catholic women in (the location of which your ip address is retrieved, Santa Cruz) who like hip hop music!
From the advent of early social networking websites, the notion of free labor from promoting an identity that represents the self as spectacle was not directly mined at the time this was written. Immaterial labor is understood as the production of “cultural content” and is still undetermined in terms of virtuality and skill. While the users of the Internet are invisible, the “avant garde of labor” or a site of resistance is becoming or has become another profit for capitalism. The economy is increasingly reliant on the production of “creative subjectivities” that are self-organizing in cyberculture. Mining scares me because no matter what kind of information we write or even just log in, an ad tracks our web presence as statistical data (whether we click or not.)
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