Susan Crawford in her thoughtful post about the New School panel writes:

http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2007/4/13/2879043.html

"Trebor is worried about "investing [his] memories" in those spaces and having that abused (and that none of his students seem one bit worried about this); Ethan and danah point out that no one forces you to use these spaces, that hyperlinks cut across them, that they're convenient, and that people just want to use them to see their friends."

Consumer choice in this context is largely an illusion. Net publics cannot just pack up and leave when they are displeased with the direction that an environment is taking them simply because the community is there, their friends are there. You could not just leave Facebook because the majority of your fellow students would not be on that other site.

In addition, it is true that there is for sure some cutting across between sites but 1) time is mainly spend on the core sites of the web and 2) much of that cross-usage of services is fought by the likes of MySpace (e.g. the recent PhotoBucket video streaming incident is a good example. MySpace cut off the ability of MySpacers to stream videos on their MySpace sites).

Finally, it is not correct to say that nobody forces you to use these sites. There is certainly peer pressure to be on Facebook when you are a college student. You can't go to site X, Y, Z when your friends are hanging out on Facebook. These sites are creating a monoculture. They have a centrality in terms of page views and the mere size of the community allows for exposure that teens are thursty for. All of this contributes to a high dependency on very few sites.
=====================

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen writes:

"Trebor, as said, it was very interesting. In your presentation, slide five referred to Paolo Virno’s conception of work or labor as something that no longer “happens solely when an object is produced. It takes on the form of a virtuosic performance with the laborer taking on the role of a speaker.”

http://www.slideshare.net/molodiez/the-paradox-of-labor-privacy-property-on-the-core-sites-of-the-sociable-web

So, clearly, more or less everything, including everything on social networking sites, is work. If we accept this, does this work then work differently from the characterization of the dominant mode of work that Marx and his heirs worked out in any of the following ways:

"1) Is it alienating in the same way? Or in comparable ways?"

Another paradox of affective labor online is that of the copy. You give your video away but at the same time you are keeping your original copy. At first glance it seems that distributed labor is less alienated. YouTube is an example for this. You create and then upload your clip. Labor dynamics are, however, very complex. We witness the upcoming drastic job cuts in the media industries, for example. Geographically dispersed individual part-time employees become merely part of the solution and are often not health insured. These kinds of jobs are alienated labor.

"2) Is it tied in with the construction of an identity that facilitates action in concert (as in the Facebook example that was floated around a lot Friday night, when people rebelled against the feed)? Or not (as when Napster simply imploded and people scurried away like cockroaches)?"

I don't think at all that collective action like that on Facebook is very typical. Sociable web media are characterized by plural monocultures: liitle islands on which like-minded people can socialize without much racial, political, economical conflict. The degree of social filtering that is possible on sites like MySpace, Facebook, or all the many other sociable web platforms is extremely high. I'd attribute the Facebook incident to a community being between a rock and hard place. Without the actual option to leave  -- you protest.  18 million students don't just move on to the next platform. The value is in numbers. What's the point of moving on when all your friends (an average of 200-300) stay behind? Community is the product. The convenience of one platform compared to another is surely also a factor. The user interface matters. Archive.org or GoogleVideo are not as easy to use as YouTube. So, I don't think of the emergence of a huge group identity on the sociable web. Or, at least, the commonality does not go far beyond the connection between people who shop at the GAP. Participatory actions are driven by deeply individualistic desires that also serve the common good: individualistic collectivism.

"3) Does the 'positive externalities' and the voluntary character of the work change the equation of whether it is exploitative or not (which it clearly is economically, but maybe less so in general? I would be inclined to say that an expansion of the conception of work would logically entail an expansion of what counts as enumeration, no?)?"

How voluntary participation in the beforementioned social networks really is, is hard to determine. There is surely a lot of peer pressure to be part of The Facebook, for example. That's where you establish yourself in front of your friends. It's not that different on MySpace. It's a way of lifesharing and emotional support and it's also a surface on which youth experiments with their identity in front of their peers. You can switch to a startup that has similar or better features than MySpace but without community it's like performing in front of an empty theater. You can't become a star, something like the Chinese Backstreet Boys, on a smaller platform.  

The centrality of the web in terms of its traffic, its sociality-- makes "consumer choice" an illusion when it comes to social networking sites. You can, of course, go and join a social networking site that aims at Christian Youth, for example. But you'll loose the wealth of the  community that these core, highest traffic sites of the web offer.

=====================

Leisure Arts wrote: 

This title-as-question cuts to the heart of some recent concerns we've had after reading Trebor Scholz's What the MySpace generation should know about working for free and Joasia Krysa's Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Both essays are emblematic of the problematic embrace of the notion of "immaterial labor" as developed by Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and others.

The discourse around immaterial labor strikes us as a perfect example of Marshall McLuhan's insight about using the rear-view mirror to describe current phenomena:

"When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."

In this vein, using "immaterial labor" to describe current networked environments is as inadequate sounding as calling automobiles "horseless carriages." Rather than developing new theoretical language, the antiquated vocabulary of Marxism is re-deployed in the service of an alleged radicality.

This leads us to the origin of the latter half of our title - Jean Baudrillard's The Mirror of Production. In this book Baudrillard describes how Marxist theory exists as a "mirror" of the capitalist order. And he could just as easily have been writing about "immaterial labor" when he notes:

"The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production."

So when Scholz paraphrases an old saying - "The greatest trick that capital ever pulled was convincing the world that labor didn’t exist.", he misses the mark. He falls prey to the Marxist "trick" of seeing the world as nothing but labor.

Or as Baudrillard bluntly puts it:

"And in this Marxism assists in the cunning of capital. It convinces men [sic] that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the 'inalienable' power of creating value by their labor. [entire quote in italics in the original]"

Joasia Krysa repeatedly invokes this rear-view mirror view of labor as well, or what Baudrillard might describe pejoratively as the metalanguage of Western critical abstraction. We see again and again in the discussions of the horseless carriages of the networked economy a failure to critique the universalism of labor itself. In immaterial labor we find a merely functional critique, one that Baudrillard might note:

"...deciphers the functioning of the system of political economy; but at the same time it reproduces it as model."

Or to put it more bluntly:

"Failing to conceive of a mode of social wealth other than that founded on labor and production, Marxism no longer furnishes in the long run a real alternative to capitalism."

We can extend this to apply to Marxism's latest variants that invent, again within the already given "rear-view" structural limits of political economy, yet another ghost - that of immaterial labor. Failing to challenge the very notions of production, labor, and value, these theories and those that uncritically adopt them leave us once more heading into the future with our eyes locked in the rear-view mirror of production...

Steven Kaye's response:

"He suggested a "communal unshackling," consisting of giving net publics control over their content, transparency (regarding privacy, property and ownership) on the part of businesses and a true sharing of monetary value created. Scholz mentioned Benkler, but didn't really pick up on any of his arguments - I should have spoken up on that."

I wish Steven would have brought up Benkler. While I was tempted, I did not bring in the following quote.

The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.
--Yochai Benkler

I disagree with Benkler on this particular point; our perspectives on the networked economy differ.

=================

Ethan Zuckerman posted a clarification of some comments he made at the New School… on his blog. I responded to sections of his comments below.

EZ:"It’s great fun to share the stage with smart people who are working in your field, but not on precisely the same issues you’re focused on. What was especially exciting was sharing the stage with two people as passionate about the issues they’re focused on as I am about the issues I advocate for."

TS: I very much enjoyed danah's and Ethan's wonderfully lively talks.

EZ: "Trebor’s talk argued that websites that rely on user-created content to sell ads are exploiting their workers - the youth who contribute to MySpace are feeding the Rupert Murdoch media machine and are unwitting dupes in forwarding his political agenda."

TS: I emphasized that I am making this argument about the core sites of the sociable web (the ten or so most visited platforms: www.sina.com.cn, www.baidu.com, www.yahoo.com, www.msn.com, www.google.com, www.youtube.com, www.myspace.com, www.live.com, www.orkut.com, and www.qq.com).

EZ: "Specifically, I ended up arguing that no one is making kids use these services and that there are alternatives people can set up to commercial services. Both of those are oversimplifications."

TS: Contributing to the success of MySpace means a monetary gain for NewsCorp. It also contributes to Murdoch's growing media monopoly. I am not arguing that MySpaceters should all take there mp3s and run but I do think that an awareness of the political context in which this social life takes place is positive. In my opinion it is definitely a good thing that teenagers can meet on MySpace in the face of parental lockdown and a basically non-existent public sphere. There is an almost inescapable hybridity. I unwillingly support businesses whose politics I do not share. There is only so much one can be aware of and act upon. But that does not mean that I have to give up and don't care whom I financially support. I care. An essentialist all-or-nothing solution is exactly not called for in my opinion. To be aware that MySpace is NewsCorp-owned is useful. Many kids are socialized in a way that does not make them care about this fact. There are, of course, exceptions. My argument is in favor of an awareness of the politics (e.g. media consolidation) that they are supporting with their time, attention, and consumption contributed to MySpace.

EZ:"This is an interesting argument and one not without merit. But it’s a hard argument for me not to take very personally. I was one of the co-founders of Tripod.com, one of the first sites in the world (alongside Geocities.com and Angelfire.com - which I also ran for a stint) to try to make money from user-created content. We failed, for the most part - we made money from venture capitalists who thought we might, someday, make money from user generated content. But if you’re looking for an exploitative capitalist trying to profit from the sweat of the proletariat’s labors, I’m your man. The fact that I’m able to work on projects like BlogAfrica, Global Voices, Worldchanging.com and Geekcorps is a direct consequence of the fact that I helped build some of the models that now make Trebor so nervous."

TS: Size matters. I mentioned that a mom and pop store is not the same as Yahoo. It goes without saying that it's not a joke to technically support the sociality of 110 or maybe even 170 million people on Myspace (who really knows how many?). But there is such thing as a cost/surplus labor/ surplus value relationship. A site NewsCorp was bought for $583m and is now estimated to head toward a market value of $15billion (over the next 3 years) does not need my pity when it comes to running costs or technical difficulties.

The exploitation of labor is not a fact of human nature as some may want us to believe; it's not a transhistorical fact that we have to live with. I deeply admire projects like Ethan's Global Voices but I wonder if the only way to make such awesomeness happen is through big business, as Ethan argues.

Fred Turner argued recently at the Berkman Center that information does not inevitably lead to social change. People having a fact of information does not mean that society changes, in his opinion. He suggested that powerful brick and mortar institutions change society (and what matters is how networks mange to tie in with those institutions).    

Examining the influence that mailing lists and sociable web platforms such as FibreCulture, nettime, or Interactivist.org had on social movements of the past ten years, I suggest that successful web initiatives can also bloom independent of venture capital. They can serve as significant intellectual undercurrents. I'm not arguing an either-or position. Working within larger-than-life, hegemonical institutions can also be valuable (and Ethan stands as a shining example).

EZ: "I think the way to address these concerns - if you’re persuaded that they are major concerns - is to try to bring interoperability back into these services, probably by creating competing services. Railing about the injustice of MySpace is unlikely to create much change. Creating a MySpace alternative - YourSpace, perhaps - that allows users to own their content, share in revenue from ads, and interoperate as much as possible with existing MySpace users just might. (You can imagine MySpace deciding to block this sort of service - “YourSpace” allows you to include MySpace members in a top eight until MySpace blocks incoming requests that originate from a YourSpace page…)"

TS: To address the socio-political context of MySpace does mean railing or complaining about it. It's simply an acknowledgment of the politics of this platforms in all its complexity. And, that matters! It is necessary to question the ethics of the sociable web, including questions of labor, property, privacy, and media monopoly. That's not a grumpy rant-- this stuff matters.

Some alternatives already exist and yes, we should support them (or, sure-- build our own). After our panel Andrew Golis of TalkingPointsMemo.com pointed me to this for-profit Project Agape. They "are applying diverse experiences to deploy a platform for large-scale political and social activism on the Internet, allowing anyone with passion and initiative to make a difference." This may be an interesting example as part of which monetized contributions benefit the larger good. 

As Ethan himself already pointed out, there are serious limitations to interoperability, pushed by proprietary urges of NewsCorp, for example. I mentioned the PaintBucket video streaming incident earlier in my responses on this page. 

EZ: "But I worry that Trebor’s critique misses a major issue - it’s really, really hard to run these sorts of community sites. It costs an immense amount of money, both to develop the software and to maintain high uptime servers. I think Trebor’s right to point out that users are creating value for companies in participating in these networks… but I would argue that these networks are more often mutualistic rather than parasitic. If they’re truly parasitic, they tend to lose users quickly and open opportunities for less offensive competitors."

TS: I agree with Ethan. As I pointed out in my talk, yes, the net publics benefit greatly. They have the pleasure of creation, they gain friendships, share their life experience, archive their memories, they are getting jobs, find dates and contribute to the greater good, and social enjoyment. These networks are not simply either-or in my opinion: they are both. They are using the networked publics while at the same time giving them a lot. The ethical question appears if very very few people make a lot of money of the backs of the very many. The argument boils down to questions of a balance. Does YouTube pay people a fair share of the advertising money that they are making from page views or are these "micro-payments" merely put in place to not cause a riot over the introduction of ads in the video material itself. For net publics to ask an appropriate share of the money that they are creating for the platform-providers is justified. It also justified for net publics to ask control over the content that they are producing. They are correct to ask for a transparency of the rules of the game. Whose profiles disappear and why? What exactly do you do with the information that is provided to you in our user profiles? Who owns the uploaded content? (Explain this understandable for human beings and not just for lawyers.)  

It'd be worthwhile to deepen this interesting exchange a bit more if Ethan is willing to jump back on board.

========================

Here is another thoughtful report of the event by the Institute for the Future of the Book. (I don't need to comment on this any further as I responded to this already in the above.)

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/04/report_on_democratization_and.html

Trebor Scholz warned that unbridled enthusiasm for user-generated content may mask an undercurrent of capitalist exploitation, even though most rhetoric about user-generated content proposes exactly the opposite. In most descriptions, user-generated content is an act of personal expression, and has value as such: Scholz referenced Yochai Benkler's notion that people gain agency as they express themselves as speakers, and that this characteristic may transfer to the real world, encouraging a politically active citizenry. But Trebor’s main point was that the majority of time spent on self-expression finds its way onto a small number of sites—YouTube and MySpace in particular. He had some staggering numbers for MySpace: 12% of all time spent online in America is dedicated to MySpace alone. The dirty secret is that someone owns MySpace, and it isn't the content producers. It's Rupert Murdoch. Google, of course, owns YouTube. And therein lies the crux of Trebor’s argument: someone else is getting rich off a user’s personal expression, and the creators cannot claim ownership of their own work. They produce content that nets only social capital, while the owners take in millions of dollars.

It's a tricky point to make, since Boyd noted that most producers are using these services expressly to gain social capital—monetary concerns don't enter the equation. I have a vague sense of discomfort in taking a stance that is ultimately patronizing to producers, saying "You shouldn't do this for fear of enriching someone else." But I can’t get away from the idea that Trebor is right —users are locked in to a site by their social ties, and the companies hold a great deal of power over them. Further, that power is not just social but also legal: the companies own the content.

==================== 

Frank Pasquale wrote: 

Trebor, I found your talk very provocative and I think you're absolutely right to point out that these platforms of social creativity are often harnessing the labor of millions to entrench the very media oligopolists they are said to be displacing.

The key question, I think, is whether we want to explore an “exploitation” paradigm to describe the potential injustice here, or if we want to ground the critique in other concerns about how online life is structured.

As an intellectual property skeptic (especially in IP), I am wary of the exploitation idea if only because it threatens to instill in more and more people a “right to be paid” for what they contribute to the social networking behemoth. I envision some dystopic anticommons of people all demanding to be paid for their contribution.

But I do think that people who contribute to these sites do deserve a right to know how they are governed, and to contribute to that governance.

The classic libertarian response, that "you can go to another site," does not cut it, because of network effects. By and large, you can't just start your own site and expect to have anything like the "competitive advantage" you gain from playing on the platforms of established players.

More responses to our panel 

http://zero.newassignment.net/blog/sean_richardson/apr2007/14/web_academia_meets_citizen_journalism

http://mmcnairnay.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/ever-read-the-fine-print-of-facebook/ 

http://participations.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/re-democratization-and-the-networked-public-sphere/

http://www.nancyscola.com/2007/04/democracy_and_networks.html

http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/4/14/2297/25684

http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2007/04/does_web20_make.html

Response To MySpace labor essay

http://thenerfherder.blogspot.com/2007/04/exploitation-of-everyone.html 

Documentation
Many people who will not be able to make it for the panel discussion at The New School (with danah and Ethan) asked for a recording. The video cast of my talk is 23 minutes long, 9.3 MB in size. You can download the m4b file and open that in Quicktime, then resize. I also added the presentation slides below.



The New School archives all talks at http://fora.tv/new_school/ where the material can be accessed in a week or so.

In response Swarming Media writes:

http://www.swarmingmedia.com/2007/05/network_sociality.html

 I use del.icio.us on a daily basis. My participation adds value to the site and was part of the aggregate participation that made it an attractive buy for Yahoo!. I use it to find interesting articles, pictures, and videos that interesting people in my network post. There is a great amount of value in this for me. I'm not about to call up strangers and ask them what they've been reading, then, if I like it, call them up every day to find out what's new. If what I give Yahoo! in exchange for exposing me to such texts as this very article is that shred of virtuosity, which in aggregate made del.icio.us valuable to a large corporation - I'm fine with that. I'd hardly think I've been duped.

One benefit of corporate dependence on network sociality is that it means there will always be space for creative and critical intervention. As soon as MySpace starts cracking down in a serious way on people bending its rules with such purposes, its value as a venue for network sociality diminishes.