momo


The topic is not the free
labor of the networked lifestyle variety (i.e. 24/7 laptop workers) I
rather concentrate on the immaterial creative/affective labor performed
in the sociable web. In the North American context the suggestion of
work within the framework of social networking sites immediately calls
up accusations of blindly leftist, world-removed academism. These
complaints only demonstrate the critics’ socialization into naturalized
corporate interests, which become closer to their heart than their very
own. Rather than getting lost in wishful thinking, however, this essay
aims to highlight new kind of “immaterial labor.”


The
expressive work on MySpace, FaceBook, or blogs is indeed ambiguous; the
affect, authenticity, knowledge, and cultural expression of people
creates surplus value through advertising schemes that transform attention into money. As usual, capitalism eats the fruits of labor but it does so in a new way.



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.
– [1] Jassa, 17 (p. 1)


MySpace
has a “time monopoly”- in the US people spend more time there than on
any other single website thus substantially “capturing” sociality and
knowledge [2] (1) .
Instead of watching TV, kids formulate comments, tag, rank, forward,
read, subscribe, re-post media, link, moderate, remix, share,
collaborate, favorite, and write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip,
discuss, and learn. People value each others’ contributions because
they have urgency and flavor and now mobile content contribution on
cell phones, anywhere, is easier than ever. Again, what kind of labor is this?


Is it really labor if teens share their life and thoughts with each other (e.g. about the [3] Internet celebrity Tila Tequila)?
Even without the web they’d do it anyway. People take their life to the
web and this activity; this labor is driven by affect, which Michael
Hardt thinks of as central form of “immaterial labor” today. [4] He writes that “this
labor is immaterial, [and] its products are intangible: a feeling of
ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of
connectedness or community.” It is exactly this satisfaction that people get out of laboring in the sociable web.



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.
–[5] Tara, 16 (p. 78)


Surely
Tara, whom I quoted here, would not think of these MySpace parties as
labor. If you consider labor in this new light of affect, however, the
picture changes. [6] Paolo Virno would agree with Hardt: For him, labor has become performance, the act of being a speaker within communication systems.
To paraphrase the old saying: The greatest trick that capital ever
pulled was convincing the world that labor didn’t exist. Labor today,
is a “casualized” and often distributed immaterial activity.


The
mere presence of Tara and her friends on MySpace creates value. Surely,
the generated monetary value varies; highly popular clips [7] like the treadmill video
on YouTube generated over ten million views, while others receive
little attention. The quantity of small acts of labor makes YouTube
profitable for Google.


User-generated
content, on the other hand, also occurs costs for Google. It takes
software architectures, storage space and a good design to receive,
order, and show submitted content. But, what is the cost/benefit
relationship?



“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.”
–[8] Wanda, 16 (p. 25)


From
the perspective of Wanda, the filling out of surveys on MySpace may
well count as labor. On the other hand, she’ll get something out of
spending time on MySpace as well. No doubt! People feel 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. Take [9] the Chinese BackStreetBoys,
for example. After very many Chinese teenagers watched their YouTube
videos, both boys were hired by Sony Erikson to advertise them allover
China. Also Jessica Rose (a.k.a lonelygirl15) was hit by offline
stardom based on her online fame. But, just like the
dishwasher-to-millionaire illusions of class mobility, these dreams of
massive popularity come only true for the very very few. These
daydreams of fame make free labor in the “social factory” of MySpace
all the more promising and glamorous [10] (2) .


Teens
benefit in these multiple ways but do they really generate value?
Nicholas Carr points out that in 2006, user-generated content was the
main reason that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted [11]
for 40% of total Internet page views. Such centrality is mind-boggling as it creates a broad reliance on monocultures [12] (3) . The wealth of content on sites like YouTube drives more and more people to this very small number of sites [13] (4) .


Why are corporations [14] willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to
buy out successful startups? After the gruesome dotcom experiences,
such massive investments would not be placed without predictable
return. Certainly, the two examples of MySpace and YouTube are extremes
but they are also the platforms where most people currently contribute
online content. Networked sociality is the product.


To
go a step further, let’s discuss the relationship between actual value
(to the corporation through advertising) and money paid out to
contributors of original content (i.e. YouTube, Digg). Are workers
ideologically deluded into thinking that they are not exploited? In an
irritating manner, Yochai Benkler suggests in fact that



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


What
Benkler seems to suggest is that workers need to be primed in order not
to feel so bad about the fact that they are used. On the contrary I’d
argue for the need of an awareness of servitude. This awareness has not
been socialized among the most fervent participants of the sociable
web: American teens. Despite misleading statistics, most “MySpacesters”
are young and live in the United States. Their upbringing did not
instill an awareness of their embrace of market-based behavior [15] (5) .
The fact that one person lives of another’s labor is natural to them.
Just consider the social context that allows a company to emerge that
is build on the idea of advertisements created by the people who watch
them. You create and give away for free (or for a sum that is not
equivalent to the value that you generate), the advertisement that is
aimed at yourself. Such companies [16] do in fact exist and they are thriving.


The
dialectics of exploitation allows for, on the one hand, the gained
ability of people with computer and net access to become speakers,
which neither favors left nor right wing opinions but supports
participatory politics in general. On the other hand, and in no way
different to all of capitalism, the labor of the very very many creates massive wealth for the very few [17] (6) .


Many
media theorists have argued that the days of the dominance of American
English (and the US influence of content online) are counted. I agree.
Countries like China, Brazil, India, Congo, Kenya, Uganda, and Russia
will become the dominating forces of the web very soon. The
phenomenon of labor in the context of user-generated content, however,
is global. It will remain beyond the demise of any particular sociable
platform (i.e. YouSpace or MyTube). Especially – because—this
phenomenon is global, it is crucial to understand that pleasurable
cultural production and sociality is turned into capital. Property
(copyleft) is only one issue. A sociable media platform does not even
need to own the created content. The created sociality is the value!
The wealth of content (even if owned by the creators) merely hooks the
net publics to the web of attention that is needed to generate
(advertisement) capital.


Almost all voices
in this field of media study write in support of the market instead of
siding with the net publics. Today we witness a centrality of
proprietary platforms online, which substantiates that the Internet
embodies a complex continuation of capital. But yet, there is very
little conflict, hardly any tension surrounding labor and the sociable
web partly because the line between production and consumption, work,
sociality, and cultural expression is extremely blurry. Part of the web
is explicitly market-driven and the rest is, according to theorists
like Richard Barbrook, best compared to a communist high-tech
gift-economy. Or, is it? Today, these sharing practices have hardly
anything to do with communism, the exchange of the “gift” takes place
on corporate turf and even the act of “free” sharing creates capital
for those who own the platform on which net publics share their
material or love [18] (7) .


What
are pragmatic, feasible critical practices in relation to the sociable
web? Sociable, not-for profit zones are rarified; at the sign of
success, corporate giants buy them out. It’s not so easy to exempt
yourself from being taken advantage of online. But there are a few
alternatives such as [19] Craigslist (Craig Newmark rejected several large offers) and [20] Archive.org
(Brewster Kahle’s philosophy does not leave room for a corporate
takeover). These examples, however, are hardly representative of the
World Wide Web. A hybrid model acknowledging critical alternatives
living on corporate grounds may include MySpace hacks or activist
groups organizing and socializing in that context.


Kevin Killian [21] (8) ,
the known poet who writes autobiographical fiction (pretend-reviews
from sweet potato baby food to Doctor Zhivago) on Amazon.com is one
such example. Killian pursues his cultural practice on proprietary
ground with a build-in audience.


In
addition to such hybrid practices, I argue for the need for a
participatory skill set, resistance to the monocultures of the web and
self-awareness in order to navigate sociable web media consistent with
our own values. Sociable Web Media make people easier to use but we can’t let them (and them in us) get the best of us.

——————————————————————————–

(1) In fact, out of all time spent online by U.S. Internet users, 11.9% were spent logged on to MySpace.com.

(2) The term “social factory” goes back to the Italian autonomists.

(3) The danger of such plural monocultures
is illustrated by casual messages like Del.icio.us’ “Internal Error:
There is something horribly wrong with our code.” or Google Calender’s:
“Server error. Google Calendar is currently unavailable. Cross your
fingers and try again in a few minutes.” or Flickr’s “Flickr is having
a massage.” If we put all our eggs in one basket, we navigate ourselves
into a scary reliance on corporate decisions. We trust them to offer
stable solutions to host our data.

(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 [22] spend the most of their time online in terms of a single website.

(5) Recent statistics saying that the average age on MySpace is 35 are
faulty, as they do not take into account that underage kids are lying
on their profiles. Some, for example, state that they are 100 years
old, distorts the numbers.

(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, [23] 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

(8) The San Francisco based poet Kevin Killian, for example wrote 1525 reviews on Amazon.com (as of January 7th, 2006).


Further links


[24] Institute for distributed creativity


[25] 79 days project