[iDC] Re: A critique of sociable (and mobile) web media

Sat Apr 21 10:30:02 EDT 2007

I was at the talk too, and I found it very provocative.   As Trebor pointed
out, these platforms of social creativity are harnessing the labor of
millions to entrench the very media oligopolists they are said to be
displacing.  (In the case of Rupert Murdoch's ownership of MySpace, this is
particularly troublesome, since the largely youthful demographic that uses
it is often the group least likely to support the right-wing political
agenda he funds with his media profits.)

And I'm glad Marty Lucas is pointing out the ways in which the supposed
"free and open" net is not so free and open after all.  In the case of
online salience, the key bottlenecks are search engines.  And they are run
in an even less transparent manner than MySpace, Facebook, etc.

One 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, 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 (and to
reconcile them to paying for anything else they see and do online...a sort
of compensational theodicy for perfect control & metering of their online
activities). I envision some dystopic anticommons of people all demanding to
be paid for their contribution.  Moreover, as Trebor pointed out, it's more
likely than not that the context-providers have the upper hand bargaining
here.

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.  We
should be prepared to challenge "black
boxes,"<http://madisonian.net/archives/2006/09/21/battling-black-boxes/>and
not to simply accept site founders' claims that they need to keep us
in
the dark about how they're run because that's the trade secret they need to
keep ahead of competitors (and to be incentivized to improve their sites).

*We need to question the claim that sites are successful because of their
great innovation; rather, their innovation may well be deemed to be great
only because the site is successful.*  It's like Thomas Schelling's old
parable about two restaurants that are empty at 6PM; one person randomly
chooses one of them, and then all succeeding customers go to that one,
because they want to choose the restaurant that is "popular."  The origins
of the popularity never get interrogated.  Except, in the search engine and
social networking context, we get to hear all sorts of post hoc explanations
for why the owners of the successful sites are so much smarter than
their vanquished
competitors <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html>.
Hagiographers in the business press are always ready to step in and
rationalize the existing order.

The classic libertarian response, that "you can go to another site," does
not cut it, because of these 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.

The best alternative is to have new, public and transparent social media
sites, perhaps government funded.  (If only the U.S. government had required
digital deposit of books for copyright, we wouldn't so desperately need a
Google Library <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=920517>.)
And, failing that, let's have a lot more
transparency<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=888327>
from
the major players, regardless of claims that that will take away the trade
secrets that made them great.

--Frank
blogs at
http://madisonian.net/archives/author/frank-pasquale/
concurringopinions.com<http://www.concurringopinions.com/movabletype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=pasquale>

On 4/19/07, Martin Lucas <mlucas at igc.org> wrote:
>
>  I attended the lecture where Ethan, Trebor, and Danah spoke.   Trebor's
> suggestion that sociality has become a form of exploited labor rang true for
> me, but what that means in terms of courses of social action is less clear.
> As Ethan stressed, you don't have to do it their way.  They provide a
> service you can take or leave.  And most people choose to take it. The
> notion that this is a Faustian bargain is a non-starter. If people don't
> feel exploited on any articulable level, what can you do?
>
> The way that hegemonic forces define choice seems obvious when you talk
> about television or the print media, and so unclear to people when you talk
> about the internet.  Listening to the discussion, I felt that we are at a
> point sort of like the early days of factory labor, where the fact that
> people are being brought together in a new way is just starting to reflect
> itself in terms of the consciousness of a predicament.
> Danah's suggested that youth are excluded more and more from real public
> space shed an interesting light on youth use of online spaces such as
> Myspace. In my mind's eye, I started to compare the youth of Los Angeles to
> the English peasantry forced off the land by the Enclosure acts, only
> instead of being sent to Australia, they have to do time in Second Life.
>
> Choice in our era is a problematic notion in general, but specifically we
> can ask 'Where do you go?'  if you turn off and tune elsewhere?
>
> Trebor suggested that the non-profit route is insignificant.  He mentioned
> Craigs List, I believe, and one of the questioners made a plea for a public,
> presumably government-owned online space that seemed well-intentioned but
> also seemed to fall flat.
>
> In a market sense the insignificance of alternatives in more than
> apparent.  Any discussion of monopolies in industry would give the $155
> Billion Google and the $300 Billion Microsoft and their confreres control of
> a market.  When I came home from the Vera lecture I noticed the story about
> Google offering $3.2Billion for the online ad agency Double-click.  The
> irony of Microsoft challenging the sale on monopoly grounds adds to one's
> conviction that the future of the online universe will be controlled by
> fewer large players.
>
> *"Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and
> publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in
> turn, provide a better experience for our users. *"So says Susan Wojcicki,
> Google's VP for Product Management.
>
> What increased monopoly control means online is different than what it
> means in television, radio or print, where it is more difficult to become
> your own producer, but it exists.  I would not argue that non-profit
> entitities will be significant competition on that level.
>
> Ethan himself has been central to creating a project Global Voices,
> globalvoicesonline.org, a developing world voice that speaks to power in a
> politically intriguing way.  His astuteness in creating such a group, and
> the crowd obviously enjoyed the presentations of online citizen media
> political action in difficult circumstances in East Africa and Southeast
> Asia,  is an important quality.  I don't share the belief that you can just
> leave or turn off.  But I do believe alternative spaces are important, if
> only for postulating an alternative, for creating cultural frameworks, skill
> sets and even modest infrastructure.  Perhaps as someone who has worked in
> alternative and community media for many years  I have to.  But what might
> alternatives mean, and how can they mean something valuable?
>
> Unfortunately the ground is shifting rapidly, casting the possibility of
> even a relatively open online universe in another light.
>
> Another trend that bodes poorly for a free or open space online is the
> significant move of online culture to mobile devices. Industry statistics
> suggest that mobile devices will be the major route to the internet in just
> a couple of years. Particularly in the US these mobile platforms are closed
> and proprietary.  Their future development in the hands of operators and
> other big players moves them more in the direction of the worst kind of
> television and commercial radio.
>
> While in East Africa an NGO can negotiate to develop social software for
> cellphone use, that's not much of an option in the US.
> How that might change is difficult to see.  When one adds the rapid
> development of locative devices for control both in public space and the
> workplace, the picture looks rather grim.
>
>  Trebor advocates in "Re-public" an invigorated media literacy, making a
> plea for "a participatory skill set, resistance to the monocultures of the
> web and self-awareness."
>
> I would suggest that we need to occupy the mobile/locative platform space,
> at least speculatively.  I would argue that what is needed are new efforts
> to bring together people who together might be able to offer tools, thinking
> and energy.
>
> To this end several groups here in New York are putting together an
> 'unconference' to bring together programmers, designers, activists,
> students, and artists in early May.  See www.mobilizednyc.org.  We invite
> participation and of course, discussion!
>
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Marty Lucas
>
>
>  On Apr 18, 2007, at 8:22 PM, Trebor Scholz wrote:
>
>  Our discussion about affective labor and the sociable web came up again
> at a recent panel at The New School. Afterwards there were quite a few
> fascinating responses to the arguments across the blogosphere to which I
> responded at:
>
>
>
> http://www.collectivate.net/display/ShowJournal?moduleId=223903&currentPage=3
>
>
> I summed up my ideas in a willfully provocative essay for a new issue of
> the journal Re-Public. (The issue also features essays by Geert Lovink,
> McKenzie
> Wark and Michel Bauwens.)
> http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=138
>
>
> What is a fair exchange in the context of the highest traffic sites of the
> sociable web? Yes, we get much out of many sites to which we contribute. We
> can
> "egocast," build friendships, develop thousands of weak ties, learn, date,
> and simply enjoy hanging out with friends on this disembodied platform.
>
>
> It is hard, however, not think of utilization when NewsCorp spent $583m on
> MySpace, which is now estimated to head toward a market value of $15billion
> (over the next 3 years). A definite value is created and that surplus
> value is not shared in a fair way.
>
>
> The community, which indeed undoubtedly benefits, is monetized. People
> cannot simply leave if they don't like being used because their friends are
> all on
> that site. You can't post a video to a small video-sharing site if online
> fame is what you are after. Perhaps the days of "Friendster-mobility" are
> over. Here,
> the networked publics left in large numbers. The choice that participants
> have is limited; they are in a social lock-down of sorts. This lack of true
> alternatives may have well been the reason that 700.000 users of the
> Facebook recently protested when the unpopular RSS feature was introduced.
>
>
> On the before mentioned panel, both, danah boyd and Ethan Zuckerman
> brought up the tremendous costs for NewsCorp that are associated with
> technically supporting all that sociality on MySpace. Ethan also pointed
> out that it may take big business to facilitate large scale networked social
> life.
>
>
> In the end, what really matters is not only that people become aware of
> the fact that they are being used on these giant sites. It is important to
> be clear
> about the ownership of content and it is also crucial to know the privacy
> rules of the platforms that we are using.
>
>
> What is most important, however, is the ability to be independent, which
> means that I have a way of leaving-- taking with me what I invested (the
> content-- the blog entries, the photos, the videos...). For me, much of
> the ethics of the sociable web is related to the ability to call it quits.
>
>
> -Trebor
>
>
> PS:
> Some of these topics were also picked up in Sweden:
> http://www.whomakesandownsyourwork.org/mw/index.php?title=Main_Page
>
>
> New subscribers-- you can read our list archive of this debate at:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-April/thread.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
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