[iDC] some thoughts on digital labor and populations
Christiane Robbins
cpr at mindspring.com
Mon Jun 8 18:03:52 UTC 2009
This is not only commonplace within the frame of students in the
classroom..... been at any meetings with your colleagues lately ....
how about any dinners ( aka the feed ) with the "family and friends
" where often its a more effective mode of communication to send a
text message rather than have a in-person verbal conversation?
The seduction of mediation ... the (non) recognition of the covert /
overt mediator ... is an issue of begging address.
Chris
On Jun 8, 2009, at 9:58 AM, Anne Beffel wrote:
> I've noticed a huge shift in how my students at Syracuse University
> relate to their worlds in social and physical terms, which I believe
> impact what they value, and ultimately shape the dominant cultural
> values. Namely, they are constantly checking facebook other social
> networking sites to remain "connected" and feel validated. Many of
> them talk about it as an addiction.
>
> Cultural shifts are hard to define, but the majority of my students'
> appreciation for being present in the moment without some kind of
> technological interface has definitely decreased. With this decrease
> in appreciation comes a decrease in the ability to consciously place
> their attention on anything for a sustained amount of time without
> checking their technological interfaces.
> -Anne Beffel
> Associate Professor of Art
> Time Arts/ Foundation
> Syracuse University
>
> On Jun 8, 2009, at 12:25 PM, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
>
>>>
>>> Today we are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in
>>> economy,
>>> labor, and life related to digital media.
>>
>>
>>
>> I wonder if we are, and if we are, is it massive, and what then is
>> the
>> mass? To what are we referring to when we consider massive in
>> relation to economy; people, money, institutions, collective
>> ideological functions, conventions? surely if there is a change on a
>> scale we'd be able to see it in some manner, and personally I've not
>> seen it. I see huge demographic changes, that's true, but not really
>> huge cultural changes. Perhaps I'm wrong, but my students at UIC
>> weren't that into technology, they were very into paying bills and
>> getting by, they used things like facebook, but then my mom is on
>> facebook, I'm sort of surprised my grandmother isn't on it, but I
>> suspect she is by proxy through her great grand-daughter. However,
>> when I look at their everyday lives they are not significantly
>> different from what they were when I was a kid, 25-30 years ago.
>>
>> Perhaps the massive change is not there, and if it isn't... what is
>> there? what is changing? Demographics are changing, and with that
>> the tax burden is changing, and with that the mode of production is
>> changing, but then the mode of production has been in transformation
>> my whole life. It is probably that categorically... if the mode of
>> production doesn't change and adapt, it disappears.
>>
>>
>>
>>> The purpose of this conference is
>>> to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure,
>>> consumption, and
>>> production since the mid-century. In the 1950s television began to
>>> establish
>>> commonalities between suburbanites across the United States.
>>
>> I wonder if this is true. I've seen the thesis, but... it was in the
>> 60's that Baudrillard and others said it was a fiction. It is a
>> metanarrative, we tried to describe the new commonalities and promote
>> them. It seems like a story we tell, much like the stories we tell
>> about all people in NYC being the same in some respect. But having
>> lived there, I can say... no, the commonalities are less common
>> though
>> more everyday, like most new yorkers that i knew had never been as
>> far
>> north as columbia university and even more had never been Astoria, in
>> Queens, but they had all been past the Empire State Building. I'm
>> wondering if these commonalities are sort of like that... 'having
>> walked past, driven past, etc. the Empire State Building. Sort of
>> like.. 'watching Archie Bunker'. The 'mass audience' though based on
>> common experience I think is somewhat of a misconception, and to
>> think
>> that television actually provided those shared commonalities I think
>> is worrisome because it really isn't a very strong medium of
>> distributed cognition. As several people on this list can argue,
>> when
>> you watch Television with me, we have profoundly different
>> experiences
>> of what is going on, we might share a central narrative, but there is
>> divergence in what we find important and interesting and how we react
>> to that.
>>
>>
>>> Currently,
>>> communities that were previously sustained through national
>>> newspapers now
>>> started to bond over sitcoms. Increasingly people are leaving behind
>>> televisions sets in favor of communing with -- and through-- their
>>> computers. They blog, comment, procrastinate, refer, network, tease,
>>> tag,
>>> detag, remix, and upload and from all of this attention and all of
>>> their
>>> labor, corporations expropriate value.
>>
>> I'm wondering how this is different from the proliferation of men's
>> and women's clubs in the 50's. I'd say that socializing is a human
>> process and communication is also, so we use whatever we have
>> available, no?
>>
>>> Guests in the virtual world Second
>>> Life even co-create the products and experiences, which they then
>>> consume.
>>
>>> What is the nature of this interactive ?labor? and the new forms of
>>> digital
>>> sociality that it brings into being? What are we doing to
>>> ourselves?
>>>
>> Is it the labor of ergodic literature? is it the labor of
>> consumption
>> like Baudrillard's Consummativity? Is it the labor of non-knowledge/
>> general economy from Bataille, or the labor of play from Homo Ludens?
>> Here I think the term labor needs context no? is that just me?
>> Labor, as a recent critique of recent marxisms, has it.... has become
>> as a part of discourse merely nominative, that is... it is a naming.
>> I'd argue that labor is not a catch-all name. Some things humans do
>> are labor and laborious. We need more context to understand what
>> people are referring to when they say labor, because right now,
>> either
>> everything is labor... or nothing is.
>>
>>
>>> Only a small fraction of the more than one billion Internet users
>>> create and
>>> add videos, photos, and mini-blog posts. The rest pay attention.
>>
>> do they? I've seen the estimates at approximately 25 million active
>> contributors worldwide and around 10x that for followers. You might
>> argue that there are more, but I think we'd need some definitions.
>> Given a global capitalist market of around 1 billion these days, that
>> is an estimate of the number of people who make more than around 2000
>> u.s. dollars per year, meaning that they have expendable income
>> beyond
>> food, clothing, shelter. To me that seems we are talking of a very
>> small minority in a world of almost 7 billion people where unesco
>> says
>> there are at least 1 billion children living in abject poverty. I
>> mean we're talking about a very small global elite. Even if you
>> increase the estimates of producers and consumers by an order of
>> magnitude, you still have a global minority.
>>
>>
>> So I'm guessing that most people aren't paying attention at all.
>>
>> I'm currently working on, amongst many other projects, a
>> conceptualization of 'the unconnected'.... that is. the people who
>> choose not to participate, who have participated online, performed
>> online labor, and then left. I'm thinking that this population might
>> help us to see what is really going on a bit better. Depending on
>> where you are in the developed world up to 20% of internet users have
>> stopped using the internet and went to other media/modes of
>> communication. I see this with email all the time. People get
>> really upset with email and give up, or blame other people, etc.
>> Eventually some just quit. Same thing happens in games, in second
>> life, in facebook, etc. etc. I ask... why do people leave? What is
>> really going on here? some move on to other systems, others just
>> stop
>> participating.... why do they choose to disconnect. I have an
>> intuition that it is because of my first set of comments. That is...
>> people are trying to live their life and are just trying to get by,
>> pay rent, etc. They have friends, colleagues, in real life that
>> they
>> interact with and spend their time doing that.
>>
>> The question then is one of whether there is... for most people, any
>> transformation at all. I suspect there is a dabbling, but it is no
>> where near as profound as we often attempt to make it, nor as
>> profound
>> as the economic speculation would have it. The latter seems to
>> becoming more true as facebook and myspace are being revalued as
>> their
>> growth seems to have been attenuated.
>>
>>
>>
>> Jeremy Hunsinger
>> Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
>> Virginia Tech
>> Information Ethics Fellow
>> Center for Information Policy Research
>>
>>
>> Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
>> -Jules de Gaultier
>>
>> () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
>> /\ - against microsoft attachments
>>
>>
>>
>>
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C h r i s t i a n e R o b b i n s
- JETZTZEIT -
... the space between zero and one ...
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LOS ANGELES I SAN FRANCISCO
The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to
the original, fancy to reality,
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for in these days
illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872,
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