[iDC] From Mechanical Turk to Web-based worker surveillance

[Sam Ladner]

Hi folks,

I've been lurking and frankly, do a poor job of it. There's simply too much
on the list to take in! So I read a bit here and there and read some on the
mechancial turk phenomenon, and the MySpace layoffs.

Of interest in today's New York Times is a story on "freelancing" (a
misnomer if I ever heard one, but that's another post). The angle of the
article is that more small businesses are signing up for "high-end" services
such as Web design, precisely because they can now afford it through
Web-enabled freelancing sites such as oDesk.

Buried well near the end of the story, oDesk actually takes a snapshots of a
"freelancer's" workstation for the "client" 6 times a day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/business/smallbusiness/25freelance.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business

I'm reminded of Marglin's famous article, "What do bosses do?" His answer:
they control. Are Web-enabled "freelancing" sites the new "factory system"?



-- 
~~~~~
Sam Ladner, PhD
Sociologist
Toronto
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20090625/dbe13f6b/attachment.htm