I am 85% sure that this is my blogging week...so here we go! First off, I hope Angry Birds is going really well for everyone. I, for one, repeatedly threw my phone into my pillow in frustration last night but I like to think that means I was just having a really great time.
Like Robert last week, I've been almost entirely incapacitated this weekend due to flu so I hope this post makes a certain kind of sense.
Wanted to link you all to a fine piece over at Salon re: Wikipedia and the burgeoning practice of paid content. The piece starts out with some high praise for Wikipedia and its inception as a kind of "utopian ideal" of open/crowd-sourced knowledge for all. Anyone who grew up with Wikipedia probably has a more complex relationship with it than that--as the citation of last resort or as a site more valuable for its footnotes than its actual content.
Regardless, Salon seems to think that the commercialization of Wikipedia will lead to certain doom indicative of Web 2.0 as a whole--that this entire internet project of open source knowledge production is in jeopardy. I tend to be more critical of that assessment of the situation, particularly in light of the subjects the article highlights: paid editors who publicly acknowledge their status as such.
However, the piece gets at a problem discussed in Henry Jenkins' "Cultural Logic of Media Convergence" piece from last week. Namely, how will the web change if its economy transitions from a gift economy to a commercial economy mirroring our IRL economics; furthermore, if that transition has already largely occurred, what (if any) are consumer alternatives?
Will we, the consumers, suffer from "higher barriers of entry to the cultural marketplace" or will another system rise up to replace it? What will web 3.0 look like and are we gradually getting further and further away from some initial, lawless cyberspace utopia or is that just cynicism typical of an aging first-generation of web users?? Do we really want Reddit to be the arbiters of consumption on the internet or will we retreat to a familiar economy of regulation that we understand?
I've always wondered about the exaltation of Wikipedia & free crowdsourcing ventures -- free means that somebody is laboring for free and somebody is donating hardware & money to keep the thing going. Wikipedia, subsidized by free labor, has helped kill off most (much more reliable) encyclopedias as they've tried to move from print to bits and still pay employees a living wage. UW has dropped its subscription to Encyclopedia Britannica because it's expensive and "everybody just uses Wikipedia anyway." Do we want all aspects of "content provision," from music to reference works to restaurant reviews to literary criticism, to be done by unpaid folk in their spare time? Anyways, a random disorganized response -- feeling cranky this morning -- Brian
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of crowdsourcing and economic models, I'm curious about the dynamic of design revisions in video games in response to user and critic feedback. It was mentioned today that game designers pay some attention to critical discourses emerging from player communities and academic conferences on the subject, and Tyler noted that subsequent releases of games attended to his critiques of earlier versions so effectively as to leave him at a loss for further comment. If the web transitions from a gift economy to a commercial economy, might this reactive model of transaction based accountability follow along behind it? One option as consumers might be to embrace the role online as much as we often do in our IRL contexts, with all of the trappings of "I demand to speak to your manager" and "I demand a refund" and "I demand an improved version of this game." As for alternatives, the digital sabbath concept seems to be gaining some traction, and it is clearly opposed to framing ourselves as consumers, whether online or not. (http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/ gives as its fifth principle: "avoid commerce.") Perhaps disconnecting ourselves from consumer habits and from the digital will become one and the same sort of practice.
ReplyDeleteAs for academics and crowdsharing, I find Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence to be an inspiring example of the way a gift economy on the web might persist and be productive rather than reductive. You can read the full draft of her book, with reader comments that were taken into consideration during revision and prior to the publication of the print version, here:
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/
What could be interesting about the Wikipedia model is that the community seems to be reacting to money injected into its community of contributors, rather than the community of consumers. This seems different from the gaming world example that Tyler mentioned. Would that limit consumers' ability to demand anything since we haven't paid into anything? With the Wikipedia model, we're not even paying with our personal information, unlike say, Facebook (um, are we?). Will the web economy become one in which producers are paid but consumers not charged, at least directly?
ReplyDeleteI guess if this were the case, a barrier to entry might emerge on the side of cultural producers, but that consumption would be open to all. Maybe this type of economy, in which people are paid by third parties rather than by direct consumers, is only a temporary move on the way toward complete commercialization. However, in the case of Wikipedia, it seems like completely embracing the for-pay model would require some centralization of the community of editors and writers. If that community continues to consist predominantly of unpaid fans, like the snail expert, that might prevent this transition from occurring. (It might still be a case of buyer beware, but with the recourse being loss of cultural relevance rather than direct revenue.)
"It was mentioned today that game designers pay some attention to critical discourses emerging from player communities and academic conferences on the subject, and Tyler noted that subsequent releases of games attended to his critiques of earlier versions so effectively as to leave him at a loss for further comment. If the web transitions from a gift economy to a commercial economy, might this reactive model of transaction based accountability follow along behind it?"
ReplyDeleteI'm not accountability is the right concept here. The flip side of "we respond to user/consumer input" is this it blurs exactly what a "product" is. Is it the final version? What about a beta tested version (often released for free, and improved with unpaid input)? In other words, what ultimately is the *thing* that we hope to change by making demands?
I also wonder if what's at stake here might not just be the Web moving from gift to commerce, but also the extent to which commerce itself is undermine old notions of compensation. Is the economic logic of beta testing all that different from the logic of the unpaid internship? In both cases, there's a "new" kind of economic arrangement...
Whoa, I'm only now noticing how many errors I dropped into this comment.
DeleteShould've been:
"I'm not SURE accountability..."
"...is THAT it blurs exactly..."
"...commerce itself is underminING old notions..."
The volunteers are angry at the profiteers--reminds me of how the army resents contractors. What about the construction of "authority?" People who make a living writing and reading have credibility--until they are working online. Then suddenly their work is deleted just because they wrote it for gain?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the editor profiled in Salon pointed out that part of her job was keeping her pages from getting deleted. That's where things get shakey--you can hire a wikibodyguard. Power becomes rhetorical power rather than historical, citational power (but also becomes democratic).
I had a class that collaboratively wrote the entry to "long poem" on Wikipedia (still standing after five years! Still "needs cleanup" after five years...). It is a little rough, looking over it. What's more important is that we received only one major complaint from the Wikipedians: that group production isn't allowed. An odd emphasis on the individual from such a collaborative institution, right? An atttempt to control accountability through user accounts? Remember when they cut off non-account edits a while back?
Scattered thoughts.
Brian's concerns really resonate with my own. Specifically, the question: "Do we want all aspects of "content provision," from music to reference works to restaurant reviews to literary criticism, to be done by unpaid folk in their spare time?" I think it's pretty clear that this is a rhetorical question. I know I want my content to come predominately from masters of the relevant techne - in most cases, that means the content-producer needs to be compensated. The everything-for-free model isn't tenable in the long term.
ReplyDeleteI would venture to say that anyone who is angry at the content-producers for "profiteering" (also known as being paid in exchange for quality work) should direct their ire elsewhere; namely, at the so-called 'content farms' like WikiHow, Bleacher Report, et al. who court the limbic systems of the lowest common denominator and are more interested in SEO search optimization than valuable content. American minds are dying on a diet of this garbage, generated by unskilled, generally un(or barely)paid workers who are usually regurgitating what they found on another website (which may itself contain content of questionable veracity). The content-generators need to be compensated - the TRUE profiteers need to be exposed, publically humiliated, and avoided at all costs.