Category Archives: Thesis

Sep 17 1 comments
Consumerism, Economics, Emerson College, Labor, Social Media, Thesis

She Works Hard for the Whuffie: Free Labor in the Age of Peer Production

It’s a title possibility for my thesis. Maybe I’ll change my mind. If I do I’ll simply come back and delete the entry altogether. How very 1984.

Thankfully the title, according to the Emerson College Department Handbook for the Master of Arts in Media Arts Program, 2004-2005 (my official catalog year), is open for redevelopment during the writing of my thesis.

I have decided that for my thesis I absolutely want to look at the economics of peer production. Almost everyone who knows me has heard my tirade on Amazon reviews (Short Version: On the whole, reviews increase sales (otherwise Amazon wouldn’t allow the system) people who take the time to write reviews are doing free promotions for Amazon products “to help educate others,” while increasing Amazon’s bottom line without compensation, etc…). Peer review systems, contests with consumer winning prizes for designing ad campaigns, corporate-sponsored play… these are topics that I’d wondered about in the abstract for but started being able to articulate after reading a Wired article by Long Tail author and longtime Wired editor, Chris Anderson, who writes:

Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie [sic*],” or simply whim.

On the whole, the article presents a far more idealistic view of peer production than I generally embrace. His line “It’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism,” left me with a riddle to solve. I’ve been in the process of temporarily moving out of my house (long story, happy ending) and, as I was packing and unpacking my library I took inventory of the number of books I’ve accumulated trying to answer this question, ‘with what, then, should I be equating peer production?’ (One hopes the answer will be less grammatically awkward than the question.) Anderson writes, “This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other,” but I have a hard time swallowing such a Utopian notion.

So, that’s what I’d like to drown in, I mean, dive into, in the next 9 months. The water is a choppy as it ever is with me, but it’s my last two semesters at Emerson. To keep with an already painful metaphor, it’s time to sink or swim. I invite anyone out there who has similar questions, or insights they’d like to share… or even just a good cookie recipe, to jump on in. I swear, the water’s fine. Join the Coast Guard and help me be the best that I can be! (As if the metaphor wasn’t bad enough, now I’ve gone and mixed it. ::sigh::)

My jump-start of a reading list is on the Works Cited tab above. Thanks for reading.

(ok, ok, that was more like 6 hours than 15 minutes of writing. 15 is a minimum, 24 the max in any given day. Deal?)

*The spelling of the word has it’s own “the day Aubree edited Wikipedia” story that ends in my wuffie entry being redirected to the “h”-bearing “whuffie“.

Sep 08 1 comments
Consumerism, Economics, Social Media, Thesis

Particitainment. Not a Typo.

The most powerful hybrid of communications and entertainment is “particitainment”—entertaining communications that connects us with some larger purpose or enterprise. - Futurist Paul Saffo, Consumers and Interactive New Media: A Hierarchy of Desires, 1993

I like this term “particitainment.” I can already hear my peers groaning at the introduction of another term to describe participatory culture, convergence culture, participation as the new consumption, and so on. But it’s clear from the getgo, Participation as entertainment. It’s not a new concept on the whole - for instance, one must participate in a roller coaster ride to get the entertainment or thrill. But in this era of user-generated content particitainment takes on a more specific tone of production and, from where I’m heading with this, labor, as a means of entertainment.

Saffo ties this notion of participation as entertainment to an even larger concept, defining particitainment as “entertaining communications that connect us with some larger purpose or enterprise.” Here it is the word enterprise that stands out to me. Written in 1993, Saffo could have meant anything by this (a prerequisite talent of Futurists), but looking at it now I jump to the bungling oft-maligned enterprises of Corporate America* and consider particitainment as those participatory acts of cultural production, largely enabled by the digital revolution, that entertain the user/consumer while producing a product of direct value to an enterprise. This leads me to my questions about labor/economy/user-generated content, wondering if there is a free labor market, slaving, under the delusion of entertainment, to the financial gain of those smart corporations that have begun to embrace the new participation as consumption model.

15 minutes up.

*must concede that Corporate America, in the all-initial-caps-sense is a diminishing notion in our ever advancing global economy.