Privacy Undone: How Convenient - Blog Post # 8 - Week 10 Pt 1

Are we selling our souls online? In my last post, I talked about how users pay for a website’s service using their personal information as currency. We aren’t always aware of the transaction, but Michael Zimmer certainly is. The recent course readings included an article by Mr. Zimmer concerning online privacy and surveillance, which you can find here. It has an obscenely long title, but thanks to the advances of Web 2.0 (namely linking), I don’t have to write it out in order for you to find it. All you have to do is click on the underlined blue text up there. How convenient.

I fear being too pretentious, but I’d really like to coin a new term: the Mephistopheles Complex. The Mephistopheles complex refers to the common practice of corporations making grand promises to encourage users to surrender their information (and ultimately their anonymity) unknowingly and permanently. This goes hand in hand with the “Faustian bargain” Zimmer describes in the article with the obscenely long title.  In the ancient German tale of Faust (or Faustus depending on which story you read), the demon Mephistopheles mediates a deal between the devil and titular scholar Doctor Faustus. In exchange for his soul, Faustus receives ultimate power and infinite knowledge – or so he is made to believe. It is Mephistopheles who persuades Faustus to seal the pact and in the end, it is Mephistopheles who collects his soul and sends the doctor to his damnation. I read Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus back in high school, and I can’t help but find similarities between the themes of the play and the current state of the Web. The Wikipedia entry on Marlowe’s work is rather inaccurate, but you can read the play in its entirety here. How convenient.

Users willingly sacrifice their information in order to receive the rewards promised by Web and Search 2.0: “breadth, depth, efficiency, and relevancy”. In his article, Zimmer is specifically referring to Search 2.0, but I would argue that the terms could just as easily be applied to the social web. Users want sites that are all-inclusive, and that effectively spoon-feed them the specific content they want. It is very difficult to provide specific content along with a variety of content. Sites that achieve this (eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook) allow users to seek out specific content and also provide content that the site deems relevant. Sites that accomplish this are often the ones that experience the most success. YouTube provides recommended videos in the same way that Facebook recommends friends. The site recalls your stored information and makes an effort to provide you with content of interest to you. The problem is that we rarely consider the cost at which these services are rendered. How convenient.

More on Zimmer in the next post.

Voluntold: Who Benefits from my Unpaid Work? - Blog Post # 7 – Week 9

There have always been volunteers who provide labour without financial remuneration. For every tree-hugging activist, there are two YouTubers who have uploaded videos. Those who archive sites for others to discover using StumbleUpon do so for free – at least in the traditional sense of the word. Volunteers do not work for nothing. Instead of money, volunteers receive a different type of payment: satisfaction.

           

The exchange of labour for payment between an employee and his/her employer has changed, albeit slightly. This change is not sudden, nor all-consuming; rather, it has been with us for a long time. The difference now is in the proliferation of the number of people who work for personal satisfaction. The social web has provided opportunities for millions of users to volunteer their time towards an ultimate goal. The (professionally unpopular) online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia does not pay its contributors. Those who invest time and effort into the creation of Wikipedia entries do not receive any monetary gain from doing so. However, they do gain a sense of worth for contributing their valued input to the site.

“Valued input.”

How can a series of thoughts, expressed in words and reproduced (for free) on monitors worldwide be “valued input”? Because value is relative. In this week’s reading, Changing Notions of Labour – From Participation to Exploitation, Søren Mørk Petersen states that nothing has an inherent value. “Usually we would ascribe significance or value to objects and subjects as if it came from within.” Instead, we need to realize that value is assigned relative to the supply and demand for an object.

Real life example: A starving man would give his life savings for a piece of bread.

Digital Age example: Digital music is so abundant online that there is no (rational) point in paying for it. People do pay for it, but more out of pity and favouritism than anything else.

As we have seen in the past few decades, web technology is dynamic. As the technology changes, so does the value of communication, information, and entertainment. Stamps are far less commonly used now than when mail was the only communication option short of smoke signals. The value of stamps has decreased in general opinion because of the advent of new communication technology. There is less demand for stamps, therefore their value is diminished. The internet is going to change the notion of supply and demand, because it eliminates the first half of that equation. Once something is online, it can be reproduced ad infinitum.

Capitalism is also dynamic, Petersen points out. It reinvents itself in order to turn a profit. Those who profit from capitalism are already cashing in on the web. Corporations don’t have to worry about maintaining a supply of their online product. They just have to ensure that there is demand for it, and that someone is available to rake in the money. But pirates are here to break the mould. Since the corporations have their product online, ready to be reproduced and sold, pirates find a way around paying for it.

With pirates on the horizon, capitalists have a crisis on their hands. In order to battle it, they have created opportunities for internet users to “volunteer” their time, while taking the information they provide and selling it. This allows other corporations to advocate their product more effectively, ensuring their own profits. What concerns many is this system’s reliance on users to “volunteer”. Some worry that this is exploitation. By definition, exploitation is the unfair treatment of others for personal gain. In this case, corporations have been called exploitative for not paying users for their work maintaining and contributing to websites. However, if the site leads to personal satisfaction, then the users are being paid, just not in the traditional sense. But here’s the kicker. Many popular sites today allow users to connect in order to exchange information through linguistic communication in order to benefit general knowledge. In his article, Petersen references Paolo Virno, who in his 1996 work, Marxism Beyond Marxism states:

“Science, information, linguistic communication, and knowledge in general – rather than labor time – are now the central pillars on which production and wealth rest.”

Are those who work for “Science, information, linguistic communication, and knowledge in general” attaining wealth? I certainly think so.

Way Off the Mark - Post # 6 - Week 8

Media theorist Trebor Scholz has me convinced. Web 2.0 really is just a useless buzzword used to advertise the web. It says: “Look! Something shiny and new!” when in reality, the technology that is massively popular today has been around for a while before this Web 2.0 stage is said to have begun. A veil of uncertainty surrounds Web 2.0, as there is not even a definitive release date. Nobody really knows when it started.

In his essay entitled Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0, Trebor Scholz didn’t impress me entirely. I started disagreeing with Scholz halfway through the abstract. The idea that the branding of Web 2.0 limits the imagination of the future web is ridiculous. Toy Story 2 did not prevent Toy Story 3 from becoming a blockbuster. Unless I am misunderstanding his point, Scholz is way off the mark here. According to Scholz, Web 2.0 also limits media discourse. My jaw is on the floor. Is Scholz blind to the millions of discussions taking place on the web? Has he not seen countless conversations, arguments and idea sharing online? This blows me away.

Scholz makes clear that the widespread use of Web 2.0 technology is new, but the technology itself is not. In fact, technology was deemed to be Web 2.0 material after its release, instead of being designed to fit into the Web 2.0 environment. The creation of the term Web 2.0 is akin to changing the colour of a jellybean. The insides are the same as they were before, but now they are more flashy, popular and useful. The only purpose is for marketing.

The sites of Web 2.0 increase in value as the number of users increases. Scholz relates this to a telephone. If no-one else owns a telephone, it becomes worthless. Only with a network of users does the device have value. With more users, more information is entered into the network. According to Scholz, modern American youth care less for their online privacy than those in the past. This comparison holds no merit, because American children of past generations were not exposed to the web in its current form while growing up. How is it possible for kids today to care less than kids of the 60s about information online?

What is more, Scholz states that by sharing their info, users confide their “friends lists”, conversations and navigation habits with corporations on a daily basis. According to Scholz, this opens up “possibilities for total control” that are “barely imaginable today.” I’d love to hear some examples. Corporations are going to surround you in advertisements that have been selected based on the information you have provided to them. This is not a bad thing. This only means you’ll see more advertisements that you are interested in, and corporations will have more success in making the appropriate consumers aware of their products. If this is Scholz’s idea of total control, I would love to see how he fares in North Korea.

Remixing The Old Testament and the Old Oak Tree - Post # 5 - Week 6

Over the last year, I’ve noticed a definite positive shift in the public attitude towards digital piracy. At first, when the topic was hot, pirates were made out to be thieves with no respect for the creators of the content they stole. It seems as if society has come to accept these pirates and their practices. It has become clear that it is impossible to enforce digital copyright laws due to the vastness of the web. Additionally, several industries have begun using the side effects of piracy to their advantage. Musicians, for example, have started releasing free songs for download on their website for a limited time. This creates a buzz, and drives sales after the time period has ended.

In 2003, pop megastar Madonna made her opinion of piracy crystal clear when she released a series of spoof audio files at the same time as her American Life album. Instead of the actual songs, anyone who downloaded the spoof mp3 files would hear the pop star cussing at them. Matt Mason describes this series of events in chapter three of The Pirate’s Dilemma. Mason goes on to explain the aftermath of these events. Madonna lost a few fans after her stunt. It was a figurative slap in the face to the tech-savvy, and they responded in turn. One such techie hacked Madonna’s web page and released her songs for free download. Resistance truly is futile. Once anything is put into the public domain, it becomes public property. If the public chooses to take your content, they can do as they please and there is little to be done about it.

Mason made an excellent point by stating that pirates create and push their own content. Before reading this chapter, I believed that pirates merely took other people’s property and shared it. In reality, many pirates produce their own content, and they are quite adept at distributing it. In the words of Robert Munsch: “We share everything!” After Madonna’s anti-piracy stunt, pirates created songs out of the spoof tracks. Pirates took Madonna’s insult, remixed it into new content and threw it back in her face.

I often relate the piracy debate to furniture. A wooden chair is made up of several pieces of wood that are combined and sold for profit. A song is made up of several notes that are combined (for free) and then sold for profit. It is completely acceptable for anyone to remix that wooden chair that they bought and make it into a crib. And yet, if you remix that song, you could get sued. As Ecclesiastes says in the Old Testament: “There is no new thing under the sun.” An artist didn’t make the notes that they included in their song. A carpenter did not magically summon the wood for the chair. Both want to be paid for remixing their medium, but only musicians feel that their work should not be tampered with. I’m willing to bet my left arm that the Old Oak Tree could care less if you gave your chair to your grandmother, as long as you paid for it first.

Remixing in other media is pretty common. In literature, to reference another scholarly work is accepted and encouraged. In film, one often experiences references to other works, and this is accepted as a complement. And yet to use part of a song is heresy. What makes this industry so different? All three of these industries are quickly changing because of their easy reproduction and availability online. So much is available for free that major corporations in these industries are struggling to make profits. Until these corporations adapt to the new file sharing environment and stop fighting against it, they are in danger of losing out on a lot of business.

Perspectives of Social and Technological Interaction - Post # 4 - Week 5

In the second chapter of Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Nancy Baym organizes four perspectives of how technology and society interact. The four perspectives are as follows:

Technological Determinism

Those who follow this perspective believe that technology enters society as a force of change that humans must adapt to. There is nothing to be done except change to fit into the new world created by technology. Advocates of the idea that the use of fast TV film cuts leads to short attention spans follow the ideals of technological determinism. Those who believe that violence in video games causes violence in gamers follow the ideals of technological determinism. I could never see myself among the ranks of this perspective. There is far too much interactivity in today’s media to ever feel helpless against it. There is a pressure to adopt and adapt to any new technology, but it is not a necessity of life that one does so. No one ever died from refusing to join Facebook. There is always a choice.

Social Construction

This perspective is the exact opposite of the first, as it believes that technology is at the mercy of society. The creators and users are the cause for change in technology, and the citizens are the cause for change in society. This viewpoint is far more appealing, but still too black and white for my liking. There are many who do not have any effect on the technology they use, other than the act of using it. For example, many people play video games without supplying any sort of feedback to the developers or modifying the game to meet their own ends. In this way, they do not effect the technology at all. They use it, but it is not changed through their actions.

Social Shaping

The ideology behind social shaping is that technology and society influence each other. Humans make the technology that changes the way many of us live. The human-made technology is perfected by users, and once again affects how we use the software. This feedback loop can be experienced in any form of media, and is proof of the shared influence of technology and society.

Domestication

When technology “fades into the woodwork” and becomes just another part of life, it has become domesticated. This is the idea behind domestication, the fourth perspective examined by Nancy Baym. This perspective incorporates the others by stating that technology changes us, and then fades after the process of alteration is complete.

If one were to combine the last two perspectives, I feel that it would be the most accurate. Nothing truly fades away, though. It takes on a new form, an improvement on the last model. It goes into the woodwork because we are more concerned with where the technology will take us and where we can take the technology. This shared progress is the definition of humanity’s explorative nature.