In Progress

Funny things happen when you join your experiences to a group. I was at the New York Public Library‘s reference room, which is a stunning space and a lovely place to do research, even if you don’t need a book from their in-house collection. I took a snapshot on my cell phone and played with it a little in Photoshop before uploading it to flickr, where it ended up coming to the attention of an online travel guide company:

How did it happen? I tagged my photo “New York Public Library” and also geolocated my photo through Flickr’s map tool, so when Schmap searched New York Public Library, they probably got my photo, or when they were searching the flickr map, they stumbled across it. Contributing to the hive mind!

One interesting aspect of this type of experience is that people used to get paid to do what is now just as much the domain of amateurs who contribute their work for free. I assume the Schmap people are of course making money from advertising and featured locales, but the photo providers no longer need to be paid when so much content of this kind is freely available online.

Trebor Scholz of The New School is concerned with this new labor model, which he writes about extensively in his work on participatory cultures and new media. He also runs an online institute, where he recently initiated a discussion on an upcoming conference he will be organizing called “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” He identifies ways that boundaries between play, consumption and production, and labor and non-labor have become blurred, and provocatively asks, “How much should Google pay [users] to tag an image?”

But of course, exploitation of so-called “clickworkers” (!) is not the only element in play.

Grant Wythoff writes, “In business circles, web 2.0 is spoken of as being a failure since it ‘has no business model,’ since there is no way to monetize it on a large scale.”

Julian Küecklich has fascinating work on the area of what he calls “playbour” (cute!), and suggests that:

“1) The playground has become a factory, but the factory has become a playground, so the logic of production does no longer apply.

“2) Resistance is futile but cheating is possible.

“3) If we want to understand the rules of this new game, we will have to become players ourselves.”

Mark Andrejevic states, “I don’t feel a loss of control over my own productive activity when I contribute to a Wikipedia entry that may benefit others. On the other hand, I might be more likely to feel this loss of control when I discover, say, that details of my online activity have been collected, sorted, and packaged as a commodity for sale to people who may use it to deny me access to a job or to manipulate me based on perceived vulnerabilities, fears, and other personal details about my mental or physical well being.”

This last point brings me back to the Schmap interaction. I gave permission for the photo to be used, knowing that Schmap is making (or trying to make) a profit without offering any compensation to the photographers involved. With all the shifts in the travel guide economy, Schmap is unlikely to be making more than a modest profit, given all the competing sources of information, many of whom don’t even need to ask for permission to use images (e.g., Google). I both appreciated the process they engaged in with me to obtain permission to publish the image and am pleased with the final product — attribution is displayed prominently, and the guide is attractive and informative. I still don’t know that I would always give permission for such commercial uses without compensation, but for now, I’d rather be a player in the space, contributing and engaging rather than sitting on the sidelines, fretting about whether I’m being compensated adequately.

At the same time, I can say that I wouldn’t necessarily feel the same way about a piece of writing that I did, or an image that I spent more time crafting. As a freelance writer, I know I often spend so much time writing my pieces that the compensation I ultimately receive is an absolute pittance. Four to six hours of writing and research for $35? That’s the sad reality of compensation in the online writing world. Hardly sustainable, but I can’t spend less time and produce a piece I’m embarrassed to attach my name to. Sigh.

If you’re interested in these issues, consider subscribing to the online discussion.

Here’s the large version of the image:

Posted on June 19th, 2009 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Media, Participatory Culture, Uncategorized