Also, make sure to check out the other presenters and their abstracts on the website, it’s a fantastic lineup!

Every free moment I’ve had for the past month has been consumed by planning and dealing with the logistics of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference, a conference about digital labor. As the volunteer coordinator, I was responsible for staffing and recording the 3 day conference at the New School. The event finally happened on Thursday to Saturday, and our team accomplished so much in that time.

Together, 26 volunteers provided full coverage for 24 different events over 3 days in 7 different locations in 4 buildings. We provided a staggering 266.5 hours of work over the two-and-a-half days, with many people working 8+ hour days. The video team deserves a special mention most of whom pulled 8 hour days both Friday and Saturday, sharing 3 sets of equipment among 6 people, trading cards between sessions and successfully covering 15 sessions without losing a single cable, card or camera. And in terms of the attendees, panelists and hosting institution, the event was a huge success, as well as seeming to be an important marker in labor studies.

Was it worth it? Well, so far, I’m not really sure. My interest in volunteering in the first place was to be more intimately involved in the experience, and to be able to network with panelists and get really familiar with the arena of labor studies, particularly in the digital space. By that measure, my experience was a complete and utter failure. Since I was command post for all questions, problems, and fixes, I didn’t get to attend a single session, so I didn’t learn ANYTHING about the field academically.

I volunteered myself for this project with pretty high hopes, but ultimately it ended in the familiar experience of taking volunteer jobs as a way to push forward professionally, but without the anticipated payoff. Similarly, my internships have been less than the key to professional advancement I expected them to be. And while one volunteer experience turned into a regular consulting job, I was never paid at a competitive level, which I suspect is in part due to its free origins debasing its value for my clients.

In my experience, volunteer labor as a means of professional development is not adequately valued, an issue which has been written about in a New York Times series on internships by Douglas Martin and Anya Kamenetz among others. I know IPF included at least one session on extremely cheap labor that is essentially free in Second Life, and I hope they addressed strictly volunteer labor as well. I should add, there is a big difference between casual volunteering, like reading stories at your local library or helping with a fundraiser on the day of, versus being a part-time employee who just doesn’t get paid. And I’m definitely talking about the latter type of volunteering.

So this conference has left me a little sadder as I catch my breath before trying vainly to catch up in my three graduate classes, while teaching a 1.5 hour class to English Language Learners (also unpaid) and leading data research on an animation project at Eyebeam (also, you guessed it, unpaid). One of my few consolations is that I will be presenting a paper at the MLA conference at the end of the year, and will have a chance to immerse myself in a conference the way I want to — hearing interesting people talk about interesting subjects, and being able to engage in dialogue with them.

It would be remiss in me to not mention my other major consolation, which was recruiting, meeting, and working with the volunteers for this conference. Being part of a team is a really nice feeling, one I miss from my old days doing policy events and strategic communications full-time. And this team was one of the nicest I’ve worked with. The student life can be one of isolation, writing papers that engage in private conversations with often dead scholars and seen by a single professor, who may write only perfunctory comments back to you. Having the chance to hear everyone discuss the sessions they worked and saw was a pleasure, and I’m glad I got to be a part of that.

Will I stop doing big volunteer projects? I guess it depends on whether people stop doing really awesome things I want to be a part of. So come on people, stop being all creative and interesting! Right now. Stop it.

Join us at The New School for Changing Labor Value a panel discussion this Tuesday September 29, 2009 at 6:30 pm at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

Drawing from critical perspectives on labor, digital technology, and social and political theory, this panel addresses the work done by Internet users. It focuses on the relationship between invisible labor and the production of value.

Panelists include Andrew Ross, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and author of the recently published collection of essays Nice Work if You Can Get It; Richard Sennett, professor of sociology at New York University and author of The Craftsman; and Tiziana Terranova, associate professor of sociology of communications at Università di Napoli L’Orientale and author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Moderated by McKenzie Wark, associate professor, chair of Culture and Media, and associate dean for faculty affairs, Eugene Lang College. An installation of Web-based art projects accompanies the presentation.

Location:
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Admission:
$8; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID

Box Office Information:
In person purchases can be made at The New School Box Office at 66 West 12th Street, main floor, Monday-Friday 1:00-7:00 p.m. The box office opens the first day of classes and closes after the last paid event of each semester. Reservations and inquiries can be made by emailing boxoffice@newschool.edu or calling 212.229.5488

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:

1. Fox News is taking an activist approach to covering the tea parties, encouraging its audience to attend them, including their own virtual one on their website. Fox is trouncing the competition in the ratings right now.

2. The other major news networks are ignoring them–so there’s no rebuttal possible to the tea partyists’ claim that it’s a nonpartisan, non-right-leaning movement.

The Huffington Post is taking this on as a citizen journalist event–which is really really important. Ignoring the news doesn’t make it not happen, as the big networks should know by now. We need coverage to demonstrate that the news media aren’t biased against conservatives, and polling and on the ground reports to uncover what types of people are attending these events (and dumping tea into the Boston harbor, ugh). FreedomWorks, one of the organizers, is talking up the liberal contempt of it, labeling them “tea party deniers.”

Otherwise, this hysteria and rage could blow up into a serious movement of civil protest like not paying taxes, etc. Consider the growth of MoveOn:

“They sent an e-mail to 100 friends with a link to moveon.org. A September 24, 1998, article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Net’s Role in Scandals May Alter News Media, mentioned the effort in its final paragraph, noting that the site had attracted 500 signatures in its first day of operation. By the end of the week, that number was 100,000.”

FreedomWorks has over 370,000 supporters already. Scary stuff.

Had to include BMac’s digital protest above, thanks Brian!

While I’ve dabbled in design projects from time to time, I’ve never been the dedicated website designer and coder. I was alternately frustrated and exhilerated  and learned a whole new bag of tricks. A few lessons learned:

I love WordPress. It’s flexible, powerful, and not that hard to learn. And open source, which makes it a great community tool with lots of free plug-ins. In the near-term, my next website platforms to start exploring are WordPress MU and BuddyPress — which together, make for a powerful set of social community tools.

Deepen the engagement. Organization objectives can sometimes confuse website priorities. One good overall principle is to focus on how to engage your audience through new content and opportunities to participate. Fresh content is the key to driving traffic, so organize the rest of your information and features around that centerpiece. And adding participatory community tools gives your readers a chance to become engaged with your mission in a deeper way. So whether it’s offering commenting, tracking tools, or games for diversion, inspire your readers to keep coming back for more.

School is tough. I probably should not have taken on a project with such a steep learning curve and condensed timeframe while being a full-time grad student. My clients were wonderfully accomodating of my schedule, but I sadly had to pull out a week before launch, transferring the site to a professional team who pulled it through that final week.

Click on the pictures to compare the old and new site designs.

But what about nonsexy music, which certainly exists in vast amounts? Lullabies for babies, annoying as hell nursery rhyme chants for children, folk songs, campfire songs, etc. Death masses. Hymns. The list is endless. It seems to me that music is just another way that people make meaning for themselves, create order out of seeming chaos, give voice to emotional states that require expression. Expressive activities are clearly very important to humans, and they go far beyond natural selection.

If anything, natural selection seems to be both an observable phenomon and physical order in the world, and also a way that humans make meaning and order out of chaos. Does natural selection function as an expressive act for scientists? Something to think about.

Gladwell had a dizzying rise to fame with the publication of The Tipping Point, in which he takes a series of seemingly unrelated ideas and unifies them to excellent end, creating an extended discussion of one of the more mysterious influences in life–momentum. The Tipping Point emerged as not only a runaway bestseller, but also a call to action for social marketers and nonprofit organizations, who took inspiration from its pages to devising new ways to try to advance their causes. Blink followed in 2005, providing musings about a split-second unconscious decision-making process that, Gladwell argues, guides our lives.

It seems the main critique of Gladwell is that his anecdotal lecture style is very enjoyable and easy to follow, even when he’s discussing radical or hard-to-grasp concepts. And the fame. He’s got too much of it. And finally, the consulting, often corporate. He charges too much for his speaking engagements and has become … wealthy. This isn’t to say that there aren’t fair criticisms to be made about Gladwell’s work, but most seem inspired by less than gracious impulses.

The first critique is elitist, implying that easy-to-follow must mean dumbed-down. The second fame argument is similarly sneeringly dismissive of his audiences, suggesting that the people who come to his sold out lectures are too numerous to be smart. If the masses like him, he must be shallow. The final critique has a little too much righteous indignation/sour grapes–it is notable that Gladwell’s income is the first thing mentioned about him in Louis Bayerd’s review of his new work on Salon.com.

And so, we run up against an increasingly relevant 21st century issue: people are smarter in greater numbers, and elitism is an outdated concept. We’ve entered the age of the participatory culture, in which the masses are finally gaining parity in access and education to the elites. This isn’t simply a technological advance, it’s a permanent revolution in how our society is structured, how we interact with one another, and how we conceive of one another.

The irony of the sneers at Gladwell is that his latest book, Outliers, is about smart people, where they come from, why they are successful. Outliers attempts to bust the myth that genius is entirely up to the individual, and at its heart, has this simple message: anyone has the potential to be a genius, given the right opportunities. So shouldn’t we try to give them to everyone? It’s a staggeringly democratizing message, so no wonder some intellectuals are up in arms at having to share their most precious commodity, intellectual prowess. And on a complete tangent, I think it’s funny that no one can write about him without mentioning his fro.

The top 11 languages on the Internet in descending order are:

English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Portugese, Korean, Italian, Arabic, and Russian.

(source is apparently Nat’l Geographic, flag image is from www.theworldflag.org)