My colleague Adam Fish and I (mediacultures.org) and I just submitted an article to a journal in which we analyze social entrepreneurs’ digital labor practices. The argument we are making is that one needs to focus on (1) organizational missions, cultures and histories, (2) the nature of the labor (its level of creativity or its invocation of routinized, uncreative time-motion studies!) and the level of agency for workers to choose this labor versus various alternatives, and (3) the level of capitalization of the labor, notably who profits and to what extent from the contributed work. Our case studies, Samasource, a digital labor firm that brings digital work to developing world populations, including refugees and women, and Current TV, a cable network that self describes as “democratizing” documentary production, and maintaining an interplay between for/non-profit, and social empowerment/exploitation. Instead of waiting the 4 months for reviews, or 8 months for publication we’d love some real time feedback on some of the more illustrative examples and concerns that drive this research. (Adam Fish will be presenting this analysis at the American Anthropological Association meeting on Friday at 5 if you prefer embodied engagement). We’d love for everyone to contribute their feedback!
Jonathan Zittrain’s ‘Minds for Sale’ (embedded above) is a provocative and compelling introduction to digital labor systems, firms, and projects. Networks, when properly articulated and managed, can accumulate a range of creative and uncreative input, he explains, from LiveOpps’ solicitation for physicists to solve a complex theoretical problem, to the more rudimentary shape-detection mouseclicking to assist computer algorithms. The level of creativity solicited in crowdsourced projects is thus a clear element to consider when empirically analyzing digital labor projects, and attempting to inductively link them to virtue-focused or free, exploited labor critiques. Yet, deeper ethnographic analysis concludes that issues like organizational culture, social mobility, history and mission, profit-sharing, and levels of agency complicate Zittrain’s pyramid model of creative (top) —> uncreative (bottom). Our reseach is thus part critique of previous scholarship on free labor/participation, part ethnography, and part analysis of the case studies to show the importance of ethnography to develop more accurate theories. Theories associated with digitally-distributed labor, or the coordination of labor through the use of networked ‘new media’ technologies, tend to fall into idealized, oppositional binaries that are judgmental rather than based on detailed analyses of the actual system or site. As such, they lack the important grounding that ethnography provides and are polemic rather than analytical. If you start ethnographically, it seems likely that these three issues will form a basis of a more nuanced critique of digital social entrepreneurship.
In three following posts, Adam and I will consider three anecdotes in order to explore these issues. In the first post we will explore YouTube and the free labor users perform to build value for Google. In the second post, we will ask questions about Amazon’s mTurk microwork system. In a final post we will explore the activist and profiteering convergences in video on YouTube through an analysis of Iran’s Green Revolution and grassroots uses of corporate technologies.
Share on FacebookWanted to share with you all the abstract of a new paper I am working on with Adam Fish, a phD student in the department of Anthropology. Our arguments are focused on the importance of looking at digital labor outsourcing (and crowdsourcing) more empirically and ethnographically. This paper is nearly done now, and should be a real analytical contribution to how we look at ambivalent questions around participation vs. profiteering and agency.
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Abstract: Theories associated with digitally-distributed labor, or the coordination of labor through the use of networked ‘new media’ technologies, tend to fall into idealized, oppositional binaries that are judgmental rather than based on detailed analyses of the actual system or site. As such, they lack the important grounding that ethnography provides and are polemic rather than analytical. These analyses need to inductively emerge out of grounded, inductive ethnographies. With our analysis of the cable television network Current TV and the digital outsourcing firm Samasource, we demostrate that polemic theories fail to describe the complexities of the organization which include its labor practices, profit models, and organizational mission, culture, and history.
Share on FacebookMalcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, weighs in today on the social media – revolution debate, asking critical questions to unpack our assumed celebration of social media technologies' contribution to democratic, anti-authoritarian, populist, 'liberation' movements. His point, that revolutions, require committment, and social cohesion amongst their advocates, is important to consider in this debate. We all of course are well aware of the over-hyped, celebratory discussion of Twitter's use within Iran, yet Gladwell astutely points out that most of the Tweets actually came from abroad and were in the English language, which most Iranian dissenters do not speak. Moreover, Gladwell extrapolates that distributed social media technologies support 'weak ties', invoking the classic work of my former mentor at Stanford, brilliant sociologist Mark Granovetter These technologies can scale rapidly because they require little committment (e.g; saying yes to a friend request, 'liking' a page on facebook) versus movements such as those in the civil rights era where there was a sustained committment to a cause that uprooted other life committments, and put the 'committer' potentially in a precarious position. It's easy to conjure up images of protesters being beaten in the civil rights movement, as they were in Iran, and realize that this is a different type of activity than the less intensive tweeting or friend-requesting of someone via a social media site. Gladwell's larger point is that social media technologies generate networks, which are by definition, anti-hierarchical, loosely connected, easily flexible, and resistant to obliteration. Revolutions require not just committment (strong ties) but also hierarchical forms of organization, which are close to impossible in their achievement via networked ecologies.
Here's where Gladwell takes the wrong exit. It's hard for me to think about revolutions without remembering the incredible Battle of Algiers film, which apparently the CIA studied when the government was deciding to take the curious step of invading Afghanistan. The success of the resistance network in Algiers was its horizontal structure. There was no point of centrality that could be attacked to then take down the overall network. Classic studies of effective movements of this sort have been conducted by the Rand Corporation, for example, in their research on Information Wars and Networks. Examples as these show that even if Gladwell is correct in that networks largely lack organization, they certainly are difficult to stifle, as we see throughout history around examples of guerilla, distributed wars.
What is notable in the Algerian example is that this effective movement was not hierarchical, but a coordinated network! And that these networks are actually extremely well organized. Organization and decentralization thus need not be mutually exclusive, though of course in some cases they may be (as did indeed seem to be the case in the iran example as well). Thus, perhaps Gladwell is making the mistake of comparing apples and oranges by contrasting most uses of social media (which are passive, require little commitment and are indeed weak ties) with the committment and organization needed within successful revolutions.
Instead, I would suggest that some elements of social media *can be utilized* to generate and cement ties and coordination between those committed to the revolutionary cause. Moreover, by spreading awareness via weak ties, other social roles can be defined and filled, perhaps by some individuals less strongly committed the cause but important in terms of their positions within the network (hit the 'donate here' button!). This is exactly what my colleague Adam Fish and I uncovered in our analysis of oppositional political bloggers in Kyrgyzstan (Internet Authorship in Kyrgyzstan: Social and Political Implications). We found that while it was not the medium itself that 'tweeted revolution', it did serve a purpose of refining a message and philosophy, and most importantly connecting a small but influential group of activists. It was the strong, not weak ties, associated with social media, that made the difference.
Finally, when considering organization and social roles, it's hard not to mention Wikipedia. What makes Wikipedia continue to thrive and function is not just its ability to tap into weak ties but the smaller set of strong-tied social leaders within the system. Social roles emerge on this site without prior organization, from the contributors who author, to technical editors, to those that fight vandalism.
Social media thus lies at the heart of both sides of the network. It can generate the weak-tied awareness that then enable social roles and associated organization to emerge out of a complex, seemingly disorganized network. Or it can empower a smaller group of coordinated activists to hone their message, cultivate their strategy, and then reach out to larger groups of potential followers. It's clear that while twitter is not 'the message', it still remains a viable social tool that can contribute to politically powerful events.
Share on FacebookThis post is a bit tardy! But I wanted to point folks to the excellent Digital Religion meeting I attended last Spring at NYU, sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. There were wonderful talks here on the means by which religious movements are actively using new media technologies to articulate and manage networks of followers, idea-generation, and influence. Great presentations included a discussion of the growth of white supremacism online, to the use of mashed up GIS by right-wing Church groups to 'critique' other religious presences in Amarillo, TX, to the movement by some hacker groups to critique scientologists by using viral video/media. Perhaps the funniest of all is the increasing use of Second Life by users to create avatars that meditate for them!
All this and more can be found at the workshop page.
My talk focused on thinking about value systems and ways of making meaning that are part of cultural and religious life. It considered the possibilities held to actively inscribe these notions onto databases, algorithms and other digital templates/vocabularies, presented in the context of some of my work in Indian villages, and with the Zuni and Kumeyaay Native communities in the United States. That talk can be found here.
I will be picking up on these ideas and talking with some excellent scholars, activists, entrepeneurs, and practitioners at the Open Video Conference this coming week/-end in New York. If you're around there, please stop by and say hello!
As always, look forward to your feedback.
Share on FacebookJust read an interesting post on Stanford’s ‘Liberation Technology’ site analyzing the conflicting arguments around the relationship new media held in catalyzing protests and the recent revolution in Kyrgyzstan. The key idea here is when we see uses of tweeting, news aggregation, citizen journalism, and tactical blogging, an important question emerges around: (a) who is actually doing the authorship, and (b) who is the intended audience?
The argument here is that with the Twitter-Iran phenomenon, we see quantitatively large amounts of authorship relating to how the topic globalized. Yet in Kyrgyzstan the amount of authorship was less but more tactically connected to the Kyrgyz citizens and social movement organizers. Thus, perhaps we are mis-reading our connections between *amount of authorship* and relevance toward the social movement. It becomes important to understand whether mass tweeting is just an example of a local, national movement becoming globalized or whether it corresponds to a more sustained, widespread, more effective actual movement? So in Kyrgyzstan we see an actual regime change despite less usage because of partly the purposive uses of new media authorship while in Iran we see the movement’s worldwide valorization without an actually robust effect on the social movement.
The above is at least one hypothesis. It’s highly complicated however by questions such as whether new media mattered at all in either case to begin with, the nature of the government that was being overthrown, and the actual forces that somewhat invisibly lay behind these grassroots internet authors (some have speculated that both American and Russian state departments were actively connected to the Kyrgyz movement).
Share on FacebookI just returned from a very interesting workshop at Ottawa’s impressive International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which supports projects worldwide related to exploring the means by which new media technologies can shape human development indicators. The workshop invited leading scholars, NGO directors, practitioners, and IDRC staff to consider how the move toward sharing information, opening up software (open source), liberalizing information policy, and allowing innovations to be shared widely can impact human development in developing nations. The move toward open platforms that allow for public crowdsourcing (such as ushahidi.com), public consumption of government data and information, and grassroots authorship and networks (via platforms such as twitter) raises big questions around its applicability to shape major questions in development studies around: (a) better, more effective governance, (b) enabling different knowledges to be shared in ways that accomodate their differences/diversities, (c) enabling local business models, (d) creating more democratic participation and self-organization from local communities.
The IDRC’s impressive Open Innovations group organized this meeting, asking big questions such as:
- How does (or might) ICT-enabled, increased access to information and communication possibilities, as well as new forms of participation and collaboration, result in social, economic, and political development?
- What are the possible downsides and risks of expanding openness in the cultural, social, economic, and political spheres, and how can we mitigate them?
So this gets at a critical question that imagines how new media may shape our world – Can these very celebrated technologies of open participation actually shape local, diverse cultural practices in ways that empowers their own sovereignty? Can they enable different forms of development to occur that are scalable and sustainable? Can they consider the potential Western model around openness that may be impositional on communities that don’t maintain such practices themselves (for better or worse)?
Huge questions – that I wanted to just write this quick blog post around. The IDRC is now funding projects worldwide that speak to these questions but developing a coherent, comprehensive narrative that brings many of these efforts together remains a challenge. I think that the ‘killer app’ dialogue around social media, now moving toward crowdsourcing has an interesting relationship with the question of 4 billion people in our world today – not really represented or directly considered in much new/social media work. Characterizing different possibilities, analyzing their impact, and developing scalable policy are mega challenges that the new media community must dive into.
The full IDRC Call is here:
| Open Development: Technological, organizational and social innovations transforming the developing world |
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- What is openness, and what are the theoretical and empirical connections between openness and promoting human development?
- What are some implications of increasing openness in different spheres of social, economic, and political activity?
- What are the participatory or collaborative activities which, enabled by ICTs, will catalyze developmental benefits and be applicable across domains?
- What are the connections between openness, innovation, and development?
- What is the relationship between open principles and a knowledge society?
- Is more openness inevitable? When is openness a public good?
- Are there differential issues that distinguish the meaning of openness in developing versus developed economies?
- Do the new possibilities of openness through ICTs have any implications for development approaches?
- What are the central impediments/barriers to implementing openness?
- What are the roles of IP laws, ICT Policy, and standards in enabling openness to catalyze development?
- Are the appropriate regulatory, human resource, and technological conditions currently present in the developing world to either support or hinder the achievement of positive outcomes related to open principles?
- What new organizational/structural models are emerging to support open content creation and dissemination/participation/collaboration?
- Open government (participatory budgeting, open data, transparency, etc.)
- Open access to education, open and collaborative educational resources
- Open source software (applications)
- Open research and open access to scientific journals
- Open access to law
- Open business models
- Open technological innovations, open hardware, and mesh networks
- Mobiles and access
- Political mobilization (through Web 2.0 tools, SMS)
- Research syntheses of “openness” cases
- What are the lessons learned from existing openness activities?
What a fascinating dialog I’ve been having with one “Mahesh Srinivasan” (my younger brother and a brilliant cognitive scientist!) on the nature of preserving diverse languages. The discussion we had gets to the real question of how does one archive diversity and whether the practices of archiving (how we organize, classify, select and describe the content that is preserved) actually stifles the diversity of a tradition that does not accord to these historically and dominantly contemporary Western notions that tend to present knowledge as objective, verifiable, generalizable, comparable, and so on.
The original NYT article I was reacting to is here: http://tinyurl.com/26x2o3r
Here is the transcript of this conversation. I’d love for you all to jump in by commenting on this blog post or just checking it out!
As somebody apt to think that language is itself ontology (or if not, very close to it), I wonder if the ethical task of saving languages involves actively allowing their use, as they work at the heart of developing communities of speakers. Perhaps the end of such use is that these languages don’t become museum pieces highlighting the imperial ability to assimilate and render them mere curiosities. Under such tight social constraints such as the paucity speakers, the prospects of preserving and using these increasingly rare languages are ever more precarious. These languages have extremely difficult struggles ahead of them.
And in the case of Garifuna, which the article describes, questions of colonial power and the acquisition of capital are never far far from the language’s fate.
The value of archiving a language, however is immense to our understanding of human nature and cognition. I think it’s misleading to give a standard critical theory analysis of it as an imperial exercise.
On the contrary, I think archiving languages binds us all together. Language is unique to humanity, and the study of its diverse forms gives us a better understanding of our own nature. It also, as Richard points out, encodes an ontology about the world, giving us insight into the diverse ways in which we conceptualize the world around us.
If you take a living contextual practice and stifle its meaning by an organizational structure/ontology that is non-endemic to the ways its articulated and that is misrepresentative and actually stifling of diversity. Here are Turnbull’s actual words here – feel free to take them on:
“The basic contradiction I want to address is not that out of agricultural simplification grew cultural complexity, but that assemblage of cultural diversity is an oxymoron. To coordinate commensurability, to order according to a common standard or measure, to make uniform, is to deny, suppress, and stifle diversity. It sublimates difference into identity. Assemblage and diversity are in contradiction with one another, so we have little alternative except to find ways of working with incommensurability and contradiction. Hence there is an attached conundrum; if we are attempting the assemblage of knowledge of complex, multiplicitous, interactive, phenomena we need a complete rethink of all the components and ontologies involved. We need to rethink the very ideas of assemblage and of diversity, which implies rethinking our understanding of science and knowledge and of the enlightenment project itself.”
I agree with what Turnbull is saying, but linguists are keenly aware of this tension–at once trying to find deeper structural universals among languages but at the same time trying to respect diversity and be cognizant of the possibility of incommensurability. Take for instance, this recent review of cross-linguistic work by these two field linguists: http://tinyurl.com/2u47s3m
So I agree that the question of how you archive is important. I’m just reacting against what I perceived was a presupposition that linguists are not aware of this when they are preserving languages. Ultimately, its an empirical question as to whether different langauges actually do conform to a common ontology (a deep, universal grammar), or not. And both answers respect diversity and humanity
I’d like to see examples where this is not the case – and if the ones you are pointing to indicates this then all the better. The NYT article example doesn’t (on surface) appear to be one of them.
I believe this is also what Richard was trying to explain.
But its a mistake to assume that an archive structured around an organizational scheme with western origins is inapplicable to non-western content. What I was referring to when I said ‘standard’ critical theory was this knee-jerk reaction. This issue comes to a head within the question of how to characterize that culture’s language. If indo-european languages and non-western languages share a common root and are both created by a human linguistic faculty that is fundamentally the same, the same means of organization should be applicable to both kinds of languages. Of course, this is an empirical question, and there may be large variation in the languages that different cultures create, in which case different ways of characterizing language will be needed in different cases (and the link I shared does indeed make an argument for this).
Its worth noting that the politics and ethics surrounding these issues within linguistics is not so clear-cut–i.e., having a common ontology for different cultural knowledge is not necessarily misrepresentative or colonialist, it is often thought of as humanity-affirming. For instance, the largest proponent within linguistics for a universal grammar is none other than Noam Chomsky, probably the most progressive dissident that America has, and an intellectual champion for human rights around the world. Its not a coincidence–his arguments that langauges are fundamentally the same go hand in hand with his political activism. And meanwhile, those linguists that have suggested that other cultures have fundamentally different languages, and can be characterized as exoticists for demeaning those cultures (cf. Andrew’s critique of Dan Everett’s take on the Piraha).
So, the issues are complicated, and I think can go either way. What’s best then is to just be aware of these issues, while treating them dispassionately and empirically.
Again, I disagree about the critical theory point – if you assume that all languages are ontologically rooted in sameness (very debatable as you admit) then you have to take the next step to assume that a western organizational scheme can capture them. However, the archive has not only historically been rooted in this mismatch but it also has been used to capture cultural forms of practice which themselves are socially constituted rather than purely biological. So the assumption of sameness on the level of nature whether true or not is not the same as the assumption of the western archival model which is in turn not the same as equating nature to social practice. This is a big problem that is often neglected.
Moreover, to state that Chomsky’s political arguments are indebted to his take on universal grammars seems fallacious to me. To state that we deserve equal rights is not the same as stating that we are all fundamentally naturally based on the same grammatical/linguistic system. One can embrace political activism and diversity concurrently. In fact, that’s another type of activist stance (not that Chomsky’s activism is not a marvel for all and totally amazing).
And I also disagree about the dispassionate claim. There is a problematic history in archival practices that has been astutely identified by a number of cultural and critical theorists. If one wants to stop re-perpetuating the past they should actually analyze these present inequities and do what Chomsky urges us to do which is actively dissent and critique. To stand by and let a practice of exclusion continue to perpetuate is the opposite of that. I’d go back to Turnbull’s point that subsuming diverse knowledges into western archival systems (if they actually diverge from these) is stifling of diversity rather than empowering of it.
You yourself say: ” I’d go back to Turnbull’s point that subsuming diverse knowledges into western archival systems (if they actually diverge from these) is stifling of diversity rather than empowering of it” The critical part of that quote is ‘if they actually diverge from these’. Well how are we to find out if we don’t actively investigate these languages, keeping all hypotheses on the table?
The reason I brought up Chomsky was to point out that where you stand on this issue can be entirely orthogonal to whether you are supporting diversity and human rights. The arguments you were making seemed to equate difference with respect of diversity. I was merely pointing out that this can easily be decoupled. You have people like Chomsky who believe that human universals abound and stem from biological endowment. And you have have racist anthropologists/scientists who would seek evidence for the inferiority of other races or cultures, for whom difference was equated with deficiency.
I’m also not sure what you mean by archive in the current case. How these languages are ‘preserved’ is to try to figure what their grammatical rules (syntactic, morphological, phonological), and lexical items (words, etc.) are. I’m not sure how this is susceptible to your criticisms of archives more generally
I’m ok with maintaining the multiple hypotheses about the nature of language. For many reasons but I think it’s important to maintain mindfulness about the possibility of incommensurability because that is often what I see omitted from much applied science.
The “if they actually diverge. . ” paranthetical is not actually from Turnbull – I wrote that in to try to reflect common ground from your position. You should read the entire Turnbull piece: http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/279.php
Re Chomsky – Of course, activism and universality are not mutually exclusive but there is a type of activism that places a critical look at diversity at its forefront – which is not what is championed by Chomsky. I think this is problematic in so far as it’s a critical question that should be associated with the movements towards rights, and is often problematically missing from the human rights discussion – Anthropologists have repeatedly pointed this out.
Re Archive – As far as archive is concerned, I think there is a body of work (which I am teaching a graduate course around) that you probably are not familiar with that tries to take objects of knowledge/cultural production and present them based on their provenance and associated metadata. Selection is based on scientific notions of sampling and representativeness that often diverges from the traditions that construct these cultural ‘documents’. This presentation often follows western hierarchies of power, selection, provenance construction and more. And there is ample evidence, not ‘standard critical theory’ that these practices have been biased, misrepresenting, and in worst cases designed to enact a subordinate position for the subject. Again, I see no evidence that this is *not* being replicated in most language archive projects.
I recently did an interview with our student, on-campus newspaper at UCLA, the Daily Bruin, where the reporter asked me to discuss the means by which student life and more generally the act of reading is being re-mediated via the e-book. The article is here: http://www.dailybruin.com/articles/2010/4/23/google-books-library-project-plans-digitize-millio/
I have a number of wonderful colleagues who have expertise in the study of the history of the book, writing, and objects/containers of information and would refer anyone to Adrian Johns’ powerful Nature of the Book. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=3620118
The question I’m most interested in this discussion relates to the larger theme of how we digest and engage with electronic information today (and in the near future). We clearly have moved toward the act of browsing (not unique to today) more than before, where a narrative is constructed through a rapid assimulation, occasional mash-up of heterogeneous information sources, which speaks to the ability for individuals to look at diverse sources of information (and media) to develop their own opinions, as opposed to sound-byte or top-down media culture. It is very rare for anyone to either create or read a web page that has more than say, 5 links within it. This is of course part of the nature of the web page as a hyperlinked document, but it also holds the power to shape our new ways of reading electronic documents.
So we browse, search, tag, mash-up a number of ‘small pieces’ (that are) ‘loosely joined’ with the web. Now when the metaphors collide with the e-book (where we have the physical form of the book and the electronic medium of how the information is presented), what are the new reading practices that emerge? Will our ability to still read longer texts persist when its via an e-book? Or will there be ultimately a resistance of the collapse of the e and the book as objects, leading to the e-book market to flame out?
Big questions for the commercial, entertainment, research, and educational world await.
Share on FacebookCK Prahalad had set the global outsourcing/consumer world on fire with his ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ manifesto has just passed away. His legacy is one of arguing that the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, the quantitatively larger masses, could be consumers in the new market geared toward their need, ‘uplifting’ the masses and enabling them to be a new middle class. Of course these ideas have both been celebrated and roundly criticized for their promotion of a corporate agenda, yet also their trickle-down implications. His passing however raises questions in the new digital economy, reminding me of my time at the MIT Media Laboratory – is the future of digital labor around the marginalized emerging as ‘producers’ rather than consumers? And according to whose ethical and material value systems? Is labor outsourcing a new creative act that is less exploitative, as per companies like Samasource? Are there strategies by which we can critically understand the position of the marginal within the networked society, considering scholars such as Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, and Tiziana Terranova?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/leading-management-thinker-ck-prahalad-passes-away-at-68-2010-04-19?reflink=MW_news_stmp
Share on FacebookThis article fascinatingly speaks to a number of dynamics my colleague and I observed whilst in Kyrgyzstan – of the means by which not only grassroots discourses and political movements can be empowered via particular uses of blogging/citizen journalist technologies, but also how diplomacy and soft power relates to internet regulation and strategic uses of particular forms of blogging.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/world/asia/19kyrgyz.html?ref=global-home