Trebor,
I think that your call for a discussion of the the ethics of
participation is useful and important and I look forward to hearing
people's thoughts on this vital issue.
My own belief, however, is that your articulation of the problem is
predicated on certain assumptions about what constitutes value in the
participatory networked culture, and I'd like to challenge or at least
address those assumptions. First I'll try to intelligently and
concisely articulate them:
You quote Nicholas Carr's point that
"putting the means of production into the hands of the
masses but withholding from those same masses
any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly
efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor
provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the
very few." (1)
This analysis, and others like it, are obviously deeply indebted –
both for their terminology and critical framework – to Marxist
traditions that are themselves based on thorough and reasonable
analyses of industrial economic paradigms. But the networked economy
is not an industrial paradigm and I think that neither these terms nor
concepts can be ported to it without bringing along certain
potentially misleading assumptions.
Carr says first of all that users do not have 'ownership of the
product of their work' when they post to Amazon, Youtube etc. But is
this really so? On one level, users who submit content are still free
to do whatever they want with their work, including sell it, or post
it elsewhere. So it's hard to argue that they do not own it, although
what is certain is that they do not own it with the same level of
exclusivity as they would if they didn't post to YouTube or Amazon.
But I'm pretty sure that the Terms and Conditions you go on to quote
"Content on the Website... may not be used, copied,
reproduced, distributed, ... sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited
for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of
the respective owners. ... For clarity, you retain all of your
ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the
User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide,
non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license
to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display,
and perform the User Submissions..." (2)
only apply to content that has been uploaded. And once it has been
removed then the conditions no longer apply. But in either case, I
want to make a larger point about what constitutes 'the product of
one's work'.
What if the product of one's work when writing an Amazon review is
not, in fact, the words you have written? What if the 'ownership' of
those words is no more important than the 'ownership' of the words you
speak in conversation? What if the real product of your work is the
relationships that those words engender? If that were the case, then
it would be difficult to say that Amazon owns those relationships.
That would not be true. What would, however, be true, is that it
enables those relationships. And what's more it does so for free.
Maybe Amazon creates another kind of value, too. Maybe it creates
collective value by consolidating and then redistributing a vast
archive of critical knowledge free of charge.
BUT THEY GET RICH OFF OUR BACKS I can hear many of you yelling.
(Hello, Brian! ;) yeah, well so did a lot of people who have done
useful things.
But really, I'm not out to defend Amazon or YouTube and I do believe
that there are better ways (i.e. better for more people) to develop
user-generated culture than these inchoate apps. My basic point,
however, is that I think that in a user-generated networked culture
you have to locate value in processes (like relationships) rather than
products. I think that we need to be talking about the Process
Economy.
And I'm not even going to get into explaining that the Product Economy
is a literate invention (there, when you write something you can
only locate its value in the writing itself because
you cannot measure or track and pursue the relationships your writings
engender - you will never meet your readers, whereas in oral cultures
this is not the case, nor is it the case in the neo-oral networked
sphere) though it is both true and of great importance in
understanding how the ethics of participation are different online
than off.
I just want to conclude by pointing out the obvious, that if we are to
engage a discussion of the ethics of participation we should not delay
in tipping our hats to Creative Commons.
Cheers,
John
www.thetalkingshop.ca
www.johnsobol.com