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<p class=MsoNormal>Grant,<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>"I believe is evidence that we have the tools and
experiences at our disposal to entirely rethink the circulation and standard of
money as well as the value of work with the digital realm."<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>The mortgage is due the first of the month… what do
you envision?<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal>- Amanda<br>
<br>
<span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";
color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>
idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net] <b>On
Behalf Of </b>Grant Wythoff<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Sunday, June 07, 2009 1:22 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> idc@mailman.thing.net<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [iDC] Introduction: The Internet as Playground and Factory<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>Hi All-<br>
<br>
My name is Grant Wythoff, and I'm currently a PhD candidate in the Department
of English and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton. My work
is situated at the intersections of media theory and science fiction, exploring
the various types of worldbuilding, estrangement, and utopianism that bubble up
from moments of epistemic shifts in media technologies. Other areas of
interest include new media culture and the rhetoric of "content,"
television studies, media archaeology, 20th century American theater and film,
and Frankfurt school aesthetics.<br>
<br>
As Howard pointed out, we are in a situation in which we must entirely redefine
our notions of labor and play, and I think this conference will be a really
exciting forum to begin thinking along these lines. One can go as far
back as Benjamin in locating an alignment of labor and play within industrial
apparatus--his notion of "Spielraum" (playspace / room for play)
seems particularly apt in our own context as it gets at the truly revolutionary
(if not utopian) possibilities opened up for new fields of action within the
very same profit motives of commercial agents. Yes, information
aggregators have proved immensely powerful tools of cognitive mapping through
both graphic means--witness Google's flu trends or twitscoop--as well as good
old fashioned research methodologies--i.e. wikipedia and wikileaks. But
at the same time, we are left with an incredibly difficult set of questions,
since the space for play the media opens for us has almost always been one that
fundamentally does not belong to us. And here I can't help quoting the
old Playstation motto, "live in your world, play in ours."<br>
<br>
Perhaps we can come back to this topic of profit motives intersecting with
useful "public" goods and enjoyable "private" behavior
raised by Howard and taken up by Trebor--and here I will just briefly jump
across a few interrelated ideas.<br>
<br>
To take a case study, Eric Schmidt swears that things like flu trends, google
maps, and semantic searching are the primary business of Google while the
harvested clickwork of their targeted ads is only a necessary evil, the fuel
powering these larger ambitions. For argument's sake, what if (and this
is a big 'what if,' used only for the purposes of a productive science
fictional tension with the real) what if through some process of natural
selection the "private" profit motives of web 2.0 companies and the
creative industries are gradually replaced (displaced? superseded?) by their
useful "public" functions? In other words, what kind of *value*
does the public at large attribute to the information economy?<br>
<br>
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. To take a second case study, we are at a crucial juncture in the information
economy, with widely publicized talk of new agglomerations of news media
(spearheaded by the AP) and new forms of control over
"content." But this talk of "monetizing" freely
linked, traded, and read online news content (a discussion that has been
disseminated through the tubes of the media themselves) has revealed in so may
fascinating ways just how regressive such proposals are. The sense of
disbelief everyone feels--grounded in their everyday techniques of screen
reading, their presence online--I believe is evidence that we have the tools
and experiences at our disposal to entirely rethink the circulation and
standard of money as well as the value of work with the digital realm. <br>
<br>
The question of newspapers and the loss of local voices is of course one to be
taken up by a different thread. Leaving this aside and turning to the
topic of properly digital labor: our work is unpaid. But do we want
remuneration? <br>
<br>
If the biggest challenge to a critique of digital labor is the fact that the
mass of clickworkers simply doesn't care, that they enjoy their free labor
(let's face it, who doesn't)--then perhaps a possible secondary line of inquiry
would bring us into the potentialities of digital networks foreclosed by their
current configurations. Television always promised a world represented as
system--channels, flow, live feed, etc--a rhetoric which has been notoriously
difficult for cultural critics to satisfactorily engage with. In what
ways has our image of the world evolved from that given to us by
television? In what ways is the potential for political critique and
"pleasurable learning, cheerful and militant learning" (Brecht)
foreclosed by the current, digital configuration of the world picture? Further,
in what ways is this foreclosure itself representable (on a mass or systemic
scale) within the digital networks themselves? (The February flare up over
Facebook's new terms of service provides somewhat of an illustration).<br>
<br>
Rambling first thoughts. But I'm eager to see these and others bounced
around.<br>
<br>
Best-<br>
Grant<br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Grant Wythoff<br>
<a href="http://twitter.com/gwijthoff">http://twitter.com/gwijthoff</a><br>
<br>
Princeton University<br>
Department of English<br>
McCosh 22<br>
Princeton, NJ 08544<o:p></o:p></p>
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