[iDC] The Ethics of Participation

Thu Jan 4 13:51:21 EST 2007

Online sharing practices have profoundly changed culture, business, and education. "Web 2" was the most-cited Wikipedia entry of 2006. Time Magazine made "You" the person
of the year. Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail received "street credibility." All this and the often-stated growth statistics indicate the increasingly broad acceptance of sites
that offer "user-generated" content. What would be included in a course on the ethics of participation? 

Media philosopher Yochai Benkler argues in-depth for the new economical model of the networked commons, benefitting from the "harnessing of collective intelligence." There is
the unpaid Amazon.com book reviewer who, for reasons yet to be determined for certain, writes thousands of reviews a year thus helping the global readership to make better
picks but also massively aiding the billionaires at Amazon.

In December 2006, writer, editor, and speaker Nicholas Carr wrote 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 keep-the-spate-but-the-potatoes-are-mine mentality is puzzling. Today the means of production are dirt cheap and immaterial labor is easily distributed. The imperative for
companies is to attract content submissions. This attention will translate into cash. YouTube is one good example for this. Watch the quirky video clip "A Message From Chad and
Steve," the co-founders of Youtube, presenting themselves shortly after their merger with Google ($1.6 billion in stocks). They are tumbling of euphoria about the money and
their talk of "staying committed to community and best services" comes across as being rather amusingly bogus. Two kings have gotten together? The fact that the co-founders
of YouTube spark youthful silliness does not mean that they are not prime examples of the Californian ideology à la Web2.

<http://www.youtube.com/v/QCVxQ_3Ejkg>

There are hundreds of video responses to this clip. Such widely-accessible, geographically distributed, almost real-time, conversational video practice has not existed before. What
follows are some examples from the responses starting some critical voices. "Renetto" points out that Chad and Steve "made money of the backs of the YouTube users." 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytYt6H_dG2I&mode=related&search=>

Indeed, the YouTube copyright specifications prevent people from making commercial use of the uploaded content. However, they don't prevent YouTube from generating profit
by selling search list ranking to companies to name one possible way of generating cash from attention. 

The YouTube Terms and Conditions state:

"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)

At the time of the merger, YouTube had not made profits but Google perhaps realized that a site with 1 million page views and 65.000 video uploads a day, will be a perfect
vehicle for the distribution of (commercial) film. In the near future, viewing scenarios for commercial films will drift away from traditional cinemas to the computer screen near
you. YouTube is also an ideal platform where amateur-style and professional video ads can still reach the eye balls of consumers. There are IKEA advertisements, for example,
but also politicians like John Edwards wake up to the fact that the millions are watching. 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=radrrjQxK7U&NR> 
<http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=johnedwards>

Some of the following videos exemplify the personal investment of youth in services like YouTube. "Unsweet" says it in no uncertain terms: "I'd be completed crushed if YouTube
would be taken away from us." The YouTube web service, in "Unsweet's" words sounds very much like a toy instrument given to a child.

Danah boyd discussed the case of MySpace and points out that social networking sites serve as a "public display of connection." Teenagers can visualize their social network on
MySpace, which validates them in the eyes of their peers. (3)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aNY5yRZVGk>

"Namerae" asks herself what is so bad about the Google/YouTube merger because Google has provided such great customer service.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POVNUkszq9g>

"Nuodai" who is 15 year old and lives in Britain, on the other hand, elaborates on his philosophy of why a merger is a bad idea. 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8tvNj_1Fr0>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HbNknf65l4>

"NoHoGirls" think of themselves as "bringing the community together," as making their videos for "the community." Here the motivation may be to have fun creating goofy
videos but at the same time their desire to be as rich and popular as Chad and Steve is transparent.

 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S990tUZaMc> 

Genuine concern but also admiration is also reflected in Jackson's video statement. He says "Congratulations for selling out YouTube. ... We are proud of you guys for going so far
with it." "Jeffmara" joins this choir "Congrats on being acquired, what a great validation of your work. You guys deserve every bit of that cash." "Thatpspguy" says "Who would
have thunk it, eh? Congratulations. You are now the richest people on YouTube, way to go."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tFZc3w-Ey8> 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HbNknf65l4>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GOncyJhnZc&mode=related&search=>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JsMr8lnh6c>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdiOR3oybm0>

Contributors upload their material, a slice of their life, to corporate sociable environments. It's not just teenagers who identify. "PhillFlash" is (perhaps) 50 years old. He performs
the surprise he felt about the news of the merger "YouTube... oh, WE are in the news." 

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV28TqQfW0A>

At any time the company can change their video player (they did) on the site or ask sites to be taken down that offer plug-ions to download YouTube videos (they did not thus
far). There is also no guarantee that YouTube will not start charging for the hosting service and bandwidth. 

In the context of YouTube but also sites like CiteUlike, del.icio.us, and others, I suggest that contributors are driven by a hybrid mix of motivations. I call this "individualistic
collectivism": contributors are not exclusively in it for themselves but they are also not completely driven by the idea of the greater good. Peter Kollock (1999) identifies
anticipated reciprocity, increased recognition, as well as a sense of efficacy and community as motivating factors. (4) For a more in-depth loom at the emotional and social
motivations for participation see my essay The Participatory Challenge, first published in DataBrowser 3.

<http://www.collectivate.net/the-participatory-challenge/>

In the case of Amazon.com it is relatively easy to understand that the attention economy leads to cash. Amazon.com has become a great research tool. The many contributors
have out-cooperated Amazon.com's competition. My local bookstore cannot line up 12 individuals who tell me what they think of a book. (Of course we all heard the horror stories
of authors promoting themselves by impersonating reputable people in a given industry, but that's not the majority of reviews.) People come to Amazon.com to research a book
and then also buy it there. However, the latter is not inevitable. If we are aiming for "ethical consistency," then we could buy the book elsewhere. 

Edward Said demanded such consistency in his essay Speaking Truth to Power, but the term "ethical consistency" was coined by the French philosopher Alain Badiou. (5) In his
book "Ethics" Badiou (2001) mounts a critique of contemporary ethics discourses, which he describes as "at best variations on ancient religious and moral preaching, at worst a
threatening mix of conservatism and the death drive." (6) For Badiou, such discourses are installed in order to reinforce the status quo.

But what I suggest as an ethics of participation is in fact quite different. "Ethical consistency" in relation to participatory cultures means that we are standing up for our values
and beliefs. You may be against centralization and radically for the open access to knowledge. What matters most, however, is that you follow through on those beliefs. 

This discussion is complicated by the fact that there is indeed hardly any outside space of the capitalist managerial logic. Today you discover a useful sociable web tool and
tomorrow it will be acquired by Yahoo or MTV. Good luck, finding remaining Habermasian public spaces online... Even in SecondLife, consumer experiences are constructed within
"user-created" contexts.

It'd be naive to completely condemn business models such as Amazon.com. They are not radically evil (as Badiou would put it). However, Google's corporate slogan Don't Be Evil
looks quite different today than it did even two years ago. The future society will be full of hybrid economic schemes and hybrid identities. Today, companies learn how to make
money in the cracks of the day-to-day culture of sharing online. They understand the importance of a low threshold; the easier it is for the "masses" to enter their environments
and contribute content, the more the company will profit.

The act of participation is political: people offer their contribution but the rules of the context to which they contribute are often vague. Many YouTube contributors were unaware
of the company's long-standing efforts to make money of the immaterial and often creative labor of this community of interest. Content producers are, in a Marxian sense,
alienated from the product of their labor because they don't have full control over its future on the site (other than its removal). Cooperation is often manipulated or even forced. 

According to Carr the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for 40% of total Internet page views in November 2006. I'd add that the user-generated content is the
prime reason for this concentration. (MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 17% of all page views in the same month.) Such centralization happened at the same time
that the number of domain names increased from 2.1 million to 5.1 million.

Michael Hardt writes that "Affective labor is one face of what I will call "immaterial labor", which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the
global capitalist economy.  ... [G]iven the role of affective labor as one of the strongest links in the chain of capitalist postmodernization, its potential for subversion and
autonomous constitution is all the greater." (7)

How can our immaterial labor be turned into an autonomous act? We can start by counteracting the mentioned centralization by not (exclusively) using mainstream services.
(Many predictions for 2007 included the rise of an ocean of user-built online applications). We can re-direct our "micro-volunteerism" toward not-for-profit projects like Archive.org
or Wikipedia. Archive.org offers video upload functionality but is much slower and complicated to use. Even creating simple awareness of future dependence on mainstream
services like Flickr, YouTube, Amazon is valuable. These are admittedly micro-actions that counteract American-style convenience; they can be implemented right away. I propose
this as a modest starting point for a discussion of the ethics of participation.

References:

(1) <http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/sharecropping_t.php>
(2) <http://www.youtube.com/t/terms>
(3) <http://www.danah.org/papers/PublicDisplays.pdf>
(4) <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm>
(5) Badiou. A. "Ethics" New York: Verso. p60
(6) Badiou. A. "Ethics" New York: Verso. p90
(7) <http://www.vinculo-a.net/english_site/text_hardt.html>

Blog entry
<http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms/2007/1/7/the-ethics-of-participation.html>