[iDC] The Ethics of Participation

[Hugemusic]

Indeed an interesting topic.

I tend to agree that the concern reflects an imposed notion of "value".  I prefer to use the term "gratification" in these things. 

People will post/read content because they achieve a gratification by doing so. For some, that gratification reflects a commercial imperative (selling songs on iTunes or promoting the band via MySpace), for some a narcissistic imperative (individuals blogging or commenting on MySpace, etc). As long as neither is entered into without appreciation, it's all ethical to me.

Youtube and MySpace offer a service of aggregation.  They construct an audience in the same way a TV station does and can commercialise it in the same way a TV or radio station does. The audience, individually, is free to leave whenever they wish - but their individual participation (including content) is not the part that has value in a commercial sense. The commercial value is in the aggregation of the audience and that value is generated by the service providers: the owners of YouTube or MySpace. The participants provide their eyeballs in exchange for a service they don't pay for - just like a free-to-air TV audience does.

It would seem odd indeed if we were to argue that the TV audience should be distributed the proceeds of the advertising revenue generated by the TV company ... but they all participate in the transaction ...

In the case of Amazon, the commercialisation is a little more diverse, but essentially the same, I think. Ditto with MySpace commercialising content via SnowCap. Happy to tease this one out further ...

Cheers,
Hughie




----- Original Message ----- 
  From: john sobol 
  To: Trebor Scholz 
  Cc: IDC list 
  Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 11:31 AM
  Subject: Re: [iDC] The Ethics of Participation


  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'. 


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