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Dear Samuel, dear list, <br>
<br>
your email finds me in the middle of a two-day conference and a
two-week family trip, so please excuse me for a rather brief
introduction. <br>
<br>
I'm a postdoctoral researcher from Vienna working at the Institute
of Technology Assessment. My background is in science and technology
studies (STS) and my current research is concerned with search
technology and how sociotechnical visions, value-systems, and
ideologies shape search algorithms, but also business models based
on practices of user profiling in different cultural contexts. <br>
<br>
At the moment, I'm leading a project on search engines at the
intersection of global capitalism and local (Austrian)
socio-political cultures - obviously, the European level will be
central here as a kind of middle ground for governance processes.
The ongoing reform of the EU data protection legislation will be
central in this analysis since it is an important arena where
supposedly global search engines - Google first and foremost - are
imagined and governed in European contexts. It's a site where
tensions between US-American search engines/ social media and
European, but also different national visions and values may be
observed, where IT lobbying takes place on a grand scale, and where
Edward Snowden and the NSA scandal plays a crucial role too. <br>
<br>
The analysis of European visions and value-systems will then be
compared to my past research on capitalist ideologies driving search
engines in US-American contexts.That's where digital labor comes
into play. I've argued that we need to go beyond the political
economy of search engines to understand complex actor-networks and
power relations involved in the construction and stabilization of
big players like Google. Accordingly, content providers and users
are not merely exploited by Google & co, but rather stabilize
its powerful role and capital accumulation cycle by
contributing mundane forms of labor - Profit is generated due to
heavy sharing, liking, poking, messaging, watching videos, creating
content etc. Drawing on contributions from critical theory
(Althusser, Marx, Gramsci) I've conceptualized the notion
algorithmic ideology to grasp co-shaping processes of algorithmic
logics and socio-cultural values, capitalist ideologies in
particular.<br>
<br>
Grounded in this body of work, I'll talk about "digital labor,
capitalist ideology, and alternative future" at #DL14. I will
discuss how ideology critique can help us to understand the gridlock
of mundane forms of digital labor that help corporate search engines
(and social media etc.) to further expand, exploit, and commodify
larger and larger parts of the web (and social reality). However, I
will further discuss how users may opt out of Google's capital
accumulation cycle and what role “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci
2012) can play in challenging hegemonic actors like Google,
Facebook, Twitter, ...<br>
<br>
If you got interested in my work, you'll find further information/
publications etc on my blog: <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.astridmager.net/">http://www.astridmager.net/</a><br>
<br>
or you just get in touch with me on twitter, facebook etc. -
ironically, I'm using these tools to share critical ideas about
search engines, social media, and so forth.. - underlining the
dialectical nature of the digital objects we are working with..
hehe. <br>
<br>
I guess that's all for now. I'm looking forward to interesting
discussions and an exciting time at #DL14!!!<br>
Have a nice summer! Best, Astrid<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 03.06.14 21:19, schrieb Samuel
Tannert:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CA+Ww5QCErrmAoOVe0iHbOwX-eT_SeDUxLSrRN2LtU1HkE-JJkQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>Cross-pollination is the key to life. In the abstract, I
mean. Communication, the process of producing difference, et
cetera.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I took on the Instagram feed for #DL14, but I am yet to
figure out how exactly to take photos of digital labor. I have
never been a photo archivist in any meaningful way. The whole
act seems too much effort -- take out the camera, lens-cap off
/ camera-app on, frame-focus-shoot -- and so none of my
Facebook photos are my own. And I have never been good with
aesthetics in any meaningful way. Possibly a fear of taste? I
desired white jeans one winter, but mostly a top-of-the-pile
heuristic has helped me through the daily fashion requirement.
Despite my own inadequacies, however, the Instagram must go
on/line!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Initially I wanted it stylish/-ized with a particular form,
e.g. always the hands or just handwritten words. Repetition is
advantageously reductionist in that the pattern has certain
intertextual demands which can substitute for nuanced
critique, passing the buck from artist to audience; a cabinet
of curiosities speaks in a way a baseball-card collection
cannot.. "I think." Digital labor seems to me more than a
series of instances to be cataloged. Digital technologies are
so pervasively immanent, "at once everywhere and soon to come
everywhere else," and the more I think about what to photogram
the more it seems I would have to capture the world itself.
Labor_Digital14 sits empty. Much/All of my time has been spent
thinking about what is possible:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>A photo of hands typing on a keyboard is a necessity. &
texting. If you crunch the numbers we spend something like 60%
of our waking day doing this and I think omission would be
deceit, here. The salient bit is that digital labor can be
captured at the point of human action on the interface -- a
kind of straightforward realist framing which blurs the
difference between perception by the tool & that of the
human. This conflation demands a search for all sorts of
interesting interactions with different digital technologies,
looking with the eye and capturing with the camera: e.g.
programming the VCR #throwbackthursday, gaming keyboards
#MoreButtonsThanGod, or an 11-hour time-lapse of a keyboard in
use #2real.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Then there's the tension between the screen and the camera
-- that strange distance provoked by a photo of a monitor or
someone videotaping the TV. It doesn't really work, right? The
extra agential layer puts the user at such a level of
abstraction from the object that the role the representing
apparatus plays becomes frustratingly apparent -- 'learn to
take a screenshot, buddy!' And that's it: the screenshot
understands the digital environment without the additional
abstraction in a kind of Bogost/alien-phenomenology, 'what
does the object see?' I keep wanting to use the word
'hyperreal' for semantic integrity, but the baggage would
suggest that the objects captured are somehow merely symbolic
which I don't mean at all.. Either way, the capturing of the
digital environment still demands a searching, but within
hyperspace and with hyperspatial vision.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>And that all is just the first-order stuff! Then you've got
the innumerable material and ideal abstractions of digital
labor, reductively defined: industry and theory & art. On
one hand I could seek out that activity which our digital
activities are predicated upon, e.g. the ConEd guy out front
of the apartment with a jackhammer at 2 AM or, taken far more
seriously, the now infamous 'FoxConn girl' selfie. On the
other hand I could go PostSecret and photograph the symbolic
abstraction, e.g. whiteboard sketch-ups, highlighted
quotations in worn books, art & more art in its broadest
sense. If you allow some kind of abstraction everything
becomes associated with digital labor, ~'no outside to
capitalism.'</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Digital Labor: DIGITAL LABOR. BIG. To really understand it
you have to come from all these different angles.. and that's
been Hollywood's problem all along, no? You can capture the
person using the interface, but it's someone just someone
tak-a-taking away; or you can capture the on-screen image, but
it's just a bunch of boring input boxes. The synthetic
experience of using a computer is really difficult to capture
from outside, and also in our real lives -- watching someone
use a computer is painfully alienating.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So the film industry's first instinct was to only engage
with digital technologies through science fiction and I think
this worked pretty well. Either interfaces were made
gesture/voice controlled so that action & intent were
apparent, or hyperspace was made material through
Hackers-esque VR goggles and graphical user interfaces (e.g.,
[HACK MAINFRAME] [CANCEL]). Then for a while they settled on a
3-quarters over-the-shoulder shot in a kind of defeatist
realism, but now that's changing! Shows are using overlays
with the screen display stuck on top of the picture, a kind of
hyper-/material collage: House of Cards, Sherlock, used often
with texting. It's all very stylish and I can only imagine
that there was extensive audience testing done -- kidding..
maybe? It really is a significant advance in capturing our
experience of digital technologies, affect of a higher
fidelity. We have realized that one part of the act simply
won't do.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So why Instagram at all? Is it necessary? Useful? I think
it has to be, because we live in a world of digital labor. The
'experience' of digital technologies extends beyond the
productive sphere and has wormed its way into life itself. It
is grafted to our collective being. & Instagram is set up
for this capturing of instances, not in the sense of a Google
Image Search ontology, but a Web-2.0 stream epistemology.
Instagram is useful in that it allows the crowd-sourcing of a
particular aspect of the whole which is most descriptive in
combination with other methods of knowing.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Turn left and I'm sure you could see this move coming, but
I mean to be very sincere: I really think that #DL14 will
succeed in this way, in the sense of a more complete picture
than we have ever had before. The Instagram aside, I have had
the pleasure of reading innumerable abstracts for projects of
all kinds coming at the problem of digital labor from so many
angles (3 x BIG) -- a proper attempt at mapping the kosmos.
More subdued: we are all in for a treat.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>A number of presentations tackle the problem of digital
labor with a very realist edge, from the panel of Amazon
Mechanical Turk workers which will provide a first-hand
account of the emerging crowd-sourcing industry to Henry
Warwick's solo-performance of Terry Riley's "In C," written
for 11 to 35 performers, which will make visible the
'redundancies' in the labor market caused by digital
technologies. Others will engage with the hypermaterial, from
Karin Hansson's social-networking platform AffectMachine which
attempts to commodify human interaction to Carl DiSalvo and
his team's reconfiguration of civil society as something which
can be 'hacked' through the development of grassroots digital
infrastructure. Others will be slightly abstracted: Miriam
Cherry will be giving an account of the legal framework
through which minimum wage could be extended to crowd-workers,
Gavin Mueller will be giving a history of the piracy/'warez'
scene, Frank Pasquale will work through the question of
whether we might someday "automate the automators" by
replacing the managerial class with algorithmic processes.
There will even be a stand-up comedy routine by Benj Gerdes,
which I hope will let us laugh despite the often overwhelming
confrontation which is the conference's focus. There are so
many fantastic projects that I do not have the space to list
here, and I am awestruck, really, at just how unique each
submission was.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I have incredibly high hopes for #DL14 as an opportunity
for a meaningful advance of the whole field of digital labor
studies. Youthful idealism included, I feel like we live in a
period of particular import as both departure and genesis,
situated as we are at the turn of the millennium. There could
not be an assembly more capable of shouldering that
responsibility than all of you.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Please introduce yourselves.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>H M Theinert</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>tl;dr</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Instagram is hard</div>
<div>Digital Labor is everywhere</div>
<div>
Hollywood is OK, sometimes, I guess</div>
<div>#DL14</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
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