User:Lidia.Pereira/Trimesters/RWRM/IEssay

Draft

"Everything and everyone on the internet is becoming collaborative. The future is, in a word, social." Andrew Keen

Jeremy Bentham, utilitarian reformer of the 19th century, dreamt of a world where there would be nowhere to hide, a paradise of transparency where everyone would be visible and therefore no secrets would exist (but only for those who could not afford privacy). This architectural idea was to be applied to the management of schools, prisons, factories and other primarily social spaces of subjectivity formation. All in the good name of efficiency and with the ever so appropriate name of "Panopticon" - a state of permanent surveillance and discipline presenting magnificent benefits to the maintenance of the economical infrastructure. This Foucaldian disciplinary society moved on to what Deleuze describes as the control society, when the crowd is no longer contained within a single space, thus witnessing the appearance of the multitude. The multitude's surveillance is now participatory, for it is the way we participate with our data that provides the tools for our control and subjectivity formation. And if it is true that we participate in the construction of our subjectivities, we still construct them within a certain system - this collective and social construction is always determined by the disciplinary methods of the neoliberal apparatus. In that sense, we might control certain aspects of that subjectivity, but the way we produce it is still coded by a much bigger apparatus. Andrew Keen warn us that the prison of the 19th century has reappeared with the social web (or, as Reid Hoffman puts it, Web 3.0), but with a plot twist: it is now considered as pleasurable and entertaining. We participate "willingly", but not always knowingly, in our own incarceration. In this way, technology both enables and shapes participatory culture.

- What is participatory culture?
According to Mirkos Tobias Schäfer, participatory culture marks a shift between cultural participation, in which users take part by an intelectual deconstruction of cultural artefacts, participation which is still very much restricted to an intelectual elite, and the fading of barriers between amateur culture and professionals, users and producers, in which action, construction and modification are common interactions of the user with cultural artifacts. This participation extends beyond media text production and modification to software development, which is "the means of production of the digital age". This shift is allowed by new technologies and the architecture of Web 2.0. The way we perceive participation has been shaped by the employment of media technology for social interaction and political activism. Participation here is viewed as a critical practice. In popular discourse, participation comes associated with the idea of promoting new technologies, whilst a more academic discourse perceives it as a cultural phenomenon which can help explain contemporary media practice. New terms have been coined to describe this user-generated culture: "produser", "prosumer", DIY culture, peer-to-peer and the ideas of a collective, of community and collaboration often come associated with it. However, one must not incur in common misunderstandings regarding participatory culture, which comprise the assumption of social progress, that participation is always explicit and based around communities sharing similar motivations and which ignore design choices which implement this participation, as well as neglect that when we participate in culture, participation in power structures and general revenues is still out of our reach. A good example of this last point is that of the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a system in which workers around the world browse HIT's (Human Intelligence Tasks) and choose which ones to complete. As explored in "The Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk", an essay by Ayhan Aytes, this phenomena can be described as crowdsourcing, a term which describes the relationship, whithin the neoliberal apparatus, of the outsourcing paradigm and the crowds of the digital networks, the breaking down of barriers between amateurs and profissionals brought about by the massified access to communication commodities, this being seen as one of the factors for pushing down labor costs. It relies heavily on labor and time arbitrage, which exploit the neoliberal apparatus gray legislative areas. This state of exception contributes further to the cultural detachment of the cognitive worker/cultural producer, who sees the access to the cultural dimension of the commodity he/she produces completely denied, for it informs social relations somewhere else in the world and ends up not affecting their own. So, in order to better understand participatory culture, we must keep in mind two key aspects, which declare that participants don't share a common motivation determined by an homogeneous socio-political background and do not always participate in areas dependent of big media industries; participation is not always explicit, but often times implicit, so that it becomes more difficult to assess the extent to which cultural production is affected by user generated content. Schäfer's mapping of the domains of user participation divides internet labour in three main areas: accumulation, archiving and construction, which can sometimes overlap and often occur in conflict areas in which user activities converge with the interests of culture industries. Accumulation describes all user activities which comment or interact in any way with massified popular culture. Within this domain one can stumble across the principles of "remixing": combining, changing and adapting pre-existing cultural artefacts, often belonging to major media companies. However, even if some of these activities are protected by fair use, it is not always the case since Copyright Law has been becoming more and more restrictive since cultural industries are not to keen on having their profits under menace. This causes for many Digital Millenium Copyright Act letters to be sent and disproportionate lawsuits to take action. Archiving is defined by user storage of artefacts, building online data collections and reorganizing cultural resources and knowledge bases. Again, this domain often clashes with copyright law, namely in the case of bit torrent sites and web storing and sharing services which not always survive copyright's holders attempt to have them shut down or their content removed. Construction refers to production not dependent on culture industries, where distribution and production means are not subjected to a centralized power. An example of this type of production is that of software, in collaborative environments which abide to free/open source principles. Not unlike the previous domains, within software

Explicit Participation (under construction)
Explicit participation is driven by extrinsic or intrinsic motivation, which varies according to the different users' skills. It should not be reduced to altruistic motivations, or critical activism against hegemonic culture, but perceived as heterogeneous in the sense that concerns users from the most different backgrounds whose range of skills vary greatly, from different contexts such as paid labour, leisure or unpaid voluntary work. It relies on the appropriation of technology by users, and further development of technical skills. Implicit Participation (under construction)
Implicit participation is a consequence of design choices that take advantage of user activity and habits by automating and facilitating. It doesn't necessarily require conscious activity of cultural production or problem-solving by users, nor is there any need for them to collaborate and communicate. There's no need for interaction, shared values and common goals. These are platforms which benefit from user generated content contributing to information management systems, which can be exploited for improving information retrieval or gathering user info for market research.

Explicit vs Implicit transactions (under construction)
The immaterial labor, which characterises the multitude, is possible due to the commodification of communication, there where "social" becomes "economical". Lazzarato sustains that subjectivity is now the "raw material" of immaterial labor, directly producting a social relation. However, this assumes the equality of conditions between digital actors, assumption which crowdsourcing disturbs. The information production cycles impact differently on subjectivity due to the immediate and direct effect on the domain where they are produced. But what if the communicator is no longer the consumer? The crowdsurfing apparatus blurs the distinctions between industrial and postindustrial labor and rejects assumptions of the indepencence from capital of the subjectivity formation brought about by cognitive work.