1. Social Media week9
Working for Praise
last update: March 30, 2009
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009
2. What You Need To Know About This Course
week 1 Histories of the Internet
week 2 Histories of the Internet and World Wide Web
week 3
Social Media, Cyber Clustering, and Social Isolation
week 4 Participation: Benefits, Numbers, and Quality
week 5 Quality. The Wisdom or Ineptitude of the Crowd
The Web 2.0 Ideology
week 7
week 6 Art and Social Media
Spring Break
week 8
Political Net Activism
week 9
What Does It Take To Participate?
Why Participate?
week 10
Got Ethics? Labor, Work, What?
week 11 week 14
The Power of Users
week 13 Net Neutrality
week 12 Near Future Scenarios
week 15
Presentations
Trebor Scholz | The New School University | Eugene Lang | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009
3. What Does It Take To Participate?
week 9
March 30, April 1
Required Reading:
”The Internet and Youth Political Participation”
Kann, M. First Monday. 27 Jul 2007. 31 Jul 2007
<http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1977/1852>
Warschauer, Mark. quot;Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide.quot; School of Information - University of Michigan:
The iSchool at Michigan. 31 July 2002. 03 Jan. 2009
<http://www.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/SI110/readings/DigiDivide/Rethinking_Digital_Divide.pdf>.
Trebor Scholz | LCST 2031 A | Spring 2009
6. Why?
“The two things that people want more than sex or money are recognition and praise.”
Mary Kay Ash (Communities Create Brands p27)
7. Willing to work for praise.
The Volunteer Economy Will Work for Praise: The Web's Free-Labor Economy
by Stephen Baker
quot;masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one.
Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning
praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and
finding satisfaction in helping others.quot;
quot;But how to monetize all that energy? From universities to the computer labs of Internet giants,
researchers are working to decode motivations, and to perfect the art of enlisting volunteers.
Prahbakar Raghavan, chief of Yahoo Research (YHOO), estimates that 4% to 6% of Yahoo's users
are drawn to contribute their energies for free, whether it's writing movie reviews or handling
questions at Yahoo Answers. If his team could devise incentives to draw upon the knowledge and
creativity of a further 5%, it could provide a vital boost. Incentives might range from contests to
scoreboards to thank-you notes. quot;Different types of personalities respond to different point systems,quot;
he says. Raghavan has hired microeconomists and sociologists from Harvard and Columbia
universities to match different types of personalities with different rewards.quot;
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/content/dec2008/tc20081228_809309.htm
8. friendship
Intensities of Participation
subscribe read
collaborate moderate
share remix
tag forward
write comment
favorite link
9. Willing to work for praise
How do you mobilize volunteers? (Some of the previous research has drawn on frequent flier programs.)
Abundant non-financial rewards
Americans happily toiling for attention on for-profit sites that don't pay them money
quot;Communispace, a market research company near Boston, conducts similar studies as it
enlists volunteer marketing consultants. The company invites targeted people to join
hundreds of social networks organized around certain products and services, from airlines to
weight-loss medications. These are virtual focus groups. The volunteers provide insights on
advertising campaigns and suggestions for new products. Manila Austin, a psychologist who
heads up research at Communispace, says that 86% of the participants contribute to
discussions and nearly 1 in 3 adds a fresh post each week.
When Austin and her team experimented with financial incentives, they discovered that
volunteers appreciated the gesture, but didn't want payment. Participation rose when
volunteers received a token $10 gift certificate as a thank-you. But raising the value of the
certificates made no difference. quot;People want the validation that they are being heard,quot;
Austin says.quot;
11. Willing to work for praise.
quot;Dinner guests, for example, satisfy social obligations by offering their hosts a bottle of wine. But,
says Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and author of Predictably
Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, it would be a jolting intrusion of the market
economy if guests instead handed their hosts a check. quot;It's a very delicate line,quot; Ariely says, quot;and the
modern workplace is right in the middle.quot;
quot;Sweet's first hit on ThisNext was a $400 fishbowl from Red Dot Design. When she posted it on
the site, it quickly became one of the most popular items. She hunted for more finds to post. As
other visitors to the site found her gems, they gave them high marks, driving Sweet up in the site's
contributor rankings. She was becoming a star—what Gould calls a maven. On a recent
afternoon, she clicked on the site to check her status. quot;I'm No. 1 in San Francisco, No. 1 in
Washington, No. 2 in Denver,quot; she announced proudly.
12. Willing to work for praise.
The unwritten quid pro quo between Gould and Sweet amounts to a boilerplate contract for
much of the free-labor economy. Gould provides a stage for Sweet to strut her stuff, a platform
to reach millions of shopping fanatics around the world. This is the key to his business. It
draws advertisers to targeted sites populated with shopping enthusiasts; ThisNext gets paid
for each click. He's happy to give Sweet a boost by putting her in touch with media (including
BusinessWeek). His team also sends mavens such freebies as skin cream and HaberVision
sunglasses, which list at $200, Sweet notes. With this blend, Gould and other entrepreneurs
manage to cash in on free labor—while glossing over the issue of financial remuneration.quot;
quot;Making money is up to Sweet, who has a full-time job as a designer. She thinks that she might
cash in on her stardom somewhere else—on blogs, books, TV, or even at a new job. (Her blog,
http://ifitshipitshere.blogspot.com, gets tens of thousands of hits per week but has yet to make
much money.)quot;
14. fb, flickr: letting others in on the experience
archiving memory
also breaching power: uploading mp3s
identification
transparency of rules
Participation In Social Media
and power dynamics
individual vs. network value
format of contributions
tone, passion, humor, personality
low threshold engagement trust
type of content scale
time sifting through music sites
relaxation
group belonging “I give because I am
link to local community
great” (agonistic giving)
social capital
job
driven by guilt: yelp, last.fm, food blogs
emotional support
sharing the experience
contributing to
of one’s time & place access to information
the greater good
software architecture
feedback
translation mobile computing
pleasure of creation
intellectual property
self-improvement
hormones reciprocity
scale
friendship challenge
embodied and networked sociality signal-to-noise ratio
permanency and
gender
privacy of content
cc Trebor Scholz
17. Illustration: Abbot Miller/Pentagon
Microcelebrity
Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone's a Little Brad Pitt
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-12/st_thompson#
19. quot;We encourage people to do the work by taking
advantage of their desire to be entertained.quot;
ESP Game
quot;We encourage people to do the work by taking advantage of their desire to be entertained.quot;
Image recognition is something that computers are not good at. Computer vision techniques donʼt work
well enough, according to the creators of the ESP game. While people are perfectly capable to
recognize and describe images, they are not especially willing to spent long hours to do so without
getting paid.
Two randomly assigned partners play the ESP game. Players are not told who their partners are and
they cannot communicate with them. Online, a large number of such pairs play simultaneously. Both
players see the same image.
The goal of the game is to guess the words with which the other person is describing the image. Once
both players have typed the same description of the image, they can move on to the next image. The
creators of the game call this process “agreeing on an image.quot; The ESP creators encourage people to
do the work of describing images by taking and they count on the desire of players to be entertained.
Better proper labels attached to each image online would allow for improved image search online and
for better accessibility of websites to blind people.
“…almost 1.3 million labels were collected with only 13,630 players, some of whom spent over 50 hours
playing the game! We believe these numbers provide evidence that the game is funquot;
http://www.gwap.com/gwap/gamesPreview/espgame/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf.
20.
21. quot;The world becomes a continuous and inexhaustible process of
emergence of inventions that goes beyond slavish accumulation.quot;
--quot;Reinventingquot; Nigel Thrift, p281
22. “Public discourse craves attention like a child.
Texts clamor at us. Images solicit our gaze.
Look here! Listen! Yo!”
“[Publics] are virtual entities, not voluntary associations.
Because their threshold of belonging is an active uptake,
however, they can be understood within the conceptual
framework of civil society— that is, as having a free,
voluntary, and active membership.”
Warner, Michael (2002): Publics and Counterpublics.
In: Public Cultures, vol. 14, no. 1, 49-90.
