Notwithstanding the obvious economic sense of this scheme, the reporter nevertheless warily raises the question of whether “the crowd [can] produce enough content to support an array of shows over many years.” Hirschorn readily puts his trust in the network and the quality of the pool of free labor it musters. He predicts that “as user-generated TV matures, the users will become more proficient and the networks better at ferreting out the best of the best.” The article provides support for this optimism: a Pew survey found that 57 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds online (twelve million individuals) are creating content and posting it on the Web. Moreover, in the case of iFilm.com, the crowd plays another important role in the process of television production: “Because iFilm already ranks videos by popularity, the service came with an infrastructure for separating the gold from the god-awful.” The crowd in this case serves also as an editorial board. In this model, “viewers serve as both talent pool and jury.” Hirschorn, therefore, predicts that “the model will succeed” (Howe 2006). In an ironic and historical turn of events, corporations such as VH1 are now vowing for a process of reskilling. They hope for “workers” to be more talented and skillful because crowdsourcing allows the company to meet them as producers in the marketplace, rather than as workers, and purchase strictly their products—that is, the end result of their labor—rather than their labor power and labor time. I will get back to that crucial point below.
The prime significance of crowdsourcing, according to the article, is not only economic. It is also not necessarily significant in terms of the cultural quality of the end products; most of these videos, the article admits, are vulgar and “stupid.” What’s important is the moral significance of crowdsourcing. The article suggests that crowdsourcing brings about a “new, democratic age of entertainment by the masses, for the masses” (Howe 2006). This populist ethos is also embedded in the names of many of the Web sites that thrive on network production. The formula “i + [content type]” (e.g., iStockphoto, iFilm) speaks to the empowerment of the “I”—the individual, amateur, unprofessional, “the people,” the masses—who can nevertheless shoot his or her own film and distribute it over the Internet. The same goes for the name of the video-sharing site YouTube, where the second person “You” refers to each individual user, or the social networking site MySpace, which again speaks of a personal space. The irony in this kind of allusion to the individual and “the people” is that many of these Web sites—which originally emerged as grassroots operations—are now owned by huge media corporations: Getty, Viacom, Google, and NewsCorp.
122
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age