The art of producing gratis media content by showcasing the vox populi has a long history; its origins could arguably be traced to the establishment of letters to the editor columns in print publications. Since these contributions were selected, edited, and, in many cases, fabricatedin order to support the editorial lineof newspapers and magazines, they offer a good illustration of howsupposedly unsolicited public opinion can be generated, shaped, or even ventriloquized. Websites that depend on user input, whetherfor the main action or in the form of comments posted in response to a featured item, are in direct linear descent from these first letters to the editor. More raw and unfiltered by far, they build on the popularity and cost-effectiveness of their print antecedents.
In recent years, as the open comments sections (“Comment Is Free") have lengthened and proliferated, more and more online newspaper versions have turned to crowdsourcing appeals for readers to generate free columns, images, videos, designs, fact checking, and other information supplies.7 The principle underlying these appealsis that readers will be gratified to participate and that the results will be more authentic, especially if they are drawing on skills and knowledge unavailable to a commissioned reporter. Outside of the mainstream media, this principle also applies to the widespread uptake of crowdsourcing as a semiindustrial technique for extractingideas, opinions, designs, and intelligence with little or no compensation for the provider other than name recognition. Informal evidence suggests that as long as a task can be advertised as fun or cool, there is a good chance you can get it done for free, or for a pittance from the seemingly ever-obliging crowd. Moreover, if some of the input seems to be very professional, that is because either the crowdsourcing call is specifically crafted to appeal to professionals on their downtime, or else because it quite probably comes from someone who used to be a professional employee and has been cast into the amateur demimonde of the volunteer content provider.
At the other end of the spectrum are more routine tasks, such as those put out for bid on programs like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The bids are acceptedin return for a minimal fee set by the requester and are assignedto tasks that may take no morethan a few minutes to perform.8 The registered taskers of the Mechanical Turkand other e-lance operations would not be thought of as remotely resembling temporary employees any more than the uncompensated creatives who respond to the more skill-intensive kinds of crowdsourcing. Theyleave no trace of their employment, and certainly nothing to implicate an employer in any legal or regulated network of obligations. What they do, however, is bring the definition of a job much closer to its etómological source—a discrete lump, or piece, of work that exists only for the duration of its fulfillment.
In Search of the Lost Paycheck
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