{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","id":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","uuid":"a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title":"DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":267,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/DIGITAL%20LABOR%20THE%20INTERNET%20AS%20PLAYGROUND%20AND%20FACTORY","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/a31b1606-7526-4f42-a12d-1edcb41ff0e7/search"},"page":{"printed_page":18,"pdf_page":25,"physical_index":25,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c66e44cf137dd84f2479b8b3979c330238c313c13ecadc663cb3ffafb75ac2a5"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"On the other hand, there is no actual social networking depicted in the film, and so uninformed viewers could plausibly conclude that the firm's huge financial success rests on the subscription base of Facebook's half a billion users. Yet these users are not consumers in any traditional sense of paying customers. Rather the variety of activities they perform (technically known as click signals) is the source of valuable data that is sold to the true customers—advertisers or behavior market vendors such as Bluekai, TargusInfo, and Acxiom. According to Eli Pariser, “Acxiom alone has accumulated an average of 1500 pieces of data on each person in its database, which includes 96% of Americans.\"4 Some of these customers pay to advertise on the site, though most use the information to follow users around the web with personalized spot advertising. The trade-off for users, of course, is free access to the platform and the software, but, from the company's perspective, the cost of hosting and maintenance is dwarfed by the tradeable value of the information it can extract from the daily churn on its site. By far the majority of social network users are unaware of how the platform owners profit from the volunteer content of their communications, or indeed how they themselves are generating monetizable product for the owners. But as Andrew Lewis has succinctly put it, \"If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product being sold.\"5\n\nThe 1960sfuturist Alvin Toffler coined the term “prosumers\" to describe the class of consumers who had evolved beyond a passive acceptance of marketplace choice. But he could hardly have imagined how the term would come to be used, as it is today,to denote the mass of Internet users whose devoted efforts to build relationships and polish their online social identity are the raw material for tidy profits enjoyed by others.Nor could any of the other sunny 1970s prognosticators of postindustrial society such as Daniel Bell have imagined the new order being driven by an attention economy, or that it would be sustained not by the gainful labor of cognitive workers but by the self-promotion of ordinary, unpaid individuals. Moreover, the rewards that underpin this economy are, in some respects, redolent of the kinds of assets that secured social standing in an era that preceded industrialization, when the careful and laborious nurturing of relationships with wealthy and powerful names were sources of considerable worth.\n\nToday, we can see the resurgence of such a culture based on the cultivation of social capital, whether for those in search of breakthrough or blockbuster attention in the reputation stakes (in Twitter trending and top viral links) or in the more low-hanging circuits of Internet self-exposure. In some quarters, this affective currency has replaced the wages of industrialization, especially for professionals who used to earn a structured living from paid content and who now disseminate their bylines far and wide in hopes of securing a niche livelihood from name recognition. But by far the most substantial rewards are allocated, on an industrial basis, to those who build and maintain the technologies of extraction, who hold the system's intellectual property, and who can trade the aggregate output of personal expression as if it were some bulk commodity like grain or beets.6 The real spoils, in other words, do not go to the aspiring stars, ranked and rated by the battery of metrics that measure Internet sentiment andopinion, but to behindthe-scenes content hosts and data miners, who utilize theseand other metricsto guarantee their profits. The outcome, for this lattergroup, is a virtually wage-free proposition. When all is said and done, the informal contract that underpins this kind of economy is a profoundly asymmetrical deal.\n\n18\n\nTheShiftingSites of Labor Markets","previous_page":17,"next_page":19}