{"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":51,"pdf_page":58,"physical_index":58,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"424a4b7e4fb13df49d03571f713a6ad9ae406e4ff90b8f099d736b2901e888a7"},"chapter":"DIGITAL LABOR","content":"Laybourne, executive of the web-based media company Oxygen, thinks of a hypothetical show called What Are They Thinking? a reality-based sketch comedy based on stories posted on the web, because “funny things happen in our lives everyday.\"59 As Bayers also adds, “until it's produced, the line separating that concept from more puerile fare dismissed by Gerry, like America's Funniest, is hard to see.\"60\n\nThe difference between the puerile fare of America's Funniest and user-based content seems to lie not so much in the more serious nature of the new web as comparedto the vilified output of television's people shows and reality television. From an abstract point of view, there is no difference between the ways in which people shows rely on the inventiveness of their audiences and the ways in which websites rely on users' input. People shows rely on the activity (even amid the most shocking sleaze) of their audience and willing participants to a much larger extent than any other television programs. In a sense, they manage the impossible; they create monetary value out ofthe most reluctant members of the postmodern cultural economy: those who do not produce marketable stóle, who are not qualified enough to enter the fast world of the knowledge economy, are converted into monetary value through their capacity to perform their misery.\n\nWhen compared to the cultural and affective production on the Internet, people shows also seem to embody a different logic of relation between capitalism (the media conglomerates that produce and distribute such shows) and its labor force—the beguiled, dysfunctional citizens of the underdeveloped North. Within people shows and reality TV, the valorization of the audience as labor and spectacle always happens somehow within a power/knowledge nexus thatdoes not allow the immediate valorization of the talk show participants: you cannot just put a Jerry Springer guest on TV on her own to tell her story with no mediation (indeed, that would look too much like the discredited access slots of public-service broadcasting). There is no real 24/7 access to reality TV, but increasing and decreasing levels of selective editing (according to the different modalities of a communication spectrum that goes from terrestrial to digital TV and the Internet). In the case of talk shows, various levels of knowledge intervene between the guest and the apparatus of valorization, which normalize the dysfunctional subjects through a moral or therapeutic discourse and à more traditional institutional organization of production. So after the performance, the guest mustbe advised, patronized, questioned, and often bullied by the audience and the host, all in the name of a perfunctory, normalizing morality. In reality television, psychologists and other experts are also brought in to provide an authoritative perspective through which what is often a sheer voyeuristic experience may be seen as a social experiment.\n\nTV shows also belong to a different economy of scale: although there are more and more of them, they are still relatively few when compared to the millions of pages on the web. It isas if the centralized organization of the traditional media does not let them turn people's productions into pure monetary value. TV shows must have morals, even as those morals are shattered by the overflowing performances of their subjects.\n\nFree Labor\n\n51","previous_page":50,"next_page":null}