DIGITAL LABOR THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY

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Contemporary networked media perform and repeat communicativitó as such, the taking place of language. As applications for the expression of any idea whatsoever, of an opinion, such that it is, blogs continue the severing of expressions from their content and their authors. Ideas and opinions link together and circulate, expressions of themselves neither completely generic nor completely individual. Posts may link and gesture, but they don't represent themselves or anything else. They are expressions, such that they are. The measuring and counting, the hits and rankings remind bloggers that we are set in intensive, reflexive communication and entertainment networks. It's as if the compulsion to make the mass speak, to poll and survey it, now takes whatever being as its target. Blog stats don’t track truth or meaning. They track blogging, the addition of posts, responses, and page views. Differently put, they track the fact of the spoken as they direct us away from what is said.

A better instance of language without referent, of language that refers only to the “it was said," is the word cloud, a graphic representation of the content of a text understood in terms of frequency of word use. For example, a word cloud made after the first debate between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 election shows that McCain frequently used the words know, spending, and got. Obama used the words think, make, and going. He also used the word got with high frequency. We don't know what this means. But we do know that words were used and speeches were made. The irony here is that language as language itself, language reflected to itself as language—Agamben’s ideal of the coming community—takes the spectacular form of the image.

In word clouds, frequency and proximity displace meaning. Which words appear with which other words? The combination of these elements determines intensity—words that appear only once either don't count (they aren't counted) or they appear very faint and tiny, type as atmosphere. Words matter, not stories and not narratives. Words index communication—they mark that they are being communicated. Word clouds shift away from a space of linguistically constituted meaning, away from a language constituted out of sentences that are uttered in contexts according to rules that can be discerned and contested.

What's lost? The ability to distinguish between contestatory and hegemonic speech. Irony. Tonality. Normativity (how can there be an ethics of the address

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if the words are not part of an address, if they are extracted from their position within speech acts to become artifacts and toys?). Critique. The terms prominent in a discourse can be discerned, but not what they mean, not even in relation to each other. We don't know the rules governing truth and falsity, which may suggest that there are no rules (other than those of frequency, proximity, and duration). Note that frequency can be citational or monological—that is, it can come from circulation or from self-repetition. Message force multipliers are more important than the message. Word clouds capture the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism.

The word image of the word cloud is prefigured in avant-garde art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cubistsincluded words as images Even more disruptive were the posters from Russian communist and Soviet revolutionary artists. On the one hand, their word art was effective because of its revolutionary impulse, its challenge to the status quo of late Russian painting. It performed the revolution, disrupting prior meanings. On the other hand, precisely because it depended on its context for its performative efficacy, it reinforced the fact ofsymbolic meaning. Its disruption was not only to index language but tc create a new one, to bring about a new world, a new man, a new register of meaning. The point wasn't to destroy meaning. It was to change it.

Word clouds aren’t revolutionary. They are elements of communicative capitalism, elements that reinforce the collapse of meaning and argument and thus hinder argument and opposition. Any words can be clouded. At Wordle you can make a new one out of speeches from Kennedy and Khrushchev, Ann Coulter or Sear. “Puffy" Combs. Anyone you like.

The word-cloud image doesn't stand in for or provide a prosthetic word. It marks a feeling, an intensity. It doesn't ask that the viewer understand it. All the viewer is expected to do is register that the word has been, that it has appeared. The word-become-image is a feeling-impulse, like a badge. It's identificatory,relying on an identity between word and object. The word image is this impulse identity

One can't argue with a word cloud. It doesn't take a position. It marks a moment. It registers aspects of the intensity of that moment: repetition entails intensity in this equation. But one doesn't know why or whether it's called for or what it's in relationto. It's just intense. The word cloud might transmit the intensity it might incite a feeling or a response, but it doesn't invite the interrogation of tha response or what induced it. It offers representation without understanding: issue are out there. A word cloud is like a Möbius strip where meta-data becomes noise “she said a lot about politics and technology." Whatever.

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Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor

PART III The Violence of Participation

ESTRANGED FREE LABOR

Mark Andrejevic

It is hardly controversial these days to observe that one of the dominant business models for the online economy relies upon consumers' willingsubmission toincreasingly detailed and comprehensive forms of monitoring. As the mainstream rightward-leaningUSA Today putit, “The coolest stuff on the Internet actually comes at a notable price: your privacy."1 And this price continues to grow thanks to the development of new frontiers for data mining ranging from start-ups mining the social web in real time to a host of mobile applications that collect data from users'smartphones and laptops.

If the ability to track onlinebehavior started out as somewhat serendipitous— the by-product of the convenience afforded by a strand of code that allowed websites to remember previous visitors, now monitoring is being designed into the system. The entire app layer of interactive services, for example, provides as many new dimensions of computer monitoring as it does innovative conveniences. If you download an application for surfing or knitting, you have simultaneously joined a new demographic group for the purposes of target marketing. The more targeted or unique the service, the more detailed and unique the information about the userit provides. Even upgrades to the computer language (hópertext markup language, or HTML) that supports the web incorporate new capacitiesfor online monitoring and tracking. As one press account noted,

The new Web language and its additional features present more tracking opportunities because the technology uses a process in which large amounts of data can be collected and stored onthe user's hard drive while online. Because of that process, advertisers and others could, experts say, see weeks or even months of personal data.²

These technological developments are complemented by the growth of online and mediated culture: the fact that large swaths of the population are conducting an increasing share of their social, professional, and personal lives on interactive platforms. It would be futile to attempt to catalogue the myriad forms of information that are collected about users; suffice it to say that pretty muc anything one does using a smartphone or an Internet connection can and will b tracked, sorted, stored, and aggregated. Those dimensions of one'sactivity that ar not yet captured by interactive devices soon will be, as interfaces become mor sophisticatedandmultidimensional—eventuallycapable of recognizing (and thu recording) expressions, evaluating mood, monitoring vital signs, and tracking ey movements.

The ease with which this type of monitoring has insinuated itself into the digi tal media landscape is breathtaking, perhaps in part because of the novelty of th technology and its applications. The seductions of the convenience and gadgetr of the smartphone far outstrip concerns about its use as a sophisticated and mu tidimensional monitoring and tracking device. Transposed into a somewhat les novel landscape, the shift might appear more objectionable. The fact is, howeve that the current embrace of commercial digital culture amounts to an unprec edented leap in the ability of institutions both public and private to collect, sor and store information about members of the public. The flashy wizardry of nev commercial technologies serves as a form of distraction or misdirection, avertin or postponing direct engagement with the fact that we are constructing a cultur inwhich commercial surveillance has become a crucial component of our com municative infrastructure. While the actual effects of this surveillance remain to b seen, it is worth pointing out that in developing a surveillance-based commercia infrastructure, we have effectively wagered on the prospect that it willprove effec tive in manipulating and channeling consumer behavior.

Privacy Issues

While it is true that popular culture portrayals ofan emerging surveillance econ omy are starting to emerge—the USA Today article, for example, is headlined “Online Tracking Takes a Scary Turn”—but they tend to frame the issue in term of personal privacy.“As digital shadowing escalates," the article observes, “so to have concerns about the erosion of traditional notions of privacy."3 Much of th discussion of online tracking has focused on the fate of privacy and the rights tha pertain to it. This is an important set of issues, but it is complicated by the way il which it frames privacy in terms of personal choice (thereby dismissing challenge to the choices made by consumers as patronizing at best and at worst an affron to their personal freedom) and overlooks the way in which their information ha become the private property of the commercial entities that do the work of har vesting it. It also tends to invoke the counterargument that there is little need fo concern since many forms of monitoring that take place in interactive context are anonymous in the sense that the aggregators and their clients are not particu larly interested in the personal identity of those monitored and do not personally inspect the details of their profiles (as if somehow the fact that no one is reading our personal e-mails means that there should be no cause for concern that they ar being electronically scanned to determined how best to manipulate us). Privacy, in short, has a tendency to frame the discussion in personal, individual terms.

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The Violence of Participation

Because of the potential shortcomings of privacy as a means of addressing monitoring concerns, this chapter proposes an approach to the commercial use of personal information that draws on a notion more conducive to collective action and the recognition of the role played by social relations: that of exploitation. The notion of exploitation has long been used in Marxist-inflected critiques of capitalism to destabilize the very notion of free choice that underwrites the type of exchange described by USA Today: the process whereby, as individual consumers, we freely give up something of our own (our privacy—in the form of personal information) in exchange for something we desire or need. The “or" in this formulation is admittedly a vexed one—it might be argued that it makes all the difference in the world whether we are talking about need or desire, about livelihood or convenience. Perhaps—although the notion of what constitutes an acceptable standard of living (beyond some baseline notion of physical survival) is, as Marx, among others, has noted, a historically and culturally conditioned one.4 While it is possible to mark the difference that separates sustenance from starvation, it is less easy to mark that which clearly delineates the boundary between need and desire.

This is not to dismiss the distinction outright, but rather to assert its socially conditioned character as a way of considering a similar issue that arises with the notion of exploitation. It is possible, as I will arguein the following pages, to make the case that the commercial appropriation of commercial information meets an abstract definition of exploitation, but to do so risks lumping together under the same name forms of brutal workplace exploitation with something that looks a lot more benign: people shopping or networking online. It is crucial to recognize the difference between types and levels of exploitation and to prioritize critical response accordingly—just as one might distinguish between different types of material deprivation. However, mobilizing the notion of exploitation raises questions about the social relations that characterize the online economy and their role in reproducing the privatization ofproductive resources, social and economic inequality, and resulting forms of alienation.

Exploitation and Free Labor

Although forms of online activity that take place beyond the workplace proper do not fall within the realm of wage labor, they can nevertheless generate value. Because the capture of personal information is used to create targeted marketing campaigns, the online marketing model has created a market in feedback commodities. In some cases, this information is used directly by interactive companies to customize advertising; in others, it is bought and sold to marketers. As the Wall Street Journal's investigative report on data mining put it in a description of a company that profiles Internet users, “tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is \$1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of 50

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First Dates)."5 Even when information is not directly bought or sold, the interactive economy relies on the capture of the value generated by users whose contributions help build the economic value of social media services such as Facebook or, earlier on, Internet portals such as America Online.

The value of activity captured by interactive platforms has generated a growing literature on the exploitation of so-called free labor. In what has become a canonical discussion of the labor provided by chat room moderators in exchange for access to online services, Tiziana Terranova notes that such productive activities can, in some contexts, be described as both voluntary and subject to exploitation: “Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited."Similarly, Michael Hardt's discussion of the network economy notes that, "in those networks of culture and communication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced—even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital."7 Petersen's (2008) account of the exploitation of user-generated content argues that the commercial “architecture of participation turns into an architecture of exploitation and enclosure, transforming users into commodities that can be sold on the market."8

For Ritzer and Jurgensen (2010), the capture of value online represents the extension of the logic of capital into new spaces and temporalities: “it appears that capitalists have found another group of people—beyond workers (producers)—to exploit and a new source of surplus value. In this case, capitalism has merely done what it has always done—found yet another way to expand."9 For Comor, forms of interactive participation reinforce rather than revolutionize the social relations upon which exploitation relies: “as long as private property, contracts and exchange values are dominant mediators of our political economy, disparities and exploitative relationships will remain largely unchallenged—unchallenged, at least through the auspicesof presumption."10

The notion of exploitation, in short, has become a recurring theme in recent accounts of the productivity of networks. Most of these critiques refer to the conscious productive activity of users beyond the confines of the workplace proper—activity such as fan labor, chat room moderation, and the creation of user-generated content—that users engage in voluntarily but that also generates value for commercial entities that are able to piggyback on user activity (for more on fan labor, see Abigail De Kosnik's chapter in this volume). The tendency has been to locate this kind of creative activity in the category of immaterial labor described by Lazzaratoas the “activity that produces the cultural content' of the commodity," noting that it “involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work'—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion."11

However, it might be useful to distinguish between some of these different forms of value generation—including users' active participation in marketing to themselves, the appropriation of user-generated content, and the capture of information that can be turned back upon users. This is not to say that any of these categories are exempt from exploitation, but rather to argue that wemight need to think a bit differently about how exploitation functions in these varying instances.

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