--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9780415896948" library_document_id: "b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc" source_sha256: "b76b52674e699a7d7369709c46c081ad5a82cdab89f79f34ec45b40bc1d8e8d3" pdf_physical_page_count: 325 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 120 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc?start=120&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=120&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=110&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=130&limit=10" --- # Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=120 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED AMT. Although the kind of income that could be produced in Mechanical Turk may not entirely compensate for an income lost from a traditional full-time job for a worker based in the United States, many Turkers still see it as convenient and flexible work that could pay \$8 to \$15 per day. 16 Rajesh Mago, “Review of Mturk after Working with Them as Worker | PC Tips and Tricks,” http://www.pctipstricks.com/myreview-of-amazon-mturk-after-working-part-time-as-worker-forfew-months/. 17 Ibid. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=121 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED References ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=122 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=123 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=124 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Fandom as Free Labor Abigail De Kosnik ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=125 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Fanatics or Workers? Historically, fan activity has been derided as frivolous, irrelevant, and even pathological. In his book Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins traces the uses of the word fan from its origins in the Latin word fanaticus, which bore connotations of (Jenkins cites the Oxford Latin Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary) “orgiastic rites and enthusiastic frenzy,” “excessive and mistaken enthusiasm,” and “possession by a deity or demon.” The associations between fandom and insanity persisted into the late 20th century, Jenkins argued: [T]he fan still constitutes a scandalous category in contemporary culture, one alternately the target of ridicule and anxiety, of dread and desire. Whether viewed as a religious fanatic, a psychopathic killer, a neurotic fantasist, or a lust-crazed groupie, the fan remains a “fanatic” or false worshipper, whose interests are fundamentally alien to the realm of “normal” cultural experience and whose mentality is dangerously out of touch with reality.1 In the two decades since Textual Poachers was published, the increasing processing power of personal computers, the decreasing costs of digital authoring tools, and the ease of publishing on the Internet have facilitated a boom in fan activity. Today, fan websites, blogs, and message boards are common, and fan groups have organized on every social media site; in these online communities, fans post their works: commentary and close readings, stories and poems, songs and videos, reenactments and animations and mash-ups, wallpapers and screen shots and icons. Fan productions permeate the Internet. This flow of audio, visual, and textual material from fans into the realm of public consumption has not greatly altered some cultural critics’ negative assessment of fandom. Rather, the abundance of fan content online has led some to disparage fans as prolific amateurs who make nothing of importance or value. Andrew Keen writes in The Cult of the Amateur, referring to T. H. Huxley’s theory that matching up an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters will eventually yield a masterpiece: Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters. Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren’t quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren’t quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys—many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins—are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.2 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=126 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED But fans’ profuse contributions to the Internet can be regarded otherwise: as labor. Online fan productions constitute unauthorized marketing for a wide variety of commodities—almost every kind of product has attracted a fandom of some kind. This chapter will argue that fan activity, instead of being dismissed as insignificant and a waste of time at best and pathological at worst, should be valued as a new form of publicity and advertising, authored by volunteers, that corporations badly need in an era of market fragmentation. In other words, fan production is a category of work. To date, the vast majority of fans’ work has been unpaid. Like many creative activities that produce content for the Internet, fandom is a form of what Tiziana Terranova calls free labor. Terranova writes: We call this excessive activity that makes the Internet a thriving and hyper-active medium “free labour”—a feature of the cultural economy at large, and an important, yet unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies…. Far from being an “unreal”, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labour through and through, a continuous production of value which is completely immanent in the flows of the network society at large.3 At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, as the question of pay for creative online labor is becoming critical for a wide variety of industries, including journalism and higher education, and as creative workers’ organizations such as the Writers Guild of America and the Freelancers Union loudly campaign for more recognition of online production as deserving of payment, we are at a ripe moment for establishing the fact that fandom is a form of free labor and for calling upon fans, scholars, and the corporations that benefit from fan activity to seriously consider the question of whether fans should be compensated for their work. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=127 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Hebdige: Subcultural Style This chapter’s primary objective is to make clear that fan activity constitutes a kind of work. To that end, we will review key works in cultural studies, particularly scholarship on subcultures and fan communities, which argue that fandom is a form of active production, not passive reception. In his landmark book Subculture, Dick Hebdige points out how queer subcultures and youth subcultures (teddy boys, punk rockers, biker gangs) transform ordinary objects into signifiers of style—style that marks the diference, the distinction, of the subculture’s members from (what constitutes in the subculture’s view) normative, homogeneous, dominant society. Hebdige writes: [O]bjects are made to mean and mean again as “style” in subculture…. [T]his process begins with a crime against the natural order—the cultivation of a quif, the acquisition of a scooter or a record or a certain type of suit. But it ends in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It signals a Refusal.4 Afinity groups, Hebdige says, collectively act upon everyday commodities, such as scooters or records or suits, and infuse those objects with a certain sensibility that is reflective of the group’s values and interests; the commodities come to “mean and mean again” as the afinity groups reconfigure and redefine their meanings. A safety pin in the hand of a housewife is not the same as a safety pin in the cheek of a punk rocker. “[T]he most mundane objects—a safety pin, a pointed shoe, a motor cycle— … take on a symbolic dimension…. [T]hese objects become signs of forbidden identity, sources of value.”5 Without afinity groups’ specialized uses and recontextualizations of these “most mundane objects,” which are commodities readily available in the marketplace, the objects would never acquire their symbolic dimension and would not be “sources of value; that is, they would not possess multiple values, they would not be valuable to diferent groups in diferent ways—they would not be special objects.6 Hebdige’s work is thus an early articulation of the type of labor that this chapter calls fan labor. Fans act upon commodities and imbue them with worth via their performances, which consist of displays of certain expressions and specific actions, which can all be summed up in the concept of attitude. Fans start to regard certain physical objects, manners of dress and hairstyles, and behaviors as integral components of the attitude that marks their diference from other groups and from what they consider to be the mainstream. In Hebdige’s study, the work performed by subcultures on commodities, the work of meaning-making, the work of recontextualizing commodities as crucial components of their performances of attitude and style, is undertaken in selfinterest, for subcultures wish more than anything to be visibly distinctive and apart from the rest of society. An afinity group invests time, efort, and imagination in everyday objects in order to make those objects serve their needs, which include helping to consolidate and represent the group’s collective identity, which often stands in clear opposition to societal norms. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=128 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED An irony that does not surface in subcultural and fan studies until decades after Hebdige’s work is that afinity groups, by endowing ordinary things with special meanings, actually increase those things’ market value; in other words, subcultures work on objects in order to make them markers of their nonconformist attitudes and values, but their work confers on objects new value and appeal, and so is efectively a type of advertising. The work of even the most rebellious subcultures therefore conforms to one of the most significant social norms of all, the norm of capitalist labor: all who live under capital’s regime must labor to promote, sell, and consume commodities. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=129 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Thornton: Taste Cultures While Hebdige draws attention to afinity groups’ reworking of things into artifacts of style, Sarah Thornton, in her study of the 1990s British techno music dance club and rave scene called Club Cultures, highlights the ways that subcultures use everyday objects to create new modes of social engagement. In the present day, as it becomes increasingly common for people to join online communities via social media sites, the observation that subcultures create entertaining forms of group participation may seem obvious. But Thornton lays out a set of concepts and terms that prove as useful today for understanding how subcultures create modes of online interactivity as they were fifteen years ago for comprehending the face-to-face techno club and rave scene. Thornton categorizes club culture as a type of “taste culture.” Taste cultures, Thornton writes, “congregate on the basis of their shared taste …, their consumption of common media and, most importantly, their preference for people with similar tastes to themselves.” Taking part in a particular taste culture “socializ[es] participants into a knowledge of (and frequently a belief in) the likes and dislikes, meanings and values of the culture.” These cultures are not often permanent institutions of afiliation; rather, they are “ad hoc communities with fluid boundaries which may come together and dissolve over a single summer or endure for a few years.” Also, taste cultures are “riddled with cultural hierarchies,” such as, in the example of club cultures, the privileging of what is considered authentic over what is deemed phoney, the hip over the mainstream, and the underground over the media.7 What Thornton describes here are the social innovations of fandoms. Thornton’s taste cultures can also be called fan cultures, and these types of groups coalesce around certain objects, which can be “common media” such as music, films, television programs, and comic books but can also be other types of commodities. Around these commodities, fans build societies with particular hierarchies, values, and belief systems. A great deal of the work of fans consists of the construction of the rules and codes of participating in fan cultures; fans moderate the interactions of other fans, establish the terms of the fans’ discussions and play (e.g., make clear what is authentic versus phoney), and initiate and teach newcomers to the fandom. Status games—the struggle for newbies to become “big name fans” or moderators in a community, or the struggle for a faction of fans who wish to modify the group’s value system to gain recognition—are common in fandoms and provide a great deal of the emotional interest and entertainment for community members. Thornton’s was one of the first studies to shed light on the importance of the social dimension of fandom. She reveals that a great deal of efort and time goes into the constitution of and participation in fan communities (although that participation may be fleeting), and she emphasizes that without activities such as the learning and policing of rules, the gaining and losing of status, the adhering to or breaking from shared belief systems, ordinary commodities would not hold much interest for many people. In other words, the community-building labor of fans endows objects with much of their appeal. Without fan labor, there would be little or no social aspect to consuming; buyers of things would not associate those things with the pleasures of joining and taking part in societies comprising people with similar tastes and values. 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=130&limit=10)