--- 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: 130 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc?start=130&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=130&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=120&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=140&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=130 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=131 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Jenkins: Fascination/Frustration Hebdige and Thornton’s early theorizations of fan labor are complemented by Jenkins’s and Matt Hills’s analyses of fan labor’s contradictions and complexities. Jenkins notes that fans choose to work on objects (he studies primarily fans of television productions) because they experience a multiplicity of afect when engaging with the objects: The fans’ response typically involves not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the two responses, which motivates their active engagement with the media. Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try to articulate to themselves and others unrealized possibilities within the original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests.8 Jenkins illuminates that the internal emotional conflict that fans feel toward the objects of their interest—both fascination and frustration, afection and loathing— drives fans to work on those commodities. Media fans, Jenkins observes, write fan fiction and fan commentary, and make art and music and videos, as a way to create their version of a text, the text as they would like it to be, the text that serves their needs best. From Jenkins, we learn that fan labor is often the work of customization, the making of massproduced things into things that serve individuals’ particular and peculiar desires and wishes. We also learn that fandom is not devotion, or rather, that it is not only devotion but also antagonism, and that fans feel they must labor—that is, dedicate time, attention, creativity, intellect, and energy to commodities—to make those things be what they want them to be. Fans work on objects in order to master them. Jenkins writes, “Far from syncopathic, fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions.”9 So, far from the notion of the fan as slavishly enthralled by commodities, we here find the concept of the fan as an individual who asserts her or his mastery over commodities by forcibly altering those objects to better serve them. The fan regards commodities as “raw materials for their own cultural productions”—echoing Hebdige’s writing on subcultures’ making over of ordinary things into icons of style and props of public performance—and as “the basis for their social interactions”—just as Thornton claims (four years after Jenkins) that taste cultures constitute communities that engage individuals with status games and unique value systems. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=132 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Jenkins allows us to see that the fan’s position is that no object of fandom is complete or perfect or whole in itself. Fans are eager to praise what is right about an object, point out what is wrong, and propose solutions and new directions for the development of that object because they think that fandom is what completes and perfects the object. The object is about the fan. It is not the fan who is devoted to the object so much as the object that serves the needs of the fan—and, initially, does not do a very good job of that; the fan must invest work into the object to customize the object to better suit the fan’s wishes. Jenkins also enables us to grasp that, from the fan’s perspective, there is a clear separation between his or her labor on a commodity and the labor of the oficial producers of that commodity. If fans must smooth out the rough edges of an object, if they must explore and actualize the unrealized possibilities of an object, then it is the oficial producers who are to blame for giving the object its undesirable attributes and suppressing its more interesting potentials. The fact that fans feel compelled to labor on things means that the labor that went into bringing that thing to the marketplace was shoddy or insuficient or, at best, left much to be desired. This distance between the fan laborer and the oficial producer is one reason that fans have not often regarded themselves as laborers. The fans’ eforts to customize mass commodities are for themselves and their fellow fans only, not for the marketplace and not for average consumers (i.e., nonfans). One might hypothesize that fans think of their activities as driven by an interest in unleashing the best and highest promise of their favored objects rather than being motivated by financial gain, as oficial producers are; many fans therefore think of their motives as purer than those of oficial producers and see themselves as above questions of market value, advertising, and sales. The frustration and antagonism that fans frequently feel toward oficial producers have largely prevented fans from regarding themselves as part of the same capitalist system within which oficial producers operate. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=133 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Hills: Fans and Exchange-Value However, as Hills argues in Fan Cultures, fans are, in fact, essential components of the capitalist system within which oficial producers operate. Hills addresses the prevalent concept of the “resistive” fan, stating that “an expressed hostility within cult fandoms towards commercialisation and commodification … [has] led to the theorization of cult TV fandom (and other related media fandoms) as somehow anti-consumerist.”10 But there is an inherent contradiction in fandom, Hills writes: While simultaneously “resisting” norms of capitalist society and its rapid turnover of novel commodities, fans are also implicated in these very economic and cultural processes. Fans are, in one sense, “ideal consumers” since their consumption habits can be very highly predicted by the culture industry, and are likely to remain stable. But fans also express anti-commercial beliefs (or “ideologies”, we might say, since these beliefs are not entirely in alignment with the cultural situation in which fans find themselves).11 Hills thus views the fan experience as having (at least) two competing aspects: the “anti-commercial ideology” side and the “commodity-completist” side. Hills’s proposal of these two halves of fandom allows him to articulate, more clearly than the subculture and fan studies scholars who preceded him, how fan labor adds value to commodities and why fans disavow or simply refuse to acknowledge that their value-adding activities constitute labor. Looking at the way that fans who have collected old, no-longermanufactured items are able to sell them for sometimes quite high prices on eBay, Hills says, Many commodities ofered for sale on eBay should, according to the conventional logic of use and exchangevalue, be almost worthless. However, due to many of them having been intensely subjectively valued by fans, such commodities take on a redefined “exchange-value”…. [F]anbased “use-values” interact with systems which belong to the economy “proper”, meaning that the existence of a marketplace for media-related collectibles is underpinned by the lived experiences of fandom.12 What gives these commodities value beyond their initial sales price is what fans add to them—the new uses to which fans put old things and the emotional landscapes that fans construct around them. Hills states that “fan ‘appropriations’ of texts or ‘resistances’ to consumption can always be reclaimed as new instances of exchange-value,”13 and, conversely, we can say that without fan appropriations, many commodities would have much lower exchange-value, a much shorter shelf life of value, and a much smaller base of potential consumers. Without fans working on them, many items would be, in Hills’s words, “almost worthless” a short while after coming to market. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=134 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED But fans and fan studies scholars have historically been reluctant to regard fans’ value-adding actions as labor since “fan identities are typically viewed against consumer identities.”14 Particularly relevant to this essay is Hills’s observation, citing a study by Taylor and Willis,15 that fans criticize members of their own communities who do regard their activities as work worthy of compensation: “[F]ans whose practices are ‘clearly linked with dominant capitalist society (e.g. they may be trying to sell videos recorded of-air) are likely to be censured within the fan culture concerned.”16 As I have written about elsewhere, using the example of the case of a Star Wars fan fiction author who briefly listed her fan novel on Amazon,17 fan communities frequently severely criticize members who attempt to sell their fan works. Because fans generally conceive of their activities as “resistive” to consumerism, they refuse to consider that their works might constitute either promotional materials or ancillary products that increase the value of the objects of fandom and therefore might be deserving of compensation, either from oficial producers or from other consumers. Linking Hebdige’s and Thornton’s theories to Jenkins’s and Hills’s, then, we can discern that fans do not think of objects of fandom as commodities even though that is what they are, even though they spend a lot of money (in some cases, a great deal of money) acquiring those objects, and even though fandom is what gives those objects market value far greater than their initial sales price. Fans, therefore, do not regard their own activities as work that adds or creates exchange-value (rather, they think of their eforts as adding personal use value) and do not seek compensation for their activities. In the digital era, however, as fans circulate their works publicly to wider audiences than was possible with analog distribution technologies, it is evident that the energy and time that fans devote to making objects “mean and mean again” (as Hebdige would say) is labor, and the vast majority of this labor is performed for free. The issue of how the Internet consists primarily of free and voluntary creative labor has been worked through by scholars such as Tiziana Terranova and Andrew Ross. Terranova’s concept of the continuous need for updating required by the digital economy maps well onto our discussion of fan labor. Terranova writes in Network Culture that the digital economy “challenged the postmodern assumption that labour disappears while the commodity takes on and dissolves all meaning. In particular, the Internet foregrounds the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work and is extremely labour-intensive.”18 She points to the work of web designers and maintainers to constantly update a website to ensure it is a “good” ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=135 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED site, and the work of programmers to repeatedly update software to keep an application relevant and in use: It is the labour of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website and it is the spectacle of that labour changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labour that goes into it.19 Similar to Terranova’s examples is the work that fans put into existing products to update them, to contribute new material in the form of commentary, stories, videos, and music that refreshes the products and feeds (and creates) consumer demand for them. Terranova also addresses the contradiction inherent in afinity groups about which Hills writes—that is, the contradiction between communities’ feeling that what they do is not work and does not warrant compensation versus the communities’ creation of a great deal of real economic value. Terranova observes that “the sustainability of the Internet as a medium depends on massive amounts of labor (which is not equivalent to employment […]), only some of which was hyper-compensated by the capricious logic of venture capitalism (during the late 1990s dotcom boom). Of the incredible amount of labor which sustains the Internet as a whole (from mailing list trafic to websites to infrastructural questions), we can guess that a substantial amount of it is still free labor.” Free labor, however, is not necessarily exploited labor. Within the early virtual communities, we are told, labor was really free: the labor of building a community was not compensated by great financial rewards (it was therefore free, unpaid), but it was also willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication and exchange (it was therefore free, pleasurable, not imposed).20 The fact that members of self-organizing communities such as the first AOL chat groups did not mind giving away their labor mirrors the way that fans freely donate their time, energy, and creativity to making fan productions that they then share online; both groups do it for the “pleasures of communication and exchange,” and both groups feel their Internet labor is “notimposed.” Terranova refers to the Internet “gift economy”21 as one framework that afinity groups use to characterize their modes of exchange without pay, but the fact that groups do not regard what they voluntarily do as work does not make it less value-producing. “[I]n 1996, at the peak of the volunteer moment [in AOL chat room moderation], over 30,000 ‘community leaders’ were helping AOL to generate at least \$7 million a month,”22 Terranova states. Today, the fan moderators, writers, and artists who post and comment on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites number in the millions, and their activities contribute to far more massive corporate revenues than the \$7 million monthly garnered by AOL in the late 1990s. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=136 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Ross, in his lecture “On the Digital Labor Question,” builds on Terranova and Hills, emphasizing that the United States is transitioning to an “Internet-based economy based on the widespread use of non-paid or amateur user labor.” For Ross, this transition raises numerous questions about fairness of wages and working conditions that both corporate employers and creative workers are, for the most part, ignoring. Ross writes: In the world of new media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the formula of overwork, underpayment, and sacrificial labor is entirely normative. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure, the widespread use of amateur or user input on the Social Web or in open source, and the systematic expropriation of Tiziana Terranova first described as “free labor” has prompted some commentators to ask whether the experience of digital environments should direct us to rethink entirely our basic understanding of labor and enterprise.23 Ross sees this expropriation of Internet users’ free labor as a form of “self-exploitation among creative workers.” What one of Ross’s informants calls “work you just couldn’t help doing,” work that seems like play and recreation, is, states Ross, “value-adding work” that can be “digitally extend[ed] … into every waking moment of an employee’s life”—and one need not even be an employee to perform this work. Applying Terranova’s conclusions regarding 1990s-era AOL chat rooms to present-day social media sites, Ross claims that wage-free labor infuses all such sites with their financial value, which is a huge boon to the sites’ founders: [F]or the business entrepreneur, [establishing a social networking site] is a virtually wage-free proposition. There are costs involved for bandwidth, hosting, and maintaining commercial platforms, but as far as the monetizable product goes, it is the users, or prosumers, as industry strategists call them, who create all the surplus value (which could be described as the diference between the value such free services ofer to users and the value they create for business).24 Ross, like Terranova, acknowledges that the “pleasures of communication and exchange” and the fact that fan labor is “not imposed” prevent fans from seeking compensation for their valueadding activities. For many fans, the donation of labor is willingly given in exchange for the opportunity to enjoy and play in a relatively open, unrestricted Internet. Ross clarifies this point of view in his writing: [T]he role the social web is currently playing in new modes of capital accumulation is simply the price one pays for preserving a free medium of exchange whose scope of activity is large enough to outpace any government or corporate surveillance. It’s another kind of trade-of, in other words, and the balance, for the time being, is still in favor of the commons. From this point of view, all of the interactive free labor that goes into user-generated value can be seen as a kind of tithe or tribute we pay to the Internet as a whole so that the expropriators stay away from the parts of it we really cherish.25 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=137 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The fact that wealth is unevenly distributed between social media companies (and, we can add, all companies that benefit from social media sites) and the fans who produce content and value for those entities is willingly accepted by fans who regard their volunteering labor as a prerequisite for their attainment of the benefits of Internet participation. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=138 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Fan Volunteerism We can now postulate several reasons for fans’ refusal to labor under anything other than a model of volunteerism. As mentioned at the start of this chapter, the concept of fandom has, for a long while, borne connotations of madness, social marginalization, and abnormality, and inherent in those connotations is the assumption that fans are possessed— psychologically and emotionally enslaved—by particular objects and texts. This definition of fandom as a state of passive reception verging on, or tipping into, insanity has undoubtedly set a low bar for what fans hope to define as their rights vis-à-vis larger society. When a group is categorized as deviant or subnormal, it typically strives for no more than the right to exist and to operate without interference. Moral panics have arisen around a number of media fandoms, from comic book fans in the 1950s to rap and hip-hop fans in the 1990s, and social censure has been applied to a far greater range of fandoms, from Trekkies to soap opera viewers to video gamers; because so many fan groups have experienced rejection and criticism for their enthusiasms over the course of the last century, an integral part of fan sensibility is knowing when to conceal one’s fannish interests and when to out oneself as a fan. The pseudonymity of online communication permits people to operate as fans discreetly, and this can be thought of as a form of closeting, for many people rarely discuss their Internet fan activities in their face-to-face social interactions. The Internet permits individuals to hide their fan identities, or rather, to protect their “real” identities and social spheres from any associations with fandom. A group that is largely closeted is usually far from eager to publicly organize and issue economic demands. The notion of fandom has become a more accepted and privileged term in marketing and consumer circles—companies understand that their products need fans, followers, and friends online and in the real world—but even when considered a worthwhile use of time and money, fandom is regarded as a marginal, recreational, just-for-fun activity, not as central to a person’s professional development or as a legitimate foundation for a career in the creative industries. In addition to the fact that fandom is widely categorized as pure leisure and completely outside the “serious” realms of people’s lives, such as work, fans’ perception that what they do is explicitly anticommercial prevents them from considering what they do as warranting pay. Subcultures often organize in opposition to social norms, as Hebdige points out, and their members remake, rework, and find new uses for ordinary objects partly to defy those objects’ advertised uses as a method of disrupting society’s habitual flows. Style can be a signal of disturbance, of breaking with the behaviors and beliefs that characterize the mainstream, and infusing commodities with nonnormative meanings to define a subcultural style is one way to reject capitalism’s proclivity for treating everybody as exactly the same as everybody else, reducing all to equivalent, interchangeable consumers. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=139 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Hills informs us that fans can also be “resistive” to the commodity aspect of their favorite texts and objects because they see their appropriative activities as pure of financial motives—fans are interested in specific things because they feel an emotional, intellectual, psychological, or artistic connection to them, not because fans wish to profit from them. In fact, fans often think that it is oficial producers’ profit-seeking motives that lead them to make incorrect or less-than-optimal decisions about their products, leaving fans to salvage or modify the products to which they have become attached, spurred by love and frustration, not by money. The opposition between finances and fandom posited in a great deal of fan discourse and fan studies scholarship does not provide fertile ground for fans to consider lobbying to receive payment for the value they add to companies’ products. And Ross and Terranova claim that even when fans do think of their productivity as labor, they can justify giving away their time, energy, and creativity for free in ways that benefit corporations by regarding that donation as a necessary trade-of for the ability to participate in the Internet’s largely unregulated social media sites. Their free labor buys them a free Internet. The very idea of fans organizing oficially, as a kind of labor union, is somewhat contrary to the underlying principles of fandom. For fans, although they do gather in groups around specific objects, do the work of customizing mass-produced things to fit their own unique desires and needs. The goal of most fan labor is to modify a commodity, which is made to suit everybody, so that it suits the fan laborer, and other fans who share the laborer’s particular tastes, much better. It is unlikely that any sizeable number of fans would all come to agreement about the types of work they all wanted to perform on various corporatemade objects and texts and propose some kind of pay schedule commensurate with clearly defined categories of production. Fan labor is, by nature, idiosyncratic, and each fan production arises from, and is shaped by, the peculiar interests of the fan producer. Also, because it is unclear how much revenue is generated for companies by the brand extensions, publicity, and marketing materials created by fans, it would be dificult for fans to seek payment on a commission or revenue-sharing model. Fan-made videos, websites, commentary, posters and other artworks, stories, songs, and reviews merge with the stream of oficial advertising and promotion that surrounds any given product—fan labor can ramp up the buzz and reputation of the product, and it can reinforce the pull or allure that the product exerts on wouldbe consumers, but it would be impossible to tell what percentage of sales of the product had resulted from fans’ eforts versus those of the paid corporate marketers. 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc.md?start=140&limit=10)