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After the presentation I had an email exchange with Dr. Beth Coleman who is professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include virtual world design and use, networked subjectivity, global media emergence and practice in China, India and Africa, contemporary art and technology, and critical history of race and technology. She blogs at Project Goodluck.

There Beth Coleman followed up on my talk:

Media professor Trebor Scholz gave a talk at MIT last week on Free Cooperation, discussing the ways in which we participate freely in data mining platforms (such as Google and Face Book) and what if means to give free labor to giant commercial enterprises.

He showed us network effect graphs that described the ways in which casual use of a site can turn into a de facto commitment to a platform. He also talked about how online labor exploitation is not visible in the manner that historical industrial labor has been. The centralizing effect of the giant media platforms is a phenomenon that causes him real alarm.

I had a few more questions for him and he nicely agreed to continue the conversation here.

1. Is this inevitable? Going from a mass-media distribution model to a distributed media of the Web, what has happened to the ability to choose? There are alternatives to Youtube?? Why does this site dominate? Is it design or social (the aggregating of people).

2. There is no precedent for participatory networks at this scale. So the rules of ownership in regard to what one makes or even of one's personal information are not clear. The eula [end users agreement] for most sites say that the user give up all rights to content. If we are seeing a centralizing movement that reflects in effect our own use habits, how do we reverse this momentum?

3. This free work is the opposite of what was meant by free software and open source initiatives a decade ago. Do user’s rights need to be mandated at the level of law to prevent our herding instincts from helping to create de facto media monopoly? Does this destroy the progressive and innovative aspects of Web agency that someone like Y. Benkler has applauded in Wealth of Networks?

Trebor Scholz:

Why do people congregate in very large numbers in very few places? People want to be where other people are. I learn from my friends on Facebook (FB) through the newsfeed and from my network on Del.icio.us. Knowledge is created among us, laterally. D. Weinberger calls it the Daily We. I can see what my FB friends (people whom I met at conferences or with whom I am otherwise acquainted) bookmark, read, which events they put on, and which groups they associate themselves with. I'm certainly not alone-- these reasons motivate many of the 70 million people who are on Facebook.

Business plans for startups are based on a very low threshold for participation, uploading is made very easy. People contribute videos, blog entries, wall posts, bookmarks, status updates, and photos but none of this material can be exported. An active user becomes more valuable over time, not unlike a bottle of wine in the wine cellar. All those “friends” with whom we reconnect, sometimes after quite some time, and all those media and texts are literally locked up. Try to delete Flickr photos (you’ll have to go one by one; try that with the 2 GB that you just uploaded). Or, try deleting your Facebook (FB) account. You can't. Attempt to export blog entries on MySpace or photos on Facebook. Not accidentally, the export option does not exist. Groups are locked up in these social milieus. Weak-tie-communities are entrapped; it's a corporate confiscation of attention, creativity, and time. Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube understands how much he owes the "community" when he thanks Youtube users shortly after being acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. Chen: “Thanks to everyone of you guys that have been contributing to YouTube, to the community. We would not be anywhere close to where we are without the help of this community.” Within three years the site had achieved popularity and that user community directly translated into Google stocks.

Users who "flirt" with a given site are attracted by the wealth of user-submitted content. Bigger is better. It's the network effect: the more people use a technology, the more valuable it becomes. Fax machines don’t get you very far if only 5 people use them. Equally, you'll not reconnect with your high school sweetheart on an obscure startup social networking site. You will also not find many photos with an uncommon tag on a photo site other than Flickr. User-submitted content makes these sites so attractive. The top ten site of the Web share 40% of all web traffic (sina.com, baidu.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com, youtube.com, myspace.com, live.com, orkut.com, qq.com). These sites disproportionally control the networked public sphere because of the user-submitted content, which makes their social milieus so intensely engaging. Yochai Benkler refers to this mass-media-like constellation of media monopoly as the "Berlusconi Effect." The democratizing effects that Benkler described in Wealth of Networks in 1995 have little to do with user-generated content. He focuses on the remaining 60% web traffic made up in part of blogs that spread reports showing the shortcoming of Diebold's voting machines.

I think that Benkler's sometimes criticized utopian enthusiasm for peer production is justified when it comes to initiatives like Wikipedia or even Google Adsense that allows individuals to supplement their income.   

 Sure, there are endless alternatives to the MyTubes and YouSpaces of the World Wide Computer. But good luck trying to migrate your data and friend lists with you. YouTube is attractive because of those 70,000 uploads a day (and counting). It's very difficult to migrate data to another site. Interoperability is largely an illusion. Users can reconnect with high school friends and those dozens of people would not all move with the potential migrating users. The loss would be significant. My hope is that exportability will become a competitive advantage for Social Web companies.

The American site Orkut dominates Brazil and India completely. Canada hearts Facebook. MySpace and FB reign supreme in the United States. How do these sites become the default? Some researchers suggest that it has to do with the colors of the interface or with a celebrity joining the site. (This is not so different to a real estate agency that spreads the news that the R&B singer and songwriter Beyoncé will buy a duplex in a newly erected building.) But then, soon, once a solid number of users is established, the wealth of social life will be the attraction. Good design cannot have much to with it: just look at MySpace and its disastrous interface.

Yochai Benkler correctly suggests that "peer production is as efficient and significant for the 21 century as the assembly line was for the 20th century." I also agree with Benkler when he suggests that through peer production "people can do more by and for themselves" but I add that the pleasures of online sociality are exploited. Communities are often deceived and commodified. They are unfairly used as a resource, often without their consent and knowledge. It's a bit like Mark Twain's "Whitewashing the Fence" in Tom Sawyer.

Tom tries to motivate the neighborhood boys to paint the fence for him. His friend Ben rejects the offer to paint the fence without pay. Tom responds “What do you call work?” and resumes his whitewashing:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple:

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

Online the promise of the free service is subtler than Tom Sawyer's boyish box of manipulating tricks.
The surplus attention of people, diverted from television to the Internet, translates into many hours every day spent on social networking sites. (For Myspace that meant an increase in value from $ 583 million in 2005 to $15 billion in 2008.)

I disagree with Benkler when he proposes social peace: "The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker." How can big businesses like NewsCorp can get away with exploiting communities. From a business perspective, the question is how you a company can find people to make a living with. How can they harvest the labor and presence of those millions on Myspace, for example, without making them feel bad? This is also an underlying question for Don Tapscott in Wikinomics when he celebrates that "In Second Life, the consumer actually co–innovates and coproduces the products they consume." (Tapscott and Williams, 2007. Wikinomics, p. 126).

Companies like LindenLab, while granting users IP-rights to their creations in the virtual world SecondLife, make profits without providing anything but the technical backbone, the real estate for all this creativity and flying around. The ownership issues of submitted content are handled in favor of the user here. But perhaps that simply shows that the content does not matter so much. Since Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, companies have learned have learned that user-submitted content is very rarely what makes money. Today, the platform zars realize that it's about attention; it's about time spent in an environment and about the data that can be sucked out of the user clicks.  

Benkler, Lessig, Sunstein and others are looking at these issues as lawyers. Their contributions are important but they respond to questions that are relevant to the legal community. I approach the issues from the cultural activist perspective.  

Is centralization avoidable? Is it a new phenomenon? User-submitted or generated content such as book reviews are not new (very much in opposition to what Web 2.0 ideologues wants you to believe). Benkler argues for the Web as a place where ordinary people can find a voice but it is not a novel trend. Personal email was a sneaky and by all means unplanned use of ARPANET. Amazon.com's review submission feature started in 1995 as an early form of self-publishing. The Indian social networking site Sulekha kicked off in 1999.  The participatory turn, the shock of the social, and groundswell of sociality online-- whatever you want to call this quantitative leap of participation in web-based social milieus-- it is new.  

Is the "Berlusconi Effect" avoidable on the Social Web? The history of radio would be a discouraging precedent. From a plethora of individual radio operators, airwave politics made sure that only the highest-paying stations would survive. Debates about net neutrality immediately enter my mind. A two-tiered Internet would be the kiss goodnight for decentralization. But recent news made me hopeful.   As it stands now, bloggers like Dailykoz or curated sites like Boingboing still exist and they are A-list sites in terms of traffic. They get a good share of the remaining 60% of traffic and that is worth defending.

Web 2.0 is not just a viral term used to describe the broad set of techno-social changes on the Web; it is also a general way of looking at things, an ideology. This ideology is a set of ideas that was proposed by the founder of a large technology publishing house, Tim O’Reilly, in 2004. While some of his propositions are accurate, others, which are suggested (but largely remain untold) have to be discredited. This essay will first trace back the term, situate it, and then make the ahistoricity of this branding effort transparent.

The Power of Naming
Public discourse is controlled by those who manage to manipulate the language of the debate. In 2006, "Web 2.0" was the Wikipedia article with the highest number of incoming, external links. The Web 2.0 Ideology is a marketing tool that falsely reframes the steady evolution of the Web as a sudden explosion, a big bang of techno-social components that were then collected under the conceptual umbrella of the newly created brand. While the Web 2.0 concept was initially criticized, the market logic that it proposes as common-sensensical, remains largely unchallenged. Entrepreneurs welcome the term, amateurs thought that they were learning something, pragmatists surrendered, while a few others are looking for less ideologically charged language. O'Reilly's branding idea, associated with radical novelty, sells books and tickets to events but most importantly, it has the potential to excite venture capitalists, not completely unlike the years of the dot-com mania.

Web 2.0
The ideas associated with the Web 2.0 brand were often discussed. In October 2004, the term was coined by Tim O’Reilly and his colleague John Battelle. Both men brainstormed the topical focus of an upcoming conference about the Web, came up with the term and trademarked it. Two years later, at a UC Berkeley commencement speech, Tim O'Reilly said:

    "If history is any guide, the democratization promised by Web 2.0 will eventually be succeeded by new monopolies, just as the democratization promised by the personal computer led to an industry dominated by only a few companies. Those companies will have enormous power over our lives -- and may use it for good or ill."

    "At a more foundational level of collective understanding, the shift from an industrial to a networked information economy increases the extent to which individuals can become active participants in producing their own cultural environment. It opens the possibility of a more critical and reflective culture (130)."

    "The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic, social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life (130)."

 
Talk of novelty is equally misplaced when it come to wikis. Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb on the Internet in 1995. And the first version of RSS, a format for syndicating content, was created by Netscape in 1999.

Application Programming Interface (API) is an additional technology at the core of Web 2.0. APIs  interconnect websites just like a door way through which people with the right “key” can pass; they facilitate the link between one computer program and another. Open APIs allow programmers to write applications that access the rich databases at Google, Facebook or Yahoo.  In the past, companies protected their APIs like treasures. But more recently, they decided to share their APIs, allowing developers to build their own hybrid mash-up software. Frappr, for example, uses GoogleMaps and adds layers of conversations on top of them.

Hardly the latest marker of the evolution of the Web, Extensible Markup Language (XML) facilitates the sharing of data across different systems on the Internet. XML 1.0 became a “W3C Recommendation” already in 1998.

Folksonomy, however, was popularized in 2004. It stands for collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, social tagging. It is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. While the Web has always been social, the scale of participation is new. It did not, however, explode over night but was the result of the steady growth of the Web. Today, online participation is made easier because of increased familiarity, easier-to-use tools and broader access to bandwidth and technologies.

Also new is the term AJAX, first coined by Jesse J. Garrett in 2005. It means that Javascript is now working in a way that allows web-based applications to function much like traditional desktop software. AJAX makes web pages feel more responsive by exchanging only small amounts of data with the server so that one does not have to reload the entire web page, each time when requesting a change. While the term AJAX is new, it uses a set of decade-old, existing technologies.

While neither user-generated content, XML, RSS, wikis, blogs, CSS, the network effect, or social networking sites were new in 2004, it is correct that folksonomies as well as the current scale of participation are indeed new.

The Web 2.0 Ideology
Web 2.0 ideologues say that control is bad but in fact control is only increasing as Lawrence Lessig warns us in his book Code 2.0. Other abreviations of this rethoric include: openness--good, authority--bad, hierarchy--bad, and amateur creativity--good.

With Web 2.0, services, rather than products are offered and users are encouraged to participate. Architectures of participation allow networked publics to achieve what Pierre Levy called Collective Intelligence. Networked individuals refer each other to useful content. They page rank, tag, follow and "unfollow." The line between amateur and professional gets blurred when users collaborate to write blogs and wiki entries. Users tag content online and therefore in many cases editorial classification is made unnecessary.

The claim of the relinquishing of control, an essential part of the Web 2.0 ideology, is a myth as William Blaze argues:

    "What separates the Web 2.0 from that plain old "web" is the establishment and entrenchment of a hierarchy of power and control. This is not the same control that Microsoft, AOL and other closed system/walled garden companies tried unsuccessfully to push upon internet users. Power in the Web 2.0 age comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders and standard definers."

Many of you have linked to this blog essay, which was by all means merely a draft, a beginning. I kept working on it ever since but did not publish my frequent updates because the text got far too long for a blog entry. I'll post a reference to the finished text here.

I waited for a long time. There is something uncomfortable about people making films about the country that you grew up in, especially facing the fact that its social formation does not exist anymore. The Lives of Others is a much-hyped film about East Germany, the country where I lived for twenty years. The central character of the film is a fabulous actor and it speaks certainly for the director to depict him as a nuanced human being. But just like with Good Bye Lenin and other films about the ex-GDR, this too cannot avoid but being a deeply ideological film. The type of reality depicted in The Lives of Others was indeed the everyday life of very visible cultural figures. The Eastern European republics took their intellectuals seriously.

These public intellectuals did fall victim to the kind of surveillance described in the film. People like Wolfgang Bierman and others were exposed to the most excruciating Stasi campaigns aimed at destroying their reputation. The Life of Others is perhaps the first film about a Stasi officer. It is problematic that the film narrowly focuses on such a case as many viewers may be led to think that this all-out surveillance was pervasive throughout East German society. It was not.

 I was harassed a lot as a youngster in East Berlin. The Stasi did not like my flirt with the evangelical church and they tried hard to cut me loose from that. I had my fair share of Stasi surveillance and face-to-face encounters but I can say with conviction that none of them would have ever worn a leather coat of the SA-variety as portrayed in the film. That is simply a caricature. I met very genuine believers who were not just careerist cynics drunk on power as shown in the film. I got to know people who deeply believed in humanistic values. So, while this stylistically conventional film is not a complete misrepresentation, it selects an example that does not show the quotidian reality of East Germany.

The director shaped the character of the Stasi officer and sought a human balance. The historical example that is given, however, is in and of itself not balanced.

Yesterday we played class struggle, an "educational game for kids 8 to 80" with the goal "to prepare for life in capitalist America." The popular board game created in 1978 by NYU political science professor Bertell Ollman is the kind of fabulous item that you may expect to find in the Whole Earth Catalogue.

According to Wikipedia, Class Struggle is the world's first Marxist board game. On the cover Karl Marx and one of the Rockefellers are arm wrestling. 

Class struggle is great fun for the entire family with each player representing a class (capitalists, workers, professionals, students) as individuals are not the real players in capitalist societies. 

The goal of the game is to teach people how capitalism really works. The elaborate rules are online and include the possibility of nuclear war:

"If the Capitalists land on square 81 this triggers off NUCLEAR WAR and brings an automatic end to the game. If the Workers or any of its allies land there first, the power of the Capitalists to start such a war has been voided for the remainder of the game. (See Rule 34 of the FULL RULES and number 81 of the "WHY?" section of the accompanying booklet for the explanation)."

You can also catch a chance card:

“You are caught feeling sorry for the Workers. Victory in class struggle comes to people who think about their own class. Miss two turns at the dice.”

or

 "Together with your fellow workers, you have occupied your factory and locked your boss in the toilet. Capitalists miss 2 turns at the dice.”

You can buy the game on Craigslist for an exploitative $65 or on ebay for $9.99.