[ICTs-and-Society] Plenary 6: “The Internet Today: Prosumer Participation and/or the Alienation & Exploitation of Play Labour (Playbour)?“ (Tobias Olsson, Trebor Scholz)

[Christian Fuchs]

Plenary session 6, lecture hall 4 (hörsal 4):
“The Internet Today: Prosumer Participation and/or the Alienation & 
Exploitation of Play Labour (Playbour)?“
Tobias Olsson (Jönköping University): The ‘Architecture of 
Participation’: For Citizens or Consumers?
Trebor Scholz (The New School): The Internet as Playground and Factory
Friday, May 4th, 2012:
15:00-16:30

This session will deal with digital labour and new new forms of 
productive consumption. Tobias' and Trebor's talks will bring up 
questions like the following ones: What notion of participation should 
we use when talking about Internet participation or participatory 
culture? How do business manifestors make use of the notions of Internet 
participation and participatory culture and what are typical ideological 
arguments found in this literature? How and why do boundaries between 
labour and play become blurred? What are typical characteristics of the 
Internet and WWW as workplace? Which meaning do concepts like 
exploitation, expropriation, volunteering, intellectual property, and 
privacy have in this context? How is economic value generated in the 
Internet economy today? What forms of violence does online participation 
entail? What are the flows or discontinuities between traditional and 
new forms of labour: between homework and care giving or tagging, and 
interactivity on social networking services? What actions are needed for 
advancing public debate about contemporary forms of exploitation.

Pre-conference discussions concerning these and related questions are 
welcome.

(Tobias Olsson, Trebor Scholz)
TOBIAS OLSSON
Jönköping University, Sweden
The ‘Architecture of Participation’: For Citizens or Consumers?
ABSTRACT: According to Tim O’Reilly – the Internet analyst who coined 
the term Web 2.0 in 2005 – the improved web is an “architecture of 
participation”, which makes it easy to co-construct knowledge and 
include users in various ways. O’Reilly’s inflated claims about the 
transformative potential of the new, more interactive web have also 
inspired debates within various academic fields. In the wake of his 
propositions, we have become increasingly familiar with concepts such as 
participatory culture (Jean Burgess & Joshua Green), convergence culture 
(Henry Jenkins), and prod-users (Axel Bruns).
The extensive use of various notion of participation – with reference to 
web 2.0 – also makes the issue complex: What kinds of participation are 
we, as researchers, actually referring to when we talk about 
participation? Sometimes the notion of web 2.0 is in-voked within 
research in order to discuss new modes of civic participation. At other 
times, it is called upon in order to point towards new possibilities for 
participation within the cultural sphere. At still other times it is 
brought into debates concerning communication for development.
To make notions of participation even more complicated, they have also 
made it into market discourses. Within the business manifesto literature 
the web 2.0 has inspired a “cult of the amateur” (Andrew Keen), holding 
that “democratized tools of production and distribution” (Chris 
Anderson) make “market and social capital [converge]” (Tara Hunt). Among 
other things, this adds up “to a more participative approach” to 
branding (George Christodoulides).
This paper will review and critically discuss these various takes on 
participation. It will above all analyse the tension that emerge as 
notions of participation are variously framed within freer, civic 
(“bottom up”) and market (“top down”) discourses.

SPEAKER INFO: Tobias Olsson is Professor and head of research in Media 
and Com-munication Studies at THE School of Education and Communication 
at Jönköping Uni-versity. His main research areas deal with the 
interrelationship between new media and citizenship

TREBOR SCHOLZ
The New School, USA
The Internet as Playground and Factory
ABSTRACT: In the midst of the worst financial crisis in living memory, 
the Internet has become a simple-to-join, anyone-can-play system where 
the sites and practices of work and play, as well as production and 
reproduction, are increasingly unnoticeable. The World Wide Web is a 
work place devoid of labour laws and worker protections. Digital media 
have affected shifting labor markets and concepts like exploitation, 
expropriation, volunteering, intellectual property, and privacy have 
shifted in meaning. "The Internet as Playground and Factory," a talk 
grounded in a New School conference that Scholz chaired in 2009, argues 
that the distinctions between work, leisure, play, and communi-cation 
have faded and that labor, without being recognized as such, generates 
data and profits for a small number of governmental and commercial 
stakeholders.
Guests in the virtual world Second Life co-create the products and 
experiences, which they then consume. What is the nature of this 
"digital labour" and the new forms of digital sociality on platforms 
like Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, LiveOps, and Innocentive 
that it brings into being?
Newly gained freedoms and visions of empowerment through digital media 
have com-plex social costs that are often invisible.
Internet users are becoming more vulnerable to novel enticements, 
conveniences, and marketing approaches. Online and off, they are 
increasingly wielded as a resource for economic amelioration. The 
channels of communication are becoming increasingly in-scrutable.
This talk will explore the violence of participation and ask how 
economic value is gen-erated in the actual rather than speculative 
economy of the Internet. How does the intertwining of labour and play 
complicate our understanding of exploitation? What are the flows or 
discontinuities between traditional and new forms of labour: between 
homework and care giving or tagging, and interactivity on social 
networking services?
Beyond an analysis of the situation of digital labour, between the 
affordances of social entrepreneurship and the dark realities of 
exploitation, this talk also suggests tangible proposals for action that 
lead to a public debate about contemporary forms of ex-ploitation. 
Attention must be focused on social action and, while always in need of 
scrutiny, state regulation and policy.
Also see: http://digitallabor.org/

SPEAKER INFO: Trebor Scholz is a scholar, artist, organizer and chair of 
the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture” at The New 
School in NYC. He also founded the Institute for Distributed Creativity 
that is widely known for its online discussions of critical network 
culture.