Spreadable Media. Henry Jenkins
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studies professor Abigail De Kosnik examines the labor that fans often provide for media producers and questions whether fans may have settled for too little in their implicit bargain with rights holders.)
However, as Mark Deuze and John Banks have warned, we must be careful that critiques of “free labor” do not paint audiences as somehow always unaware of the economic value being generated by their actions (2009, 424). Indeed, taking part in free labor may be meaningful and rewarding (as compared to previous corporate structures), even when a company may be perceived as providing too little value or recognition for that work. Instead, it seems audiences are increasingly savvy about the value created through their attention and engagement: some are seeking ways to extract something from commercial media producers and distributors in return for their participation. These fans see their attention—and the data mined when they visit sites—as a growing source of value for commercial interests, and some are demanding greater compensation, such as more control over and access to content, in recognition of the value they are generating. Individually, they may choose among a range of competing sets of arrangements and transactions which shape their access to material. Collectively, they can work through their responses together, organizing large-scale protests (such as those directed against Facebook when it sought to change its terms of service concerning users’ privacy) which can have a real impact on the public perception and economic fortunes of the companies involved. Of course, the potential for collective action and discursive struggle are limited when audience members are forced to use a corporation’s own platforms to pose their critiques of that company’s practices. All too often, Web 2.0 companies have not really opened up their governance to the communities they claim to enable and serve (Herman, Coombe, and Kaye, 2006).
The frictions, conflicts, and contestations in the negotiation of the moral economy surrounding such labor are ample evidence that audiences are often not blindly accepting the terms of Web 2.0; rather, they are increasingly asserting their own interests as they actively renegotiate the moral economy shaping future transactions. For instance, Hector Postigo (2008) has documented growing tensions between video game companies and modders (developers who build new games or other projects through appropriating and modifying parts of an original platform). While many game companies have made their code available for grassroots creative experiments, others have sought to shut down modding projects that tread uncomfortably close to their own production plans or head in directions of which rights holders do not approve. In return, because modders are aware of the many economic advantages game companies often receive from these “co-creation” activities, they may reject the moral and legal arguments posited for restraining their practice. We feel it is crucial to acknowledge the concerns of corporate exploitation of fan labor while still believing that the emerging system places greater power in the hands of the audience when compared to the older broadcast paradigm.
Engaged, Not Exploited?
When it comes to the matter of profits, it is clearly the media companies that win out in current economic arrangements. If, however, we are to truly explore who benefits from these arrangements, we need to recognize the varied, complex, and multiple kinds of value generated. Critiques of “free labor” sometimes reduce audience labor to simply alienated labor.
Richard Sennett (2008) complicates classical economic models that view labor as motivated almost entirely by financial returns. Rather, he notes, the craftsmen of old were also rewarded in intangible ways such as recognition or reputation, status, satisfaction, and, above all, their pride in a “job well done.” These craftsmen set higher standards on their own performance than necessitated by a purely commercial transaction. It was not enough to produce commodities to be exchanged for money; these were also artifacts that displayed professional accomplishments. Craftsmen performed labor that benefited others yet also created structures of self-governance on the level of the guild that helped shape the conditions of their production. (Of course, historically, guilds also sought to construct monopolies, making it harder for newcomers to enter trades, thus protecting the economic interests of their members. Though tempting, we must not overly romanticize such arrangements.) It is precisely the shift from this system in which individual craftsmen felt pride in their own labor to one in which they became anonymous and interchangeable contributors to an assembly line that resulted in the concept of “alienated labor.”
Sennett’s work is crucial to think through as we examine why participants engage in activities which may not yield them immediate financial returns or which may even cost money to sustain but which get appraised through alternative systems of value. Sennett himself cites the open software movement as an example of a modern social structure which in many ways replicates the self-motivation and shared governance of craftsman guilds (2008, 24), contrasting this system of voluntary labor with the kinds of compensating-yet-regulated performance associated with work in industrial or bureaucratic systems.
Like Sennett’s craftsmen, the millions of individuals producing videos for YouTube take pride in their accomplishments, quite apart from their production of value for a company. They create media texts because they have something they want to share with a larger audience. Certainly, as writers such as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) suggest, this process—whether the work of celebrities such as Tila Tequila or of an average teen posting videos of herself dancing with her friends—always involves some degree of “self-branding,” which can make the participants complicit in the systems of values through which commercial companies appraise their material. Users generating online content are often interested in expanding their own audience and reputation. They may measure their success by how many followers they attract on Twitter, just as television executives value the number of eyeballs their programs attract.
Yet, even if we agree that some degree of self-promotion plays a role in all communication, we must likewise recognize a desire for dialogue and discourse, for solidifying social connections, and for building larger communities through the circulation of media messages. The material emerging from DIY or fan communities provides a vehicle through which people share their particular perspectives with the world, perspectives often not represented in mass media. When audience members spread this content from one community to another, they do so because they have a stake in the circulation of these messages. They are embracing material meaningful to them because it has currency within their social networks and because it facilitates conversations they want to have with their friends and families.
We should thus describe such audience labor as “engaged” rather than “exploited.” Talk of “engagement” fits within industry discourse which has sought new ways to model, measure, and monetize what audiences do with content within networked culture (as we will examine in chapter 3). However, “engaged” also recognizes that these communities are pursuing their own interests, connected to and informed by those decisions made by others within their social networks. Perhaps this is what Terranova means when she describes the activities associated with “free labor” as “pleasurably embraced” by participants, even as they are also being commodified and “exploited” by corporate interests.
If Sennett offers us a way to frame labor that does not rest exclusively on economic relations, others have suggested ways of thinking about notions of ownership which respect the emotional and moral investments fans make in media properties and not simply the economic stakes of media corporations. Flourish Klink, Chief Participation Officer at transmedia branding and entertainment company The Alchemists, developed a statement of best practices to govern corporate relationships with a fan base. Reflecting her own involvement as a fan in debates around “free labor,” Klink contends in this “fan manifesto,”
A person who works in an office probably doesn’t own their own desk—it probably belongs to their company. But they feel like they own the desk; it’s their desk. In the same way, when you love a story, you feel like it’s your story. That’s a good thing. If you didn’t feel that way, you obviously wouldn’t care very much about the story. As storytellers, we want to encourage people to own their favorite stories. We want them to incorporate their favorite stories into their lives, to think about them deeply, to discuss them passionately, to feel like they know the characters and they’ve really been to the locations. (2011)
Klink goes on to argue that storytellers