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Let's Start with Sensual Labour
To look, to listen, to read . . .
Is to labour
Since industrial capitalism, Technologies discipline perception And render it productive of value.
Consider, e.g., how screens train eyes.
Early Attention Economics
Attention is a commodity.
How to capture it?
How to measure it?
How to structure content around it?
Enter the Nielsen Ratings
The Nielsen Radio Index, 1942
The audimeter: paper tape records a group's listening habits
Attention Economics Today
Clicks, views, likes, subscriptions
Recommendation engines: "If you likev X, then you might also like Y"
Attention becomes discrete (units), even though it ain't.
Digital Labour
Usually unpaid
Internet is a factory and playground
Play is work, and work is gamified
"Immaterial": remote, online, disembodied
(But actually place-based and embodied)
Connected to services and "avatarial capital"
Strength of weak ties: successful social coordination through shared acquaintances, not strong ties among friends
On strength of weak ties, see Mark Granovetter
Examples of Digital Labour
Content moderation
Sharing (sharing economy)
Labour brokering
Gigs (gig economy)
But to what effects, y'all? How do you feel about it?
Goldfarming
Film by Ge Jin
Goldfarming Cont.
Film by Ge Jin On avatarial capital, see Castronova and Nakamura
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Crowdsourcing platform where businesses (called “requesters”) contract workers (called “workers”) to perform individual human intelligence tasks (called “HITs”) that computers either cannot perform or do not perform well.
HITs are categorized into seven types of work: information finding, verification and validation, interpretation and analysis, content creation, surveys, content access, and research.
AMT Cont.
Some HITs require qualifications, which are determined for each worker by the AMT’s HITs assessment system.
AMT qualifications are based on HITs abandoned (tasks accepted but not completed in time), approved (task results approved by requesters), rejected (task results not approved by requesters), and returned (tasks accepted but left unanswered).
Approved HITs earn “rewards” corresponding with U.S. dollars.
Median hourly wage is ~$2 per hour, with only 4% of AMT workers earning more than $7.25 (the U.S. minimum wage) per hour.
For a task-level analysis of AMT, see Hara et al. 2018.
Prompts for Your Log
Explain why the AMT’s HITs system is a form of digital labour.
Describe how workers accumulate “avatarial capital” through AMT’s qualifications mechanism.
Detail at least one important AMT activity for which AMT workers are not or may not be compensated.