Digital Labour:
Then, Now, Soon

Jentery Sayers | Unlearning the Internet | Week 10
DHum 150 | UVic English | 14 March 2019
Slides Online: jentery.github.io/150/slides/week10r

Use your left + right arrow keys to navigate this slidedeck.

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.

Return to the course website.