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April 26, 2011 02:21 pm PDT

Marina Gorbis on social production and "manor economies"

Inspired by the recent lawsuit filed by some of Huffington Post's unpaid bloggers seeking to get paid for their contributions to the site, Institute for the Future's executive director Marina Gorbis wrote a provocative essay titled "Ain't Gonna Work on Arianna's Farm No More." I don't think that the bloggers are entitled to one third of the $315 million that Arianna and her investors got for selling the farm to AOL, but Marina raises some interesting questions about the increasing number of online businesses in which the users' contributions are the product. The suit, however, brings to the fore tensions inherent in a new kind of production that is emerging today"what we might call "social production." This kind of work involves micro-contributions from large networks of people who often receive "payment" in the form of fun, peer recognition, and a sense of belonging"that is, in social rather than monetary currencies. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flickr, and many other stalwarts of today's digital economy are enablers and beneficiaries of such production. They couldn't possibly exist without the content of social producers, without their unpaid, albeit fun, labor. It is we who create Facebook profiles and post to them, we who share our thoughts on Twitter, we who upload our pictures to Flickr, we who post our medical data on PatientsLikeMe"it is we who are the new producers. Without us making these daily micro-contributions, none of these platforms could persist and grow and create value at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Huffington case brings us face-to-face with the reality that we, as social producers, are all becoming digital peasants. By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, "modern serfs" working on Mark Zuckerberg's and other digital plantations. "Ain't Gonna Work on Arianna's Farm No More"...


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/L-t9YlVff5M/marina-gorbis-on-soc-1.html

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