Welcome to Me-Mart

Why 2.0 Is Not Always Better Than 1.0

Welcome to the participation revolution, the peer-production revolution, the mass-collaboration revolution. Welcome to the future, of books, music, television, and computers, where you can be your own author, musician, performer, programmer, publisher, broadcaster, and publicist. Welcome to the new Internet, where you can create anything, with anyone, at any time, at minimal cost, for everyone to see, read, hear, comment on, buy, and recommend. You are your own news empire, your own media conglomeration, your own public relations giant. You are the face of the net, the darling of the media, the ace of the business world; you are Time’s person of the year. ¹ Welcome to Web 2.0, a world of long tails, wikinomics, folksonomies, and remixibility, a world where everything is viral and everyone is linked.

Barely half a decade after it was first professed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly (2005), the revolution heralded by Web 2.0 has become status quo. Today, we no longer talk about a new generation of software and how it has improved the publishing model of the old web. Today, we no longer think about our sharing, participation, and collaboration as particularly revolutionary or even novel. Today, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, photo- and video-sharing websites, and e-commerce websites are no longer part of some digital vanguard but constitute the mundane media landscape in which people buy, sell, create, and share stuff with their friends. Beer and Burrows (2007) voice concern about the currency of academic critique in relation to the Internet’s accelerated cycles of innovation, suggesting that by the time their critique reaches publication, the novel schematic features of Web 2.0 will be taken for granted.

Writing against this concern, Scholz (2008) questions whether Web 2.0 constitutes any change at all, suggesting instead that the Web has always been an agglomeration of sites, directories, and conversations created through user participation. The inventor of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee, agrees that Web 2.0 is not so different from the old web (cited in Clarke, 2006). Scholz (2008, n.p.) suggests that “the Web 2.0 concept itself merely boxes current phenomena to launch them as a brand.” Similarly, Harrison and Barthel (2009) insist that more than a set of technological innovations, Web 2.0 is a business model that hinges on its channeling of our participative, creative, and collaborative energies for functionality and profitability. For example, Google.com needs bloggers to hyperlink each other for its search algorithms to function optimally, Amazon.com needs its customers to recommend books and rate sellers to perpetuate sales, and Facebook.com needs friends to share profiles, pictures, links, and status updates that form placeholders for contextual advertising.

In O’Reilly’s terminology, these services operate on architectures of participation that optimally harness users’ collaborative efforts, forming a “global brain” that generates exponential innovation and profitability. Tapscott and Williams’s (2006) Wikinomics embellishes this business model by proposing that “mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery” (p. 15). Other instances of this infectious rhetoric of empowerment are evident in a slew of popular books on social media that are marketed using catchy neologisms, such as Leadbeater’s (2008) We-Think, Howe’s (2008) Crowdsourcing, and Qualman’s (2009) Socialnomics. This wave of business literature has been criticized by van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) for promulgating a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. Allen (2008) adds that the rhetoric of 2.0 expresses user empowerment in libertarian overtones, where democracy is simplistically mapped onto freedom of choice, creation, and participation in a web that is exceedingly commercialized. Furthermore, unlike previous digital utopianisms, Web 2.0’s version of democracy is a direct function of its mediated architectures of participation. Bassett (2008, n.p.) encapsulates that this empowerment rhetoric “has rejuvenated the old Cyber-utopianism—no longer cloaked in politics or ideology . . . [but] fully entrepreneurial yet dangerously idealistic.”

Amid the disagreement about whether Web 2.0 constitutes a genuine break with the old web, Bermejo (2009) reminds us that often, the search for the newness of new media has a heuristic rather than an ontological nature. Web 2.0 designates more than a set of sociotechnical characteristics—it is embedded within a rhetorical formation that was explicitly framed as a remedy to the failures of the old web and its millennial bust. In an effort to separate hype from history (Silver, 2008), we must remember that hype is part of the history of Web 2.0. This hype has since petered out. However, just because scholars and technologists now use “social media” to refer to the same denotation of platforms and architectures does not mean that Web 2.0’s sociotechnical configurations have been replaced or that its empowerment rhetoric has dissipated or been fulfilled. What Scholz (2008) calls the “versioning virus” has simply gone underground. A decade after the dot-com debacle, the web has paid its redemptive dues and no longer needs to tirelessly promote itself with the gloss of revolution and novelty. Like last season’s fashions, the 2.0 shows its age; the 2.0 is a crass relic of a period of transition and must be dismissed, denounced, and erased, to establish its logics and ideologies as part of the everyday, to institute itself as the default mode. What we now call social media is simply the outcome of this process. ²

Regardless of what we call it and whether we agree that the web has always been participatory, we can all agree that the current web has more stuff on it, as a result of more people contributing stuff to it. These contributions of text, video, image, and sound are collectively referred to in the management literature as user-generated content (UGC). Universal McCann estimated that 625 million people worldwide contributed UGC to a social media platform (Parker, 2009). Another firm, eMarketer, also found that UGC sites generated $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2007 and is projected to attract $4.3 billion in 2011 (Verna, 2007). However, our awe at its immensity and profitability should not distract us from the fact that UGC is not a thing that exists out there in the world or on the web. Encoded texts, videos, images, and sounds exist on the web, but UGC does not—it may appear as a discrete digital artifact in its most obvious form, but its true identity is as a sociotechnical relation (Akrich, 1992) that embodies the blueprint for (a) regulating the behavior of users, (b) streamlining procedures for the generation of specific results, and (c) instituting a shared infrastructure for the circulation of content across platforms. Only by peeling back its stages of reification can we recognize UGC as a sociotechnical configuration whereby the functionality by and of the user, the automatic and aggregative force of generation, and the stability and exchangeability of content are locked together with the force of facticity into a simple acronym: UGC.

UGC is thus a refraction of power relations from a certain vantage point—people contributing to the web are more likely to see their content as creation rather than generation. Whether earnestly or casually, people are more likely to see their posts, comments, links, votes, photos, videos, and social networks as a way to build something, to express themselves, to connect with others, and perhaps to make some extra money (Lenhart & Fox, 2006) rather than as an aggregated contribution to some corporate pocketbook. The content that users create is not just an exchangeable byte in the digital economy of attention; rather, it constitutes the texture and flow of their everyday lives and a vital part of their identities, relationships, and lifeworlds. It is for this reason that some scholars consciously favor the term user-created content (Harrison & Barthel, 2009) or user-created media (Manovich, 2009) to UGC. To recover the human agency that is rhetorically exalted yet systemically appropriated, I will differentiate between the diversity of contributed creations and intentions as “expressive artifacts” and its sociotechnical reconfiguration as “UGC.”

Prosumption emerges from this space between creation and generation, between mediated lifeworlds and corporate pocketbooks. This is the scene of contestation and complicity, where subjects’ consumptive energies on discrete social media platforms are milled through a digital ecosystem to be repurposed through a variety of monetization schemes, for which contextual advertising is only a small part. This is the scene of ambition and ambivalence, where subjects in post-Fordist and postcrunch economies engage in a (rigged) game of cyber-entrepreneurship and feel empowered to sell their productive energies in the digital marketplace. This is the scene of what Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) call prosumption—the implosion of consumption and production, which has historical and spatial continuities beyond the social web yet is intensified and accelerated by these digital means to such degree that it engenders a unique social contract, a distinct brand of subjectivity, and an altered modality of capitalism.

The Integrative Circuits of Prosumption

These tensions, ambivalences, and possibilities of prosumption play out in the blogosphere. Specifically, personal bloggers—63% of all blogs (Smith, 2008)—are collectively negotiating the commercialization of a cultural form that has been consistently linked to the authenticity of its author’s life and thoughts (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz (2004). This generic expectation derives from diary writing (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2005) and stands in ideological opposition to the pressures of commerciality. Rettberg (2008) documents this tension in the popular blog Dooce.com: Despite describing commercialization and its perceived corrupting force on her content as “selling her soul,” the blogger eventually incorporated advertising. This is a deliberation on the sociotechnical configuration of expressive artifacts as UGC, on the translation of the expressive agency of self-documentation into an economically productive force.

The blogger behind Dooce.com is only one of a growing multitude of subjects under informational capitalism (Bassett, 2008) who is negotiating her position in relation to its accelerating logic of prosumption—which synergizes consumptive energies, such as the purchase and review of commodities, with psychic energies, such as creative self-documentation and repurposes them within the systemic configuration of UGC toward economically productive ends, such as contextual advertising. The machinery of social media circulates this economically productive synergy through visible platforms, such as blog trackers, search engines, and link aggregators, as well as invisible mechanisms that synergize online activity and movement, with geographical and psychographic markers to produce various kinds of marketing data. Andrejevic (2009) and Beer and Burrows (2010) offer that in addition to our expressive artifacts, our entire digital trail produces economic value for corporations that buy and sell our online identity markers, movements, and actions for the purposes of sentiment analyses or interface optimization. In an effort to educate the public on this “black market” for user-generated data, ³ the Wall Street Journal recently exposed the flagrant levels of tracking and mapping of online behavior that goes on without our consent or knowledge by websites as innocuous as Dictionary.com (Angwin & McGinty, 2010). Van Dijck (2009) suggests that these types of metadata that are harvested by companies such as Google are a prime resource for profiling customers and are more valuable to advertisers than users’ actual content.

This synergistic arrangement presents just one scenario in which consumption and production converge online. The logic of prosumption does not just repurpose the consumption of commodities through productive mechanisms (for example, through contextual advertising) or repurpose the production of expressive artifacts through frameworks of consumption (for example, by blog readers who see advertising as a trade-off for free content). Instead, prosumption entails the implosion of consumptive and productive practices and mechanisms, which—as the example of Dooce.com illustrates—are becoming increasingly indistinct. Prosumption provides a framework for thinking about UGC that moves beyond the myopia of the web’s cyber-utopianisms (Carey, 2005) and instead situates UGC within crucial spatiotemporal continuities. Prosumption is an economic logic that predates social media. Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) remind us that the logic of self-service—which was inaugurated by late-19th-century cafeterias, institutionalized by 20th-century fast food industries, and has since been accelerated by the rationalization of processes across the spectrum of consumptive activities—constitutes an enduring form of prosumption. Furthermore, the binary between production and consumption has long been problematized by Mumford (1967) and Cohen (2003), who describe consumer capitalism as an integrative circuit in which the corollary of productive labor is the national responsibility to consume. Ritzer (2010) adds that postwar social theory has shifted from a productivist overemphasis on labor to a consumerist overemphasis on leisure yet remains unresponsive to the enduring porosity between production and consumption, and the mutual implication of one in the other, regardless of which dominates during specific historical periods.

The logic of prosumption also extends beyond the web. Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody (2008) suggest that prosumption on the social web is the extension of a larger marketing logic that constructs consumer subjects as empowered, entrepreneurial, and liberated. In so doing, corporations facilitate profitable relationships with customers and increase their competitive advantage by designing “platforms for consumer practice.” These platforms solicit customer feedback and innovation to integrate them more tightly into circuits of production—a vital strategy for efficacy and efficiency in a post-Fordist age marked by the fragmentation of demand. This business philosophy was most notably articulated by management gurus Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), who called it “value co-creation,” and marketing professors Vargo and Lusch (2004), who used the term “service-dominant logic of marketing.” Zwick et al. (2008) believe this to be the most advanced technology of consumer subjectification:

Marketing’s desire to produce cultural conditions that allow for more subtle ways to insert brands and products deeply into the fabric of consumer lifeworlds has resulted in a style of marketing practice that now aims at completely drawing consumers into the production and, more importantly, innovation process itself. (p. 168)

Prosumption is not novel; however, it is intensified by the explosion of social media and UGC. The logic of prosumption pries economic value from the interstices of consumption and production, attempting to rationalize all spheres of human experience, integrating the subject—already burdened by the necessity of labor and the responsibility of consumption—more tightly into the circuits of capital, so much so that life itself is put to work. The politics of UGC is crucial to understanding the stakes involved in the complex digital ecology that feasts on the productive energies of our mediated activities, in the struggle for control over personal and communal creativity, communication, and entrepreneurship in an emergent world order where the psychic, social, and economic coalesce as never before in the history of capitalism.

This intellectual undertaking is especially crucial at a juncture where mounting public outrage by users, journalists, and policy makers is forcing social media giants, such as Google and Facebook, to reconsider their appropriation of expressive artifacts in ways that allegedly infringe privacy and antitrust principles. This was evident in the controversy regarding Google Buzz, a service that automatically generated and publicized users’ social networks by analyzing and colligating frequencies of exchange between contacts from its sister e-mail service, Gmail. What was justified as a stroke of synergistic genius was seen by users as a blatant infringement of privacy, what Lyons (2010) called “Google’s Orwell moment.” Alongside the escalating debate about privacy is the continuing debate about exploitation: Peterson (2008) protests that UGC fuels the digital economy yet remains uncompensated and therefore should instead be called “loser-generated content.”

Although the media buzz over blogging has waned, ⁴ and its growth reaches saturation (Parker, 2009), like Web 2.0, blogging’s nascent exuberance is transitioning into a phase of ubiquity, where UGC’s configurations become more entrenched, where the inequities of prosumption become more palpable. Therefore, blogging offers an important window into the sociotechnical ecosystem of UGC, its synergies with the economic logics of prosumption, its divergence from its rhetoric of empowerment, and its friction with the agentive and entrepreneurial subject that it willfully configures. The following sections will explicate these synergies, divergences, and frictions by synthesizing the rhetoric of popular blogging handbooks and the perspectives of quotidian bloggers that they target. ⁵ These handbooks present a blend of marketing and technical advice that instruct bloggers on how to monetize their blogs, thereby offering a glimpse into the socialization of the prosumer subject. Suspended between a vibrant vision of blogging as a ticket to fame and fortune and a sobering reality of obscurity, bloggers are recalibrating their expectations by constructing alternative economies of exchange. Instead of valuating their admitted labor monetarily or quantitatively, bloggers are prioritizing social exchanges that are qualitative in form.

Schisms in the Global Brain

As advertising colonizes the blogosphere, the ideological opposition between “souls” and money, between expressive artifacts and its translation into UGC, is waning into an ambivalent balancing act. In an interview with M. A. Banks (2008), Ken Fisher of Arstechnica.com describes the contradiction that advertising poses for the impartiality of product reviews:

I feel that advertising is absolutely fair tradeoff for free content. . . . The other side of advertising is that you just absolutely have to keep the advertisers at arm’s length. . . . If you are the publisher and the guy writing [the blog], you have to get your hands dirty with money. You cannot avoid it. (p. 137)

Echoing this glorification of the expressive artifact versus its configuration as UGC, Frank Warren of Postsecret.com advises, “Don’t start blogging for money; start blogging because of your passion” (M. A. Banks, 2008, p. 63). Despite these proclamations, all Banks’s “blogging heroes” accept some forms of advertising, sponsorship, or consulting spinoff that earn them a living. This is the dominant perspective of bloggers at the top of the food chain. High-profile bloggers, or “probloggers,” have the critical mass of readers needed to spin advertising into livelihood and represent Florida’s (2004) creative class—a class of knowledge workers who labor in flexible and rewarding conditions and drive innovation in postindustrial economies. For example, in their handbook Problogger, Rowse and Garrett (2008) exclaim, “I love blogging. It is great to be able to work from home, on my own schedule, while helping and meeting so many people. I can’t imagine a better way to earn a living!” (p. 5).

These charmed lives are, however, only a minuscule part of the picture. Despite the rousing assurances from guidebooks that anyone can be a problogger, in reality, most blogs languish in digital obscurity. According to Mandansky and Arenberg (2008), more than 92% of all blogs have fewer than 10 incoming links. In other words, most of the hyperlinked activity that is taking place in the blogosphere is between a mass of obscure blogs and a small core of probloggers. This disparity translates into advertising revenue: The top 1% of U.S. bloggers earned more than $200,000 annually from ad revenue, whereas the median income of the rest amounted to a meager $200 annually (Mandansky & Arenberg, 2008)—not enough even for Internet access. ⁶ There is a patent disparity between the promise of prosumption and bloggers’ actual experiences and opportunities for communication and its monetization.

In this sense, probloggers perform similar functions to the mass media—the dissemination of content to a mass audience in exchange for advertising dollars. However, within the blogosphere, the game of cyber-entrepreneurship is arguably rigged. Despite the flourish of Web 2.0’s empowerment rhetoric, most bloggers will never be part of the creative class. Yet handbooks persistently encourage them to “tap your creativity and uniqueness as a person” to “transform yourself into a cyberstar” (Rich, 2009, pp. 117, 144). Socialized into an entrepreneurial frame that is characteristic of neoliberal selfhood (Urciuoli, 2008), many bloggers mine their lives for expressive artifacts to serve as placeholders for contextual advertising through schemes such as Google’s AdSense, which matches the content of a page to specific ads for more targeted advertising solutions. For Google and its corporate clients, microadvertising, such as AdSense, is more effective than the mass media because it is targeted and more efficient because it compensates bloggers through cost-per-click or cost-per-impression schemes.

This means that 99% of blogs constitute the proverbial “lonely roads” of advertising, attracting nominal traffic and compensation for their psychic and entrepreneurial labor of fashioning and marketing themselves as cyberstars for a miniscule audience. However, nominal traffic does add up for the middleman—these microscopic slices eked out by laboring bloggers and accumulated by AdSense added up to $1.64 billion in advertising dollars, 30% of Google’s total revenues for the first quarter of 2010 (Google, 2010). In his forcefully titled book The Googlization of Everything, Vaidhyanathan (2011) explains that Google is at its core a search engine service and owns real estate throughout the web—the blog platform Blogger, the social networking platform Orkut, the e-commerce payment service Google Checkout, and various applications on its “cloud”; however, Google still generates most of its revenue through advertising—through AdSense on blogs, the Partner Program on YouTube, and AdWords on its search engine.

Why More Is Sometimes Really Less

To characterize prosumption by the unconscionable disparity between the Googles of the social web and its laboring yet undercompensated masses is not altogether unfair; it is, however, a simplification of how power operates under the logic of prosumption—not through coercion but through what Zwick et al. (2008) suggest is closer to Foucault’s (1991) notion of governmentality. This is a mode of control that works from the bottom up, by addressing subjects as free persons while simultaneously putting mechanisms in place that channel subjects’ experience of freedom into predetermined modes. Unlike the orders, rules, and norms of disciplinary power, government operates through the provision of ambiences that frame and partially anticipate the agency of prosumers. In Web 2.0 speak, these ambiences are touted as “architectures of participation” that optimally harness users’ collaborative efforts for maximum profitability (O’Reilly, 2005). Participation in social media is not about free-flowing creativity but about the solicitation of productivity within prescribed sociotechnical frameworks. Ritzer (2011) explains that although platforms such as Ebay.com provide ambiences that solicit decentralized contributions of infinite variety, these microcontributions are managed by “a rationalized system that can embrace and encompass unpredictability and variety within a framework that is efficient, calculable, predictable, and centrally controlled” (p. 232).

In the case of UGC, governmentality begins with what the information sciences call “registration” (Bordewijk & van Kaam, 1986)—standardized intake systems that specify where, and in what form, users should type their text, upload their images, assign their tags, and highlight their hyperlinks to facilitate the identification, organization, and analysis of each packet of information to be strategically synergized for maximum profitability across an ecology of platforms. ⁷ The functionality of users and the stability and exchangeability of their content lock into place to facilitate the generation of value that is abundant and aggregative. Importantly, most users do not experience these “ambiences” as constrictive but as a choice. Participation on the social web is framed through consumer choice—through user agreements (that are hard to read), disclaimers (that are hard to see), and checklists of features (that are hard to find) that one can simply opt in or opt out of. However, in an era where network effects rule social media, and where antitrust infringement is arguably part of the corporate strategy of many social media giants, governmentality is less of a consumer choice and more of a social contract.

Blogging is a system that is not deterministic yet not entirely open-ended; it is a marketplace, not just of eyeballs but also of conversations and social connections; it is platform, not just for decentralized prosumption but also for centralized distribution. To think about blogging as a system is to move beyond blogs as discrete entities and to understand blog networks as nodes of content production and linkage within an ecology of platforms that include search engines, such as Google.com; blog trackers, such as Technorati.com; social bookmarking websites, such as Delicious.com; link aggregators, such as Digg.com; RSS readers, such as Bloglines.com; and web traffic analyzers, such as Alexa.com.

This ecosystem of platforms exists to organize the indiscriminate content generated by users that the system itself cannot sort through—it needs us to help out. This task is commonly referred to as collaborative filtering, a form of user-generated organization (Wesch, 2008) that is solicited by social media platforms to create gradations of value on the social web, which itself constitutes a form of value. Today, the information overload is a truism. Proliferation is, after all, a direct consequence of more democratic production and gives rise to two interrelated problems: The first is social and relates to the desire for differentiation and distinction; the second is pragmatic and relates to how to organize content in the information overload. The answer to both of these problems is collaborative filtering. For example, Slashdot.com’s user contributions are modulated through a system of checks and balances in which a critical mass of users rate each other’s content and are then ranked accordingly. This distributed responsibility is cumulative—rating occurs at the level of content and users; users’ rating proficiencies are themselves ranked to produce a hierarchical reputation system in which the rating decisions of power users’ are prioritized.

The blogosphere is organized through mechanisms of collaborative filtering and reputation systematization. Its ecology of platforms uses different algorithms to organize blog content that are based ultimately on relevancy and ranking. Relevancy is based on the qualitative differentiation of tags, metadata, and textual content. Ranking is based on quantitative differentiation that combines two interdependent scales, web traffic and incoming links. Similar to the ranking mechanisms of Slashdot.com, incoming links from problogs are prioritized by the blogosphere’s ecology of platforms that perform comparable functions of reputation systemization and collaborative filtering. The Rough Guide to Blogging calls this “a game of link reciprocity” (Rough Guides, 2006, p. 96) in which one has to spend a little to gain a little. In theory, all bloggers have equal access to the tools of content production and distribution; however, the systematization of reputation in collaborative filtering skews the channels of distribution toward a hierarchical structure. In other words, the totality of the blogosphere is one massive filter designating a handful of problogs as nexuses of hyperlinked activity and drives this small selection of problogs to the top of the food chain. This is why Technorati.com calls its measurement of link-based ranking “authority.”

At every level of analysis, UGC diverges from its rhetoric of empowerment. As a sociotechnical configuration, UGC advertises choice, participation, and agency, yet it delivers a mode of governmentality that prods subjects into narrowly defined modes of productivity predefined by standardized intake systems that facilitate the translation of expressive artifacts into quantified and monetized value. As an ecosystem of platforms, UGC proffers democracy, individuation, fame, and fortune; yet for the blogging masses, it delivers hierarchy, aggregation, and obscurity.

Democratization Delirium

The economic logic of prosumption and its implosion of consumption and production in its current digital incarnation do not create a level playing field of creative entrepreneurship; instead, they engender a portentous digital divide. This digital divide separates the empowerment rhetoric of Web 2.0 from the structural realities that undergird the blogosphere, the expressive agency of subjects from the sociotechnical prescriptions of UGC, the creative class of probloggers from their plebeian hopefuls, and the mass of unwaged professional-amateurs from the social media goliaths that profit from their aggregated microcontributions. Prosumption’s game of cyber-entrepreneurship is arguably rigged.

This fundamental inequity derives from prosumption’s capitalist logic, which responds to the post-Fordist crisis of control over consumer demand and behavior by rationalizing processes of consumption and production into a more tightly integrated circuit. Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) state that capitalism has merely done what it has always done; it has found yet another way to expand into new psychic territories—into the interstices of consumption and production—and in doing so has managed to exploit a new source of surplus value. Zwick et al. (2008) concur that the forms of prosumption we are witnessing today constitute a transformation of the “social communication of living subjects, the dialogical performances, and the communicative competence of individuals—into living labor” (p. 178).

This living labor is part of what Marx called the “general intellect”: cognitive, cultural, linguistic, and affective capabilities developed by workers as a result of automation and the increased availability of free time (Peterson, 2008). According to Terranova (2004, p. 91), this mode of affective labor—what autonomist Marxists call “immaterial labor”—keeps individual sites viable through their traffic, usage, and contribution and collectively sustains the web. Terranova calls this “free labor”—free because it is not financially rewarded but also because it is willingly given. Peterson (2008) asserts that despite the voluntary and even pleasurable aspects of UGC production, it is patently exploitative. In addition, the costs of content creation, which include hardware, software, connectivity, and free time, are all borne by the user.

However, Terranova argues that free labor is not necessarily exploited labor. Citing examples from their study of user cocreation in a video game company, J. Banks and Humphreys (2008) suggest that despite the patent inequities of prosumption, scholars must move beyond a refractory critique of exploitation; instead, scholars should acknowledge the agency of users and recognize that the extraction of economic value from prosumption is a dynamic and emergent process that also transforms the practices of business and capital. Summarizing the insights from the appropriately titled conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory,” Scholz (2010) concurs that the eroding distinctions between labor and leisure render the critique of exploitation too blunt an analytical tool to fully understand the pleasures of participatory culture and its politics. Terranova (2004) adds that it is unproductive to think about free labor within the framework of exploitation or even appropriation:

Such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are results of a complex history where the relation between labour and capital is mutually constitutive, entangled and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism. . . . Late capitalism does not appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits and exhausts its labour force and its cultural and affective labour. (p. 94)

Like the concept of prosumption, free labor acknowledges UGC’s historical continuities with Fordism as well as spatial continuities with what autonomists call the “social factory,” in which the technological rationality of the factory diffuses into all spheres of experience. Therefore, prosumer capitalism is an altered modality of industrial capitalism, just as the social factory is an altered modality of the Fordist factory. They are the same yet different. The differences are palpable—one imposes systems of discipline onto wage labor to produce material goods, whereas the other provides systems of government onto unwaged (voluntary and involuntary) labor to produce immaterial goods. The similarities are less obvious yet crucial—both convert labor time into economic value through uneven relationships of power between those who own the means of production (virtual architectures and its network effects) and those who do not.

These continuities—whether or not they can be collectively considered exploitation—have social and psychic consequences. Blogging’s ecology of platforms encourage users to micromanage their blogs to tweak its economic, social, and cultural capital. For example, web traffic analyzers, such as Alexa.com, allow users to calculate, analyze, and project the real-time status of their advertising valuation and revenue; their popularity, rank, and reach; and their authority and influence on readers, bloggers, and journalists. Similarly, Blogging for Fame and Fortune (Rich, 2009) instructs bloggers on how to track their web traffic statistics and how to interpret and augment them in the style of a professional audience analysis. Lovink (2008) proposes that these architectures of participation and their rhetoric of empowerment are drawing bloggers into corporate structures, into a complex economy of links, tags, traffic data, and microdebits, which feed bloggers’ dreams of fame and fortune, which in reality are available to only a few. These strategies of micromanagement that bloggers are socialized into are reminiscent of what Deleuze (1995) referred to the entrepreneurial subject of control societies, who moves fluidly within diverse yet pervasive systems that modulate behavior according to a constant tweaking of inputs and outputs, incentives and disincentives. Like governmentality, modulation creates a sense of freedom in a system where the rules are set in advance.

Alternative Economies of Exchange

A look at what bloggers are saying might be helpful in exploring the possibilities of agency and its implications for prosumer subjectivity. The commercialization debate exemplified by probloggers seems to be a recurring motif in the blogosphere, where “selling out” is framed as an inevitable trade-off between money and quality, work and fun. A teenager who blogs about amateur filmmaking explains,

If I were blogging for money it would take some the fun away. Sure, it’s fun to get paid—but it’s not always a good thing for your overall blog quality. Blogging for a small audience is tough. If you’re not paid, half the motive is gone. And if you don’t have a large audience, then some may say that that’s the other half [emphasis added]. But I don’t think so. I continue to blog because I enjoy it. I enjoy posting about my interests, and I enjoy the occasional feedback that I get in the comments.

Although there is a perceived trade-off between advertising income and quality content, the former is a form of compensation for the latter. In fact, according to this perceptive blogger, two forms of payment for UGC dominate in the blogging world: advertising dollars and reader comments.

The relationship between these forms of compensation is complex and interrelated. On one hand, although popularity usually ensures high traffic, it does not always result in comments, because a majority of readers lurk instead of participate. On the other hand, high traffic often leads to commensurate income. Furthermore, bloggers believe advertising compromises content quality, which in turn leads to reduced traffic numbers and fewer comments. As aforementioned, only the top 1% of bloggers have traffic volumes high enough to make a living from advertising. This disappointment with the overhyped expectations that are associated with advertising is echoed in the following quotation by a blogger who writes about being a working mother:

Very few women are making a substantial living on blogging. If I’m lucky I’ll make a $100 this year in ad revenue from this little blog which won’t even cover the cost of my domain and service fees. Considering the amount of time I put into writing compared to the money I’ll make for it, I’m making WAY below minimum wage on my writing.

These quotations reflect the statistical reality that the fast track to advertising fortune is a pipedream; instead of an income, most bloggers settle for a pittance. However, the alternative compensation of reader comments is more attainable. For example, a female blogger who writes about the outdoors offers,

In blogging, I pretend that I’m working for a small magazine that gives me complete creative freedom, sending me on any assignment I wish. Small detail: cash flow’s not so good. I haven’t received a paycheck in two and a half years. I haven’t quite figured out how to approach the boss, but I’m pretty sure she likes my work.

Other bloggers also seem to negotiate between these two models of compensation. Importantly, even though advertising income and reader comments are closely interrelated, they are often framed by bloggers as being opposed; the former is out of reach, whereas the latter is more attainable. Concordantly, most bloggers admit to being motivated more by personalized exchanges than by quantifiers of popularity. It seems that bloggers are socialized into the hierarchies of value promoted by handbooks and view blogging as a form of labor. In other words, they seem to aspire toward the probloggers’ quantitative and monetary markers of popularity. However, the quotations suggest that these aspirations are ambivalent. Rather, bloggers seem to be setting up an alternative form of exchange that is based not on capital but on sociality:

I would love if everyone (and I mean everyone) who reads this post would do me the favor of leaving a comment with their thoughts. . . . You can think of it as your small payment for the content that you have just consumed.

The picture of blogging that emerges from these comments suggests that bloggers feel ignored by their readers rather than exploited by social media. Against UGC’s empowerment rhetoric, bloggers are not empowered to negotiate the terms of their labor. Instead, these bloggers feel powerless in a system in which their productive value is aggregative instead of individual, in which they are simply one node within a plurality of productive nodes that are unable to collectively negotiate the terms of their admitted labor. These quotations suggest that although blogging may not empower its users to take control of the channels of distribution for their productive activities, it allows for some measure of agency to negotiate the object but not the terms of one’s productive exchange. In other words, bloggers may favor social to monetary compensation in exchange for their production of content; however, this does not translate into actual compensation. In fact, this limitation could be traced back to the overall ecosystem and architectures of participation—blogging’s system of incentives encourages practices of reciprocal exchange for links but not for ideas or comments.

Conclusion

Our communal media futures are being drafted in boardrooms, in newsrooms, and on senate floors across the wired world, a future that is continually being negotiated by bloggers of all stripes who create, circulate, synergize, and monetize their UGC on a daily basis. This article has used the practice of blogging to reflect on the sociotechnical ecosystem of UGC, its synergies with the economic logics of prosumption, its divergence from its rhetoric of empowerment, and its friction with the agentive and entrepreneurial subject that it ineluctably configures. Suspended between a vibrant vision of blogging as a surefire ticket to fame and fortune and a sobering structural reality of obscurity and tedium, bloggers are recalibrating their collective delusions of grandeur by constructing alternative economies of exchange. If the norms of blogging are in line with probloggers’ belief that advertising is fair trade-off for free content, then the dynamics of sociality between the blogger and reader changes from being a community for the exchange of ideas and will increasingly be an impersonal node in a network for the exchange of links and for the exchange of content for eyeballs and advertising dollars. This shift has one important implication for bloggers as individuals and as a collective: It implies that the system will be increasingly unable to cater to the motivations of a majority of its bloggers, who are not in it for the money but for the sociality and, instead of global popularity, simply want local recognition and response.