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After the presentation I had an email exchange with Dr. Beth Coleman who is professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include virtual world design and use, networked subjectivity, global media emergence and practice in China, India and Africa, contemporary art and technology, and critical history of race and technology. She blogs at Project Goodluck.

There Beth Coleman followed up on my talk:

Media professor Trebor Scholz gave a talk at MIT last week on Free Cooperation, discussing the ways in which we participate freely in data mining platforms (such as Google and Face Book) and what if means to give free labor to giant commercial enterprises.

He showed us network effect graphs that described the ways in which casual use of a site can turn into a de facto commitment to a platform. He also talked about how online labor exploitation is not visible in the manner that historical industrial labor has been. The centralizing effect of the giant media platforms is a phenomenon that causes him real alarm.

I had a few more questions for him and he nicely agreed to continue the conversation here.

1. Is this inevitable? Going from a mass-media distribution model to a distributed media of the Web, what has happened to the ability to choose? There are alternatives to Youtube?? Why does this site dominate? Is it design or social (the aggregating of people).

2. There is no precedent for participatory networks at this scale. So the rules of ownership in regard to what one makes or even of one's personal information are not clear. The eula [end users agreement] for most sites say that the user give up all rights to content. If we are seeing a centralizing movement that reflects in effect our own use habits, how do we reverse this momentum?

3. This free work is the opposite of what was meant by free software and open source initiatives a decade ago. Do user’s rights need to be mandated at the level of law to prevent our herding instincts from helping to create de facto media monopoly? Does this destroy the progressive and innovative aspects of Web agency that someone like Y. Benkler has applauded in Wealth of Networks?

Trebor Scholz:

Why do people congregate in very large numbers in very few places? People want to be where other people are. I learn from my friends on Facebook (FB) through the newsfeed and from my network on Del.icio.us. Knowledge is created among us, laterally. D. Weinberger calls it the Daily We. I can see what my FB friends (people whom I met at conferences or with whom I am otherwise acquainted) bookmark, read, which events they put on, and which groups they associate themselves with. I'm certainly not alone-- these reasons motivate many of the 70 million people who are on Facebook.

Business plans for startups are based on a very low threshold for participation, uploading is made very easy. People contribute videos, blog entries, wall posts, bookmarks, status updates, and photos but none of this material can be exported. An active user becomes more valuable over time, not unlike a bottle of wine in the wine cellar. All those “friends” with whom we reconnect, sometimes after quite some time, and all those media and texts are literally locked up. Try to delete Flickr photos (you’ll have to go one by one; try that with the 2 GB that you just uploaded). Or, try deleting your Facebook (FB) account. You can't. Attempt to export blog entries on MySpace or photos on Facebook. Not accidentally, the export option does not exist. Groups are locked up in these social milieus. Weak-tie-communities are entrapped; it's a corporate confiscation of attention, creativity, and time. Steve Chen, co-founder of Youtube understands how much he owes the "community" when he thanks Youtube users shortly after being acquired by Google for $1.6 billion. Chen: “Thanks to everyone of you guys that have been contributing to YouTube, to the community. We would not be anywhere close to where we are without the help of this community.” Within three years the site had achieved popularity and that user community directly translated into Google stocks.

Users who "flirt" with a given site are attracted by the wealth of user-submitted content. Bigger is better. It's the network effect: the more people use a technology, the more valuable it becomes. Fax machines don’t get you very far if only 5 people use them. Equally, you'll not reconnect with your high school sweetheart on an obscure startup social networking site. You will also not find many photos with an uncommon tag on a photo site other than Flickr. User-submitted content makes these sites so attractive. The top ten site of the Web share 40% of all web traffic (sina.com, baidu.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, google.com, youtube.com, myspace.com, live.com, orkut.com, qq.com). These sites disproportionally control the networked public sphere because of the user-submitted content, which makes their social milieus so intensely engaging. Yochai Benkler refers to this mass-media-like constellation of media monopoly as the "Berlusconi Effect." The democratizing effects that Benkler described in Wealth of Networks in 1995 have little to do with user-generated content. He focuses on the remaining 60% web traffic made up in part of blogs that spread reports showing the shortcoming of Diebold's voting machines.

I think that Benkler's sometimes criticized utopian enthusiasm for peer production is justified when it comes to initiatives like Wikipedia or even Google Adsense that allows individuals to supplement their income.   

 Sure, there are endless alternatives to the MyTubes and YouSpaces of the World Wide Computer. But good luck trying to migrate your data and friend lists with you. YouTube is attractive because of those 70,000 uploads a day (and counting). It's very difficult to migrate data to another site. Interoperability is largely an illusion. Users can reconnect with high school friends and those dozens of people would not all move with the potential migrating users. The loss would be significant. My hope is that exportability will become a competitive advantage for Social Web companies.

The American site Orkut dominates Brazil and India completely. Canada hearts Facebook. MySpace and FB reign supreme in the United States. How do these sites become the default? Some researchers suggest that it has to do with the colors of the interface or with a celebrity joining the site. (This is not so different to a real estate agency that spreads the news that the R&B singer and songwriter Beyoncé will buy a duplex in a newly erected building.) But then, soon, once a solid number of users is established, the wealth of social life will be the attraction. Good design cannot have much to with it: just look at MySpace and its disastrous interface.

Yochai Benkler correctly suggests that "peer production is as efficient and significant for the 21 century as the assembly line was for the 20th century." I also agree with Benkler when he suggests that through peer production "people can do more by and for themselves" but I add that the pleasures of online sociality are exploited. Communities are often deceived and commodified. They are unfairly used as a resource, often without their consent and knowledge. It's a bit like Mark Twain's "Whitewashing the Fence" in Tom Sawyer.

Tom tries to motivate the neighborhood boys to paint the fence for him. His friend Ben rejects the offer to paint the fence without pay. Tom responds “What do you call work?” and resumes his whitewashing:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple:

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

Online the promise of the free service is subtler than Tom Sawyer's boyish box of manipulating tricks.
The surplus attention of people, diverted from television to the Internet, translates into many hours every day spent on social networking sites. (For Myspace that meant an increase in value from $ 583 million in 2005 to $15 billion in 2008.)

I disagree with Benkler when he proposes social peace: "The key is managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker." How can big businesses like NewsCorp can get away with exploiting communities. From a business perspective, the question is how you a company can find people to make a living with. How can they harvest the labor and presence of those millions on Myspace, for example, without making them feel bad? This is also an underlying question for Don Tapscott in Wikinomics when he celebrates that "In Second Life, the consumer actually co–innovates and coproduces the products they consume." (Tapscott and Williams, 2007. Wikinomics, p. 126).

Companies like LindenLab, while granting users IP-rights to their creations in the virtual world SecondLife, make profits without providing anything but the technical backbone, the real estate for all this creativity and flying around. The ownership issues of submitted content are handled in favor of the user here. But perhaps that simply shows that the content does not matter so much. Since Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds, companies have learned have learned that user-submitted content is very rarely what makes money. Today, the platform zars realize that it's about attention; it's about time spent in an environment and about the data that can be sucked out of the user clicks.  

Benkler, Lessig, Sunstein and others are looking at these issues as lawyers. Their contributions are important but they respond to questions that are relevant to the legal community. I approach the issues from the cultural activist perspective.  

Is centralization avoidable? Is it a new phenomenon? User-submitted or generated content such as book reviews are not new (very much in opposition to what Web 2.0 ideologues wants you to believe). Benkler argues for the Web as a place where ordinary people can find a voice but it is not a novel trend. Personal email was a sneaky and by all means unplanned use of ARPANET. Amazon.com's review submission feature started in 1995 as an early form of self-publishing. The Indian social networking site Sulekha kicked off in 1999.  The participatory turn, the shock of the social, and groundswell of sociality online-- whatever you want to call this quantitative leap of participation in web-based social milieus-- it is new.  

Is the "Berlusconi Effect" avoidable on the Social Web? The history of radio would be a discouraging precedent. From a plethora of individual radio operators, airwave politics made sure that only the highest-paying stations would survive. Debates about net neutrality immediately enter my mind. A two-tiered Internet would be the kiss goodnight for decentralization. But recent news made me hopeful.   As it stands now, bloggers like Dailykoz or curated sites like Boingboing still exist and they are A-list sites in terms of traffic. They get a good share of the remaining 60% of traffic and that is worth defending.