The Sharing (or not sharing as we like to think) Economy

 

 

The Public Domain Project by Pond5

In an effort to understand the ways in which Pond5 initiated the Public Domain Project, I will go through some areas which can highlight both its strengths and weaknesses as commons based website.

Commons is based on an idea of sharing a resource, so in the first instance we can see that The Public Domain Project, through its very title, is attempting to commit its efforts to sharing. The Public Domain Project is a website which acts as a way to make historic media files available for creative focused projects. With over 60 thousand files in the collection, it is a place worth checking.

As a side note, The Public Domain Project is a product of Creative Commons which is a derivative of the ‘Commons’ idea. But expresses the same idea in relation to work that has been made using creative input.

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public.

Pond5 is as an organization which claims to be the world’s largest, most vibrant video-first content marketplace, providing filmmakers, creators, and producers of all kinds with the content, inspiration, and tools they need to improve their projects. The video resource is shared through their online platform, which a suer must sign up for and search for footage. The Public Domain project particularly focuses on historical video assets. Such as the Buzz Aldrin in a space suit video which can be downloaded easily, amongst an array of videos of B-17 Bomber Taxiing On Airfield or Girl Campers Enjoying a River.

Pond5’s governance is not however strictly horizontal in its management structure. If this was to be considered as a product of commons based effort, this websites approach to management would need to be considered. The Public Domain Project is a subsidiary of Pond 5 which is an organisation dedicated predominantly to stock content, most of which is used online.

Its USP is that it shares licensing revenue with its contributing artists, which along with The Public Domain aims to position its organisation as having strong ethics within it market, along with notable companies like Shutterstock. By driving a hard and fast rule to support content makers, they separate themselves from their competitors. But even as we language like this is used to describe an otherwise ethical organisation, we inevitable slip into the pervading question of how much it can call its practices common.  Further investigation into  Pond5 finds that it is a venture-backed company funded by Accel Partners and Stripes Group with offices in New York, Dublin, Prague, London, and LA. Ultimately its ethics, if challenged, cannot stand in the way of its investors recouping a bottom line, which is their right by law. They may have to abandon such practices of distributing free content, which at second glance acts as a very effective sales funnel to connect customer back to their main site to direct them towards purchasing the priced content they have available. In this way the site could be seen a PR or marketing play to draw in potential customers. When we look at Ostrom’s (1990) guidance on the area of commons, the point could be made that in and of itself the website does connect users to their main resource, but don’t give user a say in how it is run. The boundaries are very clear, however users are not clear on who edits the content or how to contact these individuals to resolve any conflicts that may arise.

 

 

 

 

What is Moodle? As a first year university student, I had not come across this website before. It was only through multiple occasions I searched for it on Google, that I discovered it use but more importantly its position within the commons or digital commons space. Moodle is a open-source software which provide the management of learning systems for many universities around the world. It has been developed under a GNU General Public Licence which gives user the ability to run, share and change the software. It has a lineage of development in the Free Software Foundation. But what is commons and how does this software identify as commons resource?

In 1968, in an article called The Tragedy of the Commons. Frank van Laerhoven discusses ideas about the Commons. These relatively new ideas in 60s academia discusses (using the an example of cows grazing) how a shared resource faces depletion when an individual actor acts in the interest of themselves, and not that of the group, in consuming said resource.  Something which Moodle, with it attitude towards sharing, steers clear from. Moodle has been active is trying to employ these commons based- practices led and coordinated by Moodle HQ, an Australian company of 50 developers which is financially supported by a network of eighty-four Moodle Partner service companies worldwide. This is how the software is managed, which helps to mitigate the free rider problem associated with the Tragedy of the Commons. Where users pull back on their full support of a resource if they feel that the resources is not adequately shared.

Moodle’s development has also been assisted by the work of open-source programmers. Which allows it to focus its efforts on maintaining the even stance with some of the main principles of the commons as a Elinor Ostrom describes, its open access allows students and teachers to contribute to the development of the platform, everyone has the ability to partake in the experience of Moodle,  its stated philosophy includes a constructivist and social constructionist approach to education, emphasising that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to the educational experience.  Martin Dougiamas, the brainchild of the project who has graduate degrees in computer science and education, wrote the first version of Moodle. Dougiamas started a Ph.D. to examine “the use of open source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry.” This is demonstrated through the use of plugins, which are a flexible tool set, allowing Moodle users to extend the features of the site. There are hundreds of plugins for Moodle, extending the features of Moodle’s core functionality. Each plugin is maintained in the Moodle plugins directory. As of June 2017, there are 1,342 plugins available for Moodle with over 405,200 recent downloads.

The resource does however have some contentions with its ethos of social constructionism as this focus can be hard to quantify. This aspect of the platform does ensure that it is distinctive in terms of its ethical offering in contrast to eLearning platforms within the space. If the Moodle Project did wanted to add this focus more tangible there may need to be room for those that don’t know the software to be taught how to engage with it. This would increase its ability to be resource that uniquely address any conflicts that come from user not feeling they are entitled to change he platform in anyway. With digital platforms there can be a knowledge gap when trying to make a resource accessible if barrier to entry are open but not accessible. 

Moodle stands for modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment. I think this is an apt classification, if commons can be understood as resources or raw material (so typically these were not man-made) which, as De Angelis and Harvie describe, are used within ‘ social systems in which [these] resources are shared by a community of users/producers…’ (2014). The software can boast in the fact that it has managed to avoid being commodified in any way, as a platform which schools, colleges and university’s use, it can certainly be used a a good example of what it means to be commons focused. Particularly in keeping in line with certain principles and particularly not being operation closed, which can often be the downfall of many software companies as they try to manage the type of content which a system holds, which can possibly be seen as a way for it to happen as if it continues to fixate on these social constructionist principles, which although considered remarkable by users, could skew their vision to a more closed system of thought.

 

 

 

 

With the transition from a Fordist society toward an information age, came the emergency of such terms of that come to define new way of producing value. With the decline of production based industry. Other industries, especially with the rise of the internet in the last decade, have developed such as that of the online social network and its derivatives. Digital labour is an idea that centres around the exploitation of user on these social networks who are used to generate content which can then be monetised and capitalised by organisations who run services that support this network.

Due to the insurgence of newer way to connect, commentators on the digital space have made it known how some of these ‘transactions’ are taking place and how. they are developing. One of these industries has been outsourcing, which direct labour towards individuals who are cheaper in regards to the labour costs incurred to the company. The evolution of this digital labour. This certainly has ties with the gig culture (sharing economy, the gift economy and the barter economy.)  Which according to one definition, it is “a labour market characterised by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work, as opposed to permanent jobs”. 

For further information on some of the ideas on digital labour take a look at some of the work by scholars like: Ursula Huws, Trebor Scholz, Frank Pasquale, Sergio Bellucci, Christian Fuchs, Andrew Ross, Jaron Lanier.

In response to all these ideas I will say, I am not completely married to the term digital labour. There are implications to this term has, which may not have been taken into consideration when it was coined. On a basic level the term doesn’t consider that digital labour can now be viewed in a similar to production-based labour.  I argue that if it can, then should be considered a job in equal measure. If this is the case, can the term be re-engineered to be seen from the perspective, of a user taking upon themselves the occupation of being a labourer? if so, can this claim then translate in an act of work experience?

Is there an argument that this could be considered a more positive form of a social roles as Fuchs describes. If the ideas surrounding wealth and labour are evolving, so must a political slants, no? One of these maybe the way in which digital labour becomes an accolade rather than a drawback. Experience can no doubt contribute to ones career development. And if so, unfortunately as an unpaid effort ( which of course would be affiliate marketing). This however is not in a way different from the norm of recruitment for some very sought after positions in organisation around the world. A CV entry could read “2017-18 – Digital Worker for Buzzfeed” , I muse of course. To leave room for a wider thinking on the subject. As Srnicek (2017) describes digital labour as an idea also moves towards a more metaphysical dimension as it could claim that all social interaction becomes free labour. As if one cannot act outside of capitalism. The reason for this slight deviation is to think about the term more broadly in that it may have more sides than one.

09/11/2018

From the hours of 7am when I woke, I used my phone to check my email and Whatsapp messages. My email is provide by Hotmail and the wonderful people at LCC IT services. As far as I am aware neither of which provide me with this subsidised service by  detecting keywords in email conversations to send me targeted adverts. Moving onto the latter part of the day, working with my peers to create as branded film, we accessed YouTube to curate some examples of the type of videos we would like to create, these video had commercials we had to watch. We sat through a few of them, then shared them with each other. The mechanism used here was focused towards linking the content we were watching to the commercials we were watching. The commercials were not content specific as we were watching all different kinds of adverts.

At the end of the day I surmised that the The top social media who use targeted advertising-based capital accumulation models. Often do not want to make this process explicit. Digital labour is an idea of course discovered through analysis, and one can only imagine it is one of many ideas which social media sites try not to give much attention due to it negative connotations. It reminded my of the …..commercial by MasterCard which Itemises parts of ones day, or an event in someone life.

Here’s one I did:

Morning promoted Tweet, around…£1.35.
Afternoon Facebook sponsored Ad…£15.00
Evening Instagram post…£8.00
Night Linked update before bed…£3.00
Finding out your whole day has actually been spent in digital sweat-shop..

…Priceless!

There’s some thing that money can’t buy.

for everything else there’s Mastercard.

12/11/2018

I used Instagrammed quite heavily today, to share humorous videos with my friends. We had a group set-up to contact each other about content that we found interesting within our day, this can be anything from dubbed Simpson cartoon to old men dancing dubbed to Salsa music, (pretty much anything that can be dubbed with the music or vocals of something else). Its very click-baity content that doesn’t take up much time and is constantly shared. Often we have a marathon of sending videos into the group, over a lunch or break time period. On second gland we contribute to the digital labour through our interactive with branded content from influencers and more niche users who profit from their associations with brands. The syndicated like or heart button clicks make our experience more removed from regular sharing of content because we each (my friends and I) are contributing to a larger more profit driven ecosystem than we are aware of, the integration of a kind of personalized social media makes this transaction seem normal, because of the ‘blanket’ of our group messages being unseen from everyone on the instagram platform further shields us from the truth. This of course makes it sound sinister, but because there is no meter telling us that we are contributing to profit, made it is?

13/11/2018

I recently signed up to Linkedin having never really needed to present myself in such an open way before other than Facebook, which is not a platform that I use for the purposes of showcasing. I use this site quite frequently now to check what positions I may be eligible for in the future. I was often struck while using this platform how its business model actually worked, Does it use my labour? LinkedIn makes money primarily from providing the corporate recruiting departments of large companies with access to job candidates through its LinkedIn Recruiter product. Having uploaded a lot of my own information and content onto the site (free of charge) I realise that, like Facebook, I am at the behest of advertisers and algorithms. The more I upload and interact the more my reality of the platform changes in its attempts to suit me, encouraging me to continue to upload. Very unlike traditional recruiters, like Reed or Jobcentre Plus, everything is on my part, and I am required to do the majority of the work to make myself as presentable as possible. I am my own middleman. I am reminded of a discussion about self-service check outs, which like digital labour, require the customer to also be the cashiers of their own goods. The tradition of being served in a supermarket has been now been firmly replaced. It is however a very different story from the labour we many endure digitally because we seem to be benefitting from it, in albeit a very sinister way, and to the tune of 2.3bn. Perhaps someone has found a way to turn the tide of free labour to their advantage, in this fast-moving online space, only time will tell.

19/11/2018

I woke up in Austria, I was also leaving, the day started for me at 8:30. when I had to shake my phone, due to the alarm I had installed the night before which only snoozes, once the phone is shook repeatedly, if they day can be counted as started from 1am when I download the app, (so I wouldn’t miss my flight) I could say that on downloading the app and writing a short comment as well as giving a 4 star rating, on Google Play, I contributed quite a bit in terms of my digital footprint. my labour consisted of engaging with the other users who has pasted opinions on the app which was the “Editors Choice” application this week. From the hour of about 9am. I sent a few email and WhatsApp  messages to

 

“Everyone – EVERYONE – needs to start thinking of themselves as a brand. It is no longer an option: it is a necessity” (Gary Vaynerchuk). 

In thinking about self-branding and how it effects our lives both consciously and unconsciously, we may need to look carefully at how this has come about in recent times and how others have become prominent in this space.   In this student blog, Rikki Henry shares his critique on the rise of Alplay B, a vlogger who rose to fame in virally on social media, as a more recent blogger himself he interprets the how the role of social media self-branding expresses itself and how this connection now develops a significance in how these types of brands can evolve.

In an essay in 1997 entitled The Brand called You, Tom Peters is said to have been the first person to coined the term “personal branding”.

“…think of yourself differently! You’re not an ‘employee’ of General Motors, you’re not a ‘staffer’ at General Mills, you’re not a ‘worker’ at General Electric or a ‘human resource’ at General Dynamics (ooops, it’s gone!) Forget the Generals! You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular ‘function’. You’re not defined by your job title and yo’re not confined by your job description. Starting today you are a brand.”.

Today the term has now been renamed self branding, and Peter’s work, though initially meant for corporate employees, has now been appropriated in now faster moving neoliberal world, and used young and old alike on online platforms. One of these people is  Alpay B (born Alpay Bugur), a 23 year old British vlogger who has amassed over 45,000 subscribers and half-a-million views for his videos on his youtube platform. His YouTube career blossomed due to his infamous ‘baiting out’ videos, subsequently doors have open for his videos to feature him with several prominent U.K. music artists such as JME, Santan Dave, AJ Tracey and Lady Leshurr.

He started video blogging while still in 6th form, at first only using his youtube platform to show case his lifestyle. (He speaks expressly about starting this by seeing American vloggers doing prank-style video’s and saw that their was a potential gap in the market for doing the same here in London.) Footage of pranks on his friends, soon drew attention from larger media outlets such as The Wall of Comedy on Facebook and – for better or worse – more controversial video’s being discussed on Sky News.

“…there was a gap in the market which he has tapped into, to promote his personality.”

In both cases this video content developed a viral buzz, which led him to develop a significant following and create videos in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Spain and Italy.

Alpay’s status has been forged through his initial focus on the interaction he has had with his friends. He rightly stated that there was a gap in the market which he tapped into promote his personality. We are now seeing how he has developed these areas of his platform into viable strengths, we are show a much more curtailed access to brand values, which focus on looking through a lens of his life extravagance and esteem, giving him a kind of naive Alice-in-wonderland charm, an seemingly understated womanising, which to a degree acts as his major selling point. We are led to believe through each video that he has appointments and different locations with distinguished individuals, which look as if they each are incongruous to his nonchalant manner.

His strategy seems to plays upon this incongruity, which grew out of video pranks of his earlier ‘self’ in 2015, into a much more robust self, which endorses self-branded products and services, and travels to exotic locations. His identity has been shaped by the prestige of who he meets and places he goes, thereby the brand of himself is now synonymous with a celebrity than his previous low-brow reporter. As the links to his previous self fade his focus now seems to aim now at trying to look at ways in which he can create a emotional response from his viewer through click-bait videos and headlines.

“…which, paradoxically, makes him connect more authentically when he meets with people who are outside of his social circle.”

There is specific focus on being a man-of-the-people. He often creates idents exhibiting his popularity within his community, e.g. footage of him taking selfies with people on the street, who recognize him from his vlog. This micro-celebrity status, bolsters the sense of authenticity that is popular among vloggers. We are encouraged to think this through his clothing styles, which are generally sports wear. This is also demonstrated through his vernacular, which has remained consistent, i.e there is a very colloquial style to his speech from his neighborhood in west London. It is also this which, paradoxically, makes him connect more authentically when he meets with people who are outside of his social circle.

“He wishes to visit other countries and show his viewer that the world is bigger than the environment you maybe coming from.”

There is often an element within Alpay B’s blog which stems from his upbringing (an impoverished area in Edmonton, North London.) That convey’s the emotional labour involved in becoming a success story. He wishes to visit other countries and show his viewer that the world is bigger than the environment you maybe coming from. In an interview with…… he promotes is that success takes work. This can, however, often be contradictory in how its is depicted. There is no actual demonstration as to how this is achieved. Or if there are any other factors which can be taken in consideration, as owning to this success.

“What has come out of this position, which Alplay B is now in , is a distancing from his original roots”

Of late, Alpay B has content has evolved into a music production, to date he has released one song and music video to date, entitled “Peng Ting”. A colloquialism meaning beautiful person, usually directed toward females.  The song has also been released on to  Spotify, Apple music and iTunes.  This trajectory is common among vloggers who can use their influence from one platform on others.  Thereby creating further revenue streams. What has come out of this position, which Alplay B is now in , is a distancing from his original roots, his image has consequently become more managed. He connecting which at first was connected with people within his neighbourhood has now been edited and pruned to suit newer audiences. It is this edited self. that is the image that Alplay B want us to see of himself, may cause major conflict with man-of-the people image he portrayed earlier on in his career. This self, or rather, this image will always be in direct contrast to the more polished version we now see, which connects particularly in the music industry. A very different space to the blogging sphere in which he began.

(1) See for example The History Workshop and the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

(2) See for example feminist geographer/s J.K. Gibson-Graham

Photo by Nathalie Gouzée on Unsplash

About the author: Rikki Henry is a Master’s student at London College of Communcation, exploring the Media, Culture and Economy. You can follow him on Twitter –

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton