Reality Check: It's not all cybernetic

This NYTimes story about the outsourcing of manhole cover manufacturing drives the point home:

"The scene was as spectacular as it was anachronistic: flames, sweat and liquid iron mixing in the smoke like something from the Middle Ages."

It does seem to shed some light on globalization and, in particular, transportation costs versus labor costs.

Free Labor: The Policing Version

The feds are tapping into the surveillance capacities of cell phones -- one of the key moves in the emerging information economy is the individuation of interactive devices, unlike terrestrial lines, cell phones are typically associated with a specific individual (and her/his movements through space and time).

Free Labor Kool-Aid

For those of you who have drunk the Kool-Aid of the commercial power of digital free labor, I have this mildly behind-the-scenes link to a company whose primary purpose is to organize and encourage this. I am working (for another class) on the ideology of baby monitors as presented in consumer reviews on commercial websites. This is a company that helps other companies incorporate consumer reviews onto their own websites as a way to boost sales.

The link is: http://www.powerreviews.com/social-shopping/solutions/

Nitpicking Jenkins?

Let me be clear. I thought Jenkins was fun to read. It was the easiest to read among all the readings we had to do this semester so far (well, Rheingold too). But I see so many gaps in his arguments that it's hard not to talk about them.
So my first discontent would be...his refusal of seeing digital divide or "access to technology" as an economic gap between cultures and countries. He seems to think that participation gap would be overcome once the "cultural factors" that prohibit different groups from paticipating would be confronted. However, these cultural factors that Jenkins talks about is deeply rooted in the economic gap between different groups of people and culture as well and I find it problematic that Jenkins argues that the "cultural factors that diminish the likelihood that different groups will participate" can be overcome merely through public education. This seems to be the kind of argument that privileged people with "cultural capital" (scholars such as Jenkins) would be saying.

My second problem with Jenkins' arguments may be an extension of my first problem. He seems to argue that participatory culture is democratic because people get to be involved in the process of production and distribution of cultural products, which is a very populist message. However, for one to participate, a certain amount of knowledge and access to technology are prerequisite. Even Jenkins admits that people of participatory culture (for now) are mostly white, middle-upper class, men. Then, how can this be a democratic process if certain people becomes excluded (for economic, cultural, and social factors) in the participatory culture? Would it be a far stretch if I say that Jenkins seems to believe that those who engage in participatory culture are better citizens (ahem...I mean, consumers) than those who don't?

Another paradox in his argument about the democratic characteristic of particpatory culture and knowledge community. Jenkins does acknowledge that some people have more access to information and knowledge ("brain trust") which makes them experts in certain fields. However, he seems to see these experts functioning outside of the knowledge community. I think he tends to dismiss the idea that hierarchy (in terms of possession of knowledge, access to technology, etc.) exists even within the knowledge community (okay, he does acknowledge that some people are more "experts" than others and when people like ChillOne and others participate as "experts" it threatens the "more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates" (p. 54) but he still argues these experts are needed for the fun of "spoiling" to continue in the community) when it is clear that experts emerge within this community. When experts emerge in the community, the non-expert participants begin to rely on these experts for their knowledge and pleasure (of course, non-experts' trust that experts will deliver their needs has to established first). Doesn't reliance on experts contradict to the "equal participation, equal responsibility, etc." principle of democracy? Or am I reading too much out of nothing?

Another thing that Jenkins makes his argument confusing is his labelling of McChesney and others as "pessimists" because they are focused more on what the media do to people than what people do to media. It seems like a fair argument but I'm just wondering whether Jenkins and McChesney et.al are focusing on the same matter. Whereas Jenkins's focus is in the "content layer" of communication, McChesney et. al's focus is on the "physical" (and also "code") layer of communication (their concern is how the monopolization of the physical and code layer of communication influences the content layer of communication). I think it is possible that people can have an influence on the content layer of communication but if the physical and code layer are controlled by media conglomerates how much of an impact can people's participation have? Even the Star Wars spoofs, culture jamming tactics, etc. that try to subvert the media conglomerate's content layer seem to get controlled by the media giants.

I have more to write on what I got from Jenkins...such as redefinition of leisure, comparison with Lessig's argument, and the possible future of democracy after training to become a better citizen through pop culture. I will post these after class.
Sorry if my arguments seem like nonsense. I'm confused myself.

Collective? Intelligence?

Some rather disjointed thoughts about Jenkins and his concept of collective intelligence:

Jenkins finds the distinction between "media" on the one hand and "delivery devices" on the other to be particularly important. How, then, is the "new" collective intelligence anything but the old collective intelligence repackaged into a new delivery device? People have been consulting the hive mind since time immemorial. At one time, when people's community activities were more varied and took them outside of their homes and neighborhoods more often, perhaps the minds with whom they interacted brought more diverse information to the table, as well. I'm envisioning, for example, a person faced with, say, a problem pertaining to some repairs done to his home. If that person was an avid churchgoer, for example, he might as a congregation member who is a contractor a question about the usual standards for doing these repairs, a congregation member who is a lawyer a question about whether he might sue, etc. How does what Jenkins envision as the new media version of the collective intelligence do anything but perhaps add more warm bodies to that model? And is some form of electronic collective intelligence simply supposed to replace the type of community that we're allegedly losing in real life?

Also, I'm interested in considering how Jenkins's ideas about the collective intelligence might tie into the discussion about deskilling and reskilling. I think, at heart, the Jenkins model works the best when everyone is an expert about something. He refers to collective intelligence as, "the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question" (27). Fine. Yet, he also argues that the difference between his concept of collective intelligence and the concept of the expert paradigm is that "[w]hat holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge- which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge- which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group's social ties" (54). What?

When Jenkins talks about how the knowledge community is this extraordinary source of energy in the community, it sounds like he's on the verge of becoming one of those people who uses crystals to heal cancer. Or maybe I'm just particularly cranky before I've had my coffee.

Deliberativeness

I have noticed my own difficulties in maintaining the mindset that Free Labor had so wisely suggested we assume at the beginning of the semester: one in which I try to understand what ideas each author genuinely has to contribute, rather than jumping right in to critique and problematize everything each author asserts.

I have had to remind myself of this mindset advice especially frequently with the Jenkins reading. Perhaps these efforts will be useful for my final paper, which is on self-surveillance and mental self-disciplining.

I am impressed by the parallels and intersections in the descriptions of the (digital) world offered by Jenkins in Convergence and by Stahl in his "gametime" construction. Trying hard to maintain my Zen-like non-judgmental mental control, I could say that Jenkins and Stahl see much of the same empirical data and draw very different conclusions about its potential long-range outcomes. Jenkins appears not to buy (capitalist pun) the Stahlist assertion that immersion in the digital world significantly deactivates deliberative capacities. Could it be that one of the characteristics that Jenkins wants to attribute to the collective intelligence evidenced by ad hoc "knowledge communities" (57) is a sort of deliberative effect that is greater than the deliberativeness of any of its individual (somewhat overwhelmed and non-deliberative) players?

It is interesting to note here the two distinct meanings of "deliberate" associated with its two distinct pronunciations: "to think about issues and decisions carefully" and "slow, unhurried, and steady." Jenkins may believe that the group process of knowledge communities can link these two meanings, even if each of the individual participants cannot.

I think Jenkins is likely to be wrong in this belief, and that the belief itself could serve to blunt useful critiques of communicative capitalism. Okay, maybe the whole purpose of the belief is to deflect critiques of communicative capitalism. Away goes the Zen mindset again! I would like to think that Jenkins could be proven false empirically if the investigation could be framed and conducted with enough deliberateness.

Who's poaching who?

From the Blue Man Group: "Right now, there is a virtually invisible network that links together millions of people who would be otherwise be completely isolated form each other. This exciting technology has grown to become an incredibly complex web of connections, that is so large and difficult to track that is would be practically impossible to estimate its total size. And even though most of us live alone in urban isolation, this system represents one of the few ways, all of our lives are intertwined. This system is... modern plumbing."

How about a parallel: Since World War II, American culture has survived multiple protests, the threat of nuclear annihilation from Soviet Russia, and a difficult transition into a new globalized economy. But now, a tide is turning, culture is shifting and attacks are mounted once again. This time, we cannot see the enemies as clearly for they are revolutionaries working from the bottom-up, bent on changing civilization as we know it; these radicals are... fans of the tv show, "Survivor."

Now that I've stolen a page from the blue men, let me proceed to comment on stealing in general. I suppose I am operating under the assumption of an author here, telling you want I want to tell you. I will find some quotes and pictures and "riff" on a few things... then "rip on" a few ideas...maybe rip off some too. However, I am concerned that this assumption is only that - a synthetic a-priori postulation that I in fact control some of the narrative directions of story lines, intentions and the antagonisms that make them go. Here is my question - am I, are you, are we really textual "poachers" in the free associative thinking context that seems to subsume this idea? I fear not (another story brought to you by the machine of late 20th century antihumanist thought). I raise this question for two reasons:

Superficially, with regard to Jenkins, there seems to be a problem squaring the social antagonism of participatory/fan culture with respect to its positive valence as contrasted to the centralized power of corporate media vs. the notion of "free" textual poaching. Antagonisms are structuring operations or conceptual matrixes of understnding, or that which or rather through which understanding is molded, maintained. If Jenkins is right, it seems he is more in line with Stuart Hall - as opposed to dominant readings there might be resistant readings (along with negotiated ones). However, resistance is resistance to something, not the creation of communal participation and the production of an internal aesthetic or logic ex nihilo. If this does in fact arise emergently, then and only then could Jenkins solve his own problem of accounting for a more productive notion of "collective" intelligence (I think Chad is on the right track in terms of calling this collective free labor or a set of skills; I'd say its collective resourcefulness or a mistaking of the immaterial product with the notion of immaterial knowledge).

Secondly then, it seems a fantasy that we are poachers. The lack of developing this idea of idea of intellection come selection and deflection more fully shows, I believe, that Jenkins lacks a nuanced discourse of post-Foucaultian ideology where superstructural elements of micro-resistance (fandom) are already accounted for and networked to produce a cultural episteme. Alas, I rob from a Michel to pay a Mark.