Differences & Repetitions

On December 9th, the website Patently Apple, which monitor’s the computer maker’s patent applications, came across a filing for an intriguing new application sharing feature.  In a nutshell, it would allow iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac apps (coming in 2011) to be downloaded not only from Apple’s proprietary servers, but also directly from devices belonging to one’s peers.  Here’s a graphic from Patently Apple outlining how the proposed feature would work:

The idea behind the peer-to-peer sharing function goes something like this.  Someone you know shows you an app.  You decide you like it, so you establish a wireless connection to your friend’s device and presto! The app is yours, without ever having to log on to Apple.  At some point down the line, one or the other of the mobile devices would report the transaction back to Apple, which would in turn arrange for the appropriate billing.

It’s difficult to draw meaningful comparisons between the analog and digital realms, but let me take a crack at it anyway.  Imagine for a moment that a friend of yours is reading a book.  You give it a quick inspection and determine that it looks interesting to you.  Instead of trudging to the library or bookstore, or ordering it online, your friend just happens to have another copy she’d be happy to sell to you directly.  And so on and so on, for every friend of hers who is also interested in the book.  (Somehow, the proceeds from each sale find their way back to the distributor.)

If Apple follows through on this patent application — and there’s no guaranteeing that it will — then it could fundamentally alter how we understand and go about transacting for digital goods.  In addition to a fixed, centralized point of point-of-sale, there would now be millions of decentralized, mobile points-of-sale.  Buttressed by a sufficiently robust incentive system (say, a free 99¢ app after 10 paid shares, or something to that effect), you can only imagine how many apps would end up getting sold between friends.  We are all salespeople now.

In some ways, Apple’s proposed peer-to-peer app selling system isn’t anything new.  People have long discovered new products through interactions with friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances.  It’s not a coincidence that these types of communications are the basis upon which viral marketing is built.  What is different, however, is the way in which Apple could conceivably close the gap between word of mouth advertising and a completed, commercial transaction.  Ideally, the two moments would become virtually indistinguishable from one another.

The other odd bit here, which no one seems to be commenting on, is this: under the proposed system, people would be paying Apple hundreds, even thousands of dollars for its hardware, which would in turn allow them to buy into the company’s mobile app sales force.  That’s right — you get to pay for the privilege of working for Apple Computer! This is assuming that the meager incentives you receive for selling are, on balance, incommensurate with the high cost of the hardware.  If it wasn’t abundantly clear by now, Apple truly has a bullpen full of evil geniuses in its employ.

Get ready to go to work.

My department at Indiana University, Communication and Culture, is looking for a top-notch person to fill an opening in digital/social media, at the level of assistant professor.  Check out the job announcement, below, and please circulate it widely.

I’m not a member of the search committee, by the way, so if you have questions it’s best to contact the committee chair–my colleague, Professor Barbara Klinger.

Indiana University

Department of Communication and Culture

Digital and Social Media

The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Digital and Social Media to begin Fall 2011.

We seek a humanities-trained Ph.D. whose primary area of research expertise and training is in digital media studies focused specifically on the social dimensions and potentials of digital media. This applicant will be expected to interact productively with colleagues in one or more of the department’s three areas: Rhetoric and Public Culture; Film and Media Studies; and Performance and Ethnographic Studies. The applicant must have a well-developed research program and teaching experience in digital and social media. She or he will be responsible for developing an introductory lecture course and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as for actively shaping and teaching graduate offerings in this field of study.

We particularly encourage applicants whose research involves specialization in areas such as:

• Social networking
• New technologies of political advocacy
• Ethnographies of new media
• Convergence and participatory cultures
• Digital video
• Games and gaming

Candidates are expected to have a strong research agenda and a commitment to excellence in teaching. Preference will be given to those who have their Ph.D. in hand by the date of appointment. Applicants should send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to: Professor Barbara Klinger, Chair, Digital/Social Media Search, Department of Communication and Culture, 800 E. 3^rd Street, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405. Review of applications will begin December 1, 2010 and continue until the position is filled.

Indiana University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. The university actively encourages applications and nominations of women, minorities, applicants with disabilities, and members of other underrepresented groups.

Great news for all of my readers who despise profligate government spending! My buddy Kembrew McLeod published a thought-provoking article in Tuesday’s edition of the Huffington Post called, “A Modest Free Market Proposal for Higher Education Reform.” In it, Kembrew outlines a compelling vision for ending the financial bloat that’s endemic to today’s public universities.

Among his proposals, he calls for corporate sponsorship of classes. Personally I’m looking forward to the day when the syllabus for my Introduction to Media class, which enrolls 250-plus students every fall, can finally say, “brought to you by the Walt Disney Company.” Kembrew also suggests that undergraduates be given the green light to utilize paid-for research assistance companies, which makes a good deal of sense, really, for how else are we to grow the economy in tough financial times? My favorite idea of his, though, is to incentivize cheap graduate student teaching. Soon-to-be PhDs, Kembrew writes, ought to be able to outsource their doctoral dissertations:

By no longer having to conduct original research themselves, graduate students will have more hours to spend in the classroom as adjunct instructors. Let’s do the math. PhD-Dissertations.com charges $17.00 per page, which adds up to $3,400 for a 200-page dissertation (plus, their website states that, “A discount of 10% applies to orders of 75+ pages!”). Although this might seem like a lot of money, consider the fact that most colleges pay adjuncts roughly the same, between $3,000 and $4,000, for each course taught per semester. Therefore, by just adding one extra course to his or her roster, a graduate student can pay for an entire dissertation in less than one academic year–while at the same time serving the university’s undergraduate teaching needs. Once this new generation of scholar/project managers enters the profession, there will be no more need for traditional professors.

Since I’m an overpaid university professor who’s contributing to all the bloat, I’ll happily step aside to let someone with a bachelors or masters degree do my job for, say, seven or eight bucks an hour. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be lapping it up over at PhD-Dissertations.com, where at long last I can put my skills and experience to some real use.

Looks A-M-A-Z-I-N-G…

// Antioch 05.08 // Rome 10.08 // Athens 12.08 // New York City 12.08 //
Helsinki 03.09 // Zagreb 05.09 // Heidelberg 06.09 // London 06.09 //Santa
Cruz 09.09//…

Seemingly discrete struggles over the conditions of university life have erupted around the world within the past year. These struggles share certain commonalities: outrage over precarious and exploitative conditions, the occupation of university spaces, and goals of reclaiming education from state and corporate interests. It is becoming increasingly apparent that recent struggles over the university are not merely discrete events. They express a wider collective desire for direct control over the means of production and forms of life; a desire to create relationships of learning, collaboration, and innovation beyond the university’s attempts to quantify
and discipline them.

Although the modern university has served the interests of the state and capital since its inception, the past thirty years have witnessed tightened ties with corporate, financial, and geopolitical interests. The subsumption of higher education under capital-driven business models has intensified the expropriation of the products of cooperative labor. With the proliferation of student-consumer and scholar-manager subjectivities, we increasingly find ourselves uncomfortably and often unwittingly occupying the role of active participants in these trends. As the global struggles over the past year have illustrated, however, opposition to these mechanisms of capture is mounting, as are creative strategies for alternatives and exodus. Struggles against the corporate university are linking up across borders; the slogan of the International Student Movement, “One World – One Struggle : Education is Not for Sale,” and the slogan of the Anomalous Wave, “We Won’t Pay for Your Crisis,” appear in actions across Europe, the Americas, and South Asia.

“Beneath the University, the Commons” builds on the work accomplished by activists, organizers, artists, and academics at the “Re-thinking” and “Re-working” the University Conferences of 2008 and 2009 (www.reworkingtheu.org), while expanding the scope of our discussions and bringing together more international scholars in order to address an increasingly volatile global situation. Our goal is to aggregate and accelerate our knowledge of university conditions and our collective acts of resistance to them, including alternative forms of engaging with each other and with the world. To this end, the 2010 conference will draw together a diverse set of people committed to exploring how we can understand, create, and experiment with the commons beneath the university. Our questions include but are not limited to:

//How do we enact and sustain occupations of the university in the exceptional times and spaces of the everyday?

//How do we generate an international “undercommons,” maintaining subversive positions as actors within, rather than of, the spaces of the university?

//How can unionization projects and occupation struggles learn from and collaborate with one another?

//How do we negotiate the line between stability and revolutionary effectiveness?

//How do we open up sustainable and livable spaces for radical research, education, and scholarship without being subsumed by the publish-or-perish disciplinary apparatus?

//How can we collaboratively map and share research, information, tactics, and cultures?

//In recognition that our conditions are a part of a larger set of global occupations and injustices, how do we link with social movements outside of and across the university?

This four-day event will consist of two days of conference sessions bracketed by two days of workshops, writing collaborations, skill shares, and plenty of time for sustained conversations among participants. We are accepting proposals both for formal papers and for non-conventional forms of participation.

– If you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract and a CV or brief biographical statement.

– If you would like to participate in another way (by leading a workshop, facilitating a roundtable, presenting media, etc), please submit a brief (1-2 pages) description of the proposed activity and include what kind of resources we would need to provide, along with a CV or brief biographical statement.

All proposals should be addressed to conference@beneaththeu.org, and must be received by January 1, 2010.

In the midst of revising my ever-evolving essay on the Amazon Kindle e-reader, I stumbled upon the company’s Mechanical Turk website. I was riveted.

The name “Mechanical Turk” pays homage to a faux automaton whose chess playing prowess captivated audiences throughout Europe in the late 18th century. Secretly, the robot’s skill derived not from any type of artificial intelligence but from a human chess master hiding inside the machine, who manipulated levers, pulleys, and magnets to create the illusion of self-directed game play. So too it is with Amazon Mechanical Turk, which the company refers to as “artificial artificial intelligence.”

The service is essentially a marketplace for 21st century piecework, the core of which are things called “human intelligence tasks.” These are, in Amazon’s words, “questions that need an answer,” or rather data processing tasks that the present generation of computers is ill-equipped to handle (e.g. writing product reviews, performing rudimentary research, identifying and tagging images, and more). Collectively, Mechanical Turk workers comprise a flexible, on-demand labor force whose job it is to respond to these questions. Compensation depends on the complexity and duration of the task. Typically it consists of micro-payments ranging from a few pennies to a few dollars per job, paid for by the party who has issued a specific information request.

Today I decided to take Mechanical Turk out for a spin, having registered a few weeks ago as a Turk worker. I made seven cents in about five or ten minutes, having chosen four separate tasks that could be completed in two minutes or less. Either way you count in, that translates into less than a dollar per hour.

One of the jobs I initially accepted involved image tagging. Basically, I was asked to type in what I thought might be an appropriate search term for a photo appearing on screen. I got rather squeamish when I was presented with a shoulders-up image of what appeared to be a teenage girl looking coyly over her shoulder. I wondered then about what might be the end-result of my work and ended up rejecting the task.

I gather from the transcript of a recent Berkman Center forum that Jonathan Zittrain has already expressed similar concerns about Mechanical Turk. With traditional piecework or even assembly-line labor the worker, however estranged he or she may be from the end-product, nonetheless typically has at least some sense of the resulting whole. But as Zittrain has pointed out, the same doesn’t generally apply to Mechanical Turk. There, laborers are so disaggregated that there’s virtually no sense of what one’s small contribution might ultimately result in.

I need to ponder this more carefully, as there seem to me some intriguing research applications were the Mechanical Turk service approached ethically. Without any type of ethical filter in place, however, I worry about its economic and political implications.

The Communication and Digital Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association is soliciting proposals for panels and individual papers that explore online participatory culture and the problematic concept of “free labor” in a network society.

Corporations are increasingly counting upon the activity of a “participatory consumer” to provide the content for sites that directly or indirectly generate revenue. Twenty five years ago, GNU operating system activist Richard Stallman famously distinguished the “free” in free software as “free as in free speech, not as in free beer.” What kind of “free” is the labor of a participatory culture? How does the appropriation of this work by major corporations complicate our understanding of “free labor”?

Possible topics include:

• Wikipedia and the Academy
• Gift Economies Online
• Free/Libre Open Source Software
• Intellectual Property
• Warez Subcultures
• “Immaterial” Labor
• Convergence & Consumer/Producers
• DIY Media
• Marx & the Digital Economy
• Fan Culture Appropriation

Submit a 250 word maximum proposal (hard copy or electronic) to:

Mark Nunes, Chair
Department of English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts
Southern Polytechnic State University
Marietta, GA 30060-2896
mnunes@spsu.edu

Deadline for Submissions: November 30, 2008

Note: Communication and Digital Culture is a themed area. Submissions off-theme should be submitted to:

• Internet Culture Area Chair, Montana Miller, montanm@bgnet.bgsu.edu
• Game Studies Area Co-Chairs, digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com

I’m not sure what to make of this:

Every other year, data released by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics provide a snapshot of the growth of part-time positions in the professoriate. This year — an off-year for that data — the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty job.

So I guess we tenure track faculty are now a minority in the academy. Could it be that we’re also an endangered species? It’s certainly odd to think about universities as places not abounding in professors (at least, as the term has tended to be understood).

I wonder: is this the university’s version of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, or between the administrative class and an increasingly “casualized” workforce (for whom there is nothing casual about their labors)? Are tenure tack faculty getting “compressed” out of existence, given how cuts in state education budgets, combined with increasingly high administrative salaries, would seem to demand a more “flexible” workforce at the bottom? For any economists out there who may be reading, please chime in anytime….

For more on the global distribution of wealth, see my previous entry, below. And for the complete story about the changing shape of university employment, check out today’s Inside Higher Ed.

I was just finishing up some research on Oprah Winfrey for my book when I came across this startling little nugget from Forbes.com: Microsoft maven Bill Gates no longer is the richest person in the world. He’s ceded the throne to über-investor Warren Buffett, after 13 gilded years at the top. Actually, he’s slipped to number three, one notch below telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helú.

Before you go shedding any tears over Mr. Gates’ fall from grace (or from the top of the Forbes list, at any rate), be sure to keep this tidbit in mind: the guy’s still worth $58 billion, which is $2 billion more than he was worth this time last year. He’s clearly not hurting.

And for those of you keeping track of the concentration of wealth, here’s some depressing news. According to Forbes.com, there are 1,125 billionaires on the planet whose “total net worth…is $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year.” Yes, that’s right–at a time when real wages are falling for the rest of us, the wealthiest people in the world got about 25% richer. So why not put that in your pipe and smoke it? They sure do.

It was enlightening to watch the ABC News/Facebook/WMUR Presidential debates this past Saturday night, for many reasons. I was aware of Obama and Huckabee’s having won the Iowa caucuses, but honestly, I hadn’t kept up much in terms of who-stands-for-what. The Indiana primary (where I live) doesn’t occur until May, which is about two months after the Democratic and Republican nominees will have all but been determined. (The states with primaries later than ours are Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, and West Virginia.) I lived in New Hampshire many years ago, home of the nation’s first primary, and was I born in New York, a state teeming with electoral votes. It’s strange now living somewhere that barely registers in Presidential elections, other than as a place that can be counted on to go red literally within minutes of the polls closing.

Two things struck me most about the debates themselves. First, I appreciated seeing former Libertarian Ron Paul mix it up with the Republicans. His presence there changed the whole tenor of things, try as the other candidates might to stay “on message” and stick to their don’t-let-them-seem-rehearsed sound bites. Though I have no intention of voting Republican, it was still refreshing to hear someone, finally, talking about the implications of the massive devaluation of the dollar that’s occurred under Bush 43′s watch. My only regret was that ABC News excluded Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic half of the debate. No doubt his presence there would have broadened the scope of the conversation and made it much more interesting.

Second, I was flabbergasted, as was the studio audience at New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College, by a comment made by the debate moderator, ABC News’ Charlie Gibson. He premised a question to the Democratic candidates about tax cuts by saying, “If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on.” Huh? Did I miss something here? Since when did it become routine for professors to make $100,000 per year or more? Apropos, there’s a story in today’s Inside Higher Education that talks about the public’s misperception of the nature of, and compensation for, academic labor by full-time faculty. No wonder folks still can’t manage to shake the myth of the ivory tower. Heck–most of what’s in my office is made of plastic.