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Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan from NYU has an excellent article on MSNBC that calls out the shortcomings of over-valuing social production in reference to the recent Time Magazine article that gave "You" the Person of the Year award. Well, thank you, Time, for hyping me, overvaluing me, using me to sell my image back to me, profiling me, flattering me, and failing to pay me…Time framed the Person of the Year as "you." That should sound familiar. Almost every major marketing campaign these days is about empowering "you." .."You" have freedom of choice... "You" could customize "your" mobile phone... After all, "you" are an "Army of One."..
But to quote the Who, "Who are You?" Are you the sum of your consumer preferences and MySpace personae? What is your contribution worth? It’s worth money to someone, if only as part of a whole. ..Google, for instance, only makes money because it harvests, copies, aggregates, and ranks billions of Web contributions by millions of authors who unknowingly grant Google the right to capitalize, or "free ride," on their work. Who are you to Google? To Amazon? Do "you" really deserve an award for allowing yourself to be rendered so flatly and cravenly? Do you deserve an award because media mogul Rupert Murdoch can make money capturing your creativity via his new toy, MySpace?...
...Time ...describes this "Web 2.0" phenomenon as a "revolution." Let’s be very careful about that term. First of all, a real revolution would be a radical rupture in the flow of history... what we now call "user-generated content" has always been a major part of the American media... ..Take a look at a copy from 1910 of the (New York) Daily Forward... and you will find a major portion of it devoted to letters from its community of readers. People wrote in asking for advice. Others responded with advice. The Forward... made itself essential by facilitating public deliberation and giving voice to the voiceless…
And ever since the rise of radio producers realized the value of the "real," the authentic, and the common. Audiences love to hear or see people whom are no more talented or important than they are. It’s comforting to know that with a little luck someone might care what I think… It’s part of a slippery slope between true democratic culture and crass commercial culture. Because we all matter equally in the polis we pretend we all might matter equally in the public square. Granting that illusory wish can be very profitable…
We do ourselves a major disservice when we exaggerate the revolutionary power of ourselves as individuals. Narcissism may be good marketing. But it’s not good for humanity. I could not have said it better. Perhaps I could have started an entry on Wikipedia on the limitations of social production…
posted by Noel Le @ 8:04 AM | Free Culture Movement
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