Sublime

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Pat... See more

For the company:The labor/ creator lets themselves be tracked, measured, and optimized, and the company gets to keep a copy of that data to run its business and maintain the relationship with the laborer for the long term. This is giving up some privacy for the laborer.

The conditions of this task-based work exemplify the worst of digital labor: it is freelance, poorly paid, and highly informal. Images, texts, and annotated videos flash before the eyes of microwork laborers, each task thoroughly detached from the product that it builds toward. As Jones writes, this “thins the aperture of knowledge to a tiny sliver... See more

At its inception between the 1960s and 1990s, the internet was imagined as a decentralized, horizontal and open space that would foster freedom and equality. Today, it is a collection of walled gardens, a hierarchical ecosystem ruled by a few gatekeepers who leverage access to data, attention and infrastructural capability to enclose users and comp... See more

To broaden our view: we must look at image production (and cultural production in general) not just as a specific vocation, but as a novel consumer behavior. The popular Technology Adoption Life Cycle framework proposes that different psychographic consumer segments—early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggard markets—can be penetrate... See more

Yelp became a place where people find their identity as an arbiter of local taste, and by fully internalizing such identity they meet others who feel the same way. They actualize such identity by pouring hours of labor to create content without any compensation besides the Elite status, which entails free access to exclusive events where fine dinin... See more

Subtitle: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution

Hyperconnectivity in the cultural realm promises abundance, decommodification and democratization. Everyone has at their fingertips an infinitely rich and varieduniverse of cultural products. New cultural forms and innovative practices have proliferated. Much digital culture is freely shared rather than bought and sold. And ever-expanding circles o

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