Towards a New Informational Capitalism?

Copenhagen.
The next COST298 speaker is Serge Proulx, whose interest is in forms of user contribution in Web 2.0. Here, users are voluntary contributing en masse to create large amounts of content, and this is increasingly harnessed by corporations as value added to their services. Why are users so ready to contribute in this way - are they voluntary participating in a new form of information capitalism, and expropriating the social link put in the service of the economic sphere of production, and/or are they participating in the emergence of a new form of individualised mass media, a form of symmetric media which may empower users through the social capital they construct, potentially leading to the creation of a more participative democracy?

There are two logics in conflict here - the trading or market logic which economically harnesses online contributions by expropriating the social link in the service of trade, advertising, and marketing, and the social or emancipatory logic which develops alternatives to established models in the creative industries and thus works towards the empowerment of the user. These logics are increasingly entangled, not least through the corporate convergence between the two sides (through the purchase of NowPublic by Associated Press, for example, or Yahoo!'s collaboration with Reuters in YouWitnessNews).

Gensollen distinguishes three types of user communities - peer-to-peer networking communities, advice exchange communities (e.g. sharing product ratings and recommendations), and epistemic communities (which produce knowledge that is linked to the marketing of complex goods).

So far, capitalism had minimised the importance of the social link in the production of economic value; this new informational form of capitalism, by contrast, harnesses the social link in the process of value production, and by participating on Web 2.0 platforms users are becoming not only content but also data providers who enrich the corporate data bases of Web 2.0 service providers. This process allows user profiling and thus a more precise targetting of users through advertisements.

There emerge from this legal and moral issues of precisely identifying responsibilities for information found online - who is most responsible for the content? Technical choices (in relation to network architecture or software design, for example) are also ethical choices here - this must be addressed.

Technorati : COST298, capitalism, ethics, information, participation, produsage
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