Dwayne Monroe:
>Sadly, the original link -- which was to shag's departed blog -- is no
>longer useful. Here's a link to an LBO shag post in which she riffs on one
>of the elements: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-February/002419.html>
awww. thanks for the shout out Dwayne. Here's the post:
Baking your own bread and circuses
Joy. Dwayne Monroe has introduced another techtopic for Lame Brained Onanists (LBOers) to ponder. I love it when we get dickswinging about that sort of thing. This time, Dwayne's issue is a piece by James Boyle, Web's never-to-be-repeated-revolution. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f3fe9c4a-4bd1-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html
On the main issue, I disagree with Boyle who claims that a revolution like we saw with the Internets (tm) and the Webs (tm) will never happen again. This is silly.
Still, what I really want to get on is this notion that anyone was just standing there, idly looking the other way, while the Internets (tm) and the Webs (tm) got out of control and only recently did they decide to control it.
Horse puckey. "They" never did that. As Joseph Turow points out in *Breaking Up America,* there has always been some big corporation or two or 556 that wanted a piece of the action.
One of their first big dreams was to use technology to segment the population, delivering up content based on demographics -- such as the way your Time magazine has a different cover depending on your ZIP Code. What they were hoping for with the Internets (tm) was a way to do the very same thing, shuffling people into segments where they'd be served up appropriate content & advertising according to a demographic profile.
This way, they could make more money because advertising to people with the right disposable income would be more lucrative than advertising to those don't have it. Instead of having to "eat it" in the days when you couldn't target as well, you can really price according to the target market. You didn't have to waste marketing money and advertising bucks on those who aren't worth your while.
If you read some of the dissertations that come out of the major tech unis, they are all about how to Make.Money.Fast.on.the.Internets. All the research on networking? It's all coming to bear fruit as people apply those concepts to things like LinkedIn, Frappr, you name it. We participate in it. We help them advertise. We help them market. We help them brand. A company gives you this doohicky "for FREE!" and you give them information, access to your site statistics, etc.
It seems like we're making out. But, are we?
These technological advances and tweaks might begin as the idea of some geek trying to do something just because she can, but it generally gets somewhere because someone sees money in it. And that revenue model? It's the same model we've had for awhile: advertising.
When you get it for free, you're paying for it, you just don't realize it. You pay for it when you use Frappr because someone is collecting that data and it's all hugely valuable to someone, somewhere. You give up a little information, your location (an IP address), and you get something, seemingly, "for FREE!" [1]
Another problem, as Henwood has pointed out, is that by paying for everything in such a non-obvious way, it encourages us to devalue the labor of the people who produce the information and entertainment we enjoy. We want them to put out for free and, as some bloggers have said, their readers don't even want to click on a google ad every so often to help "pay for it."
What's going on rationalization. With technological advances we can see how we're often in a double-bind: it both makes our lives easier, freeing up time, and it can make it so we actually have more work to do.
Ask any professor who's moved through the world when there were typewriters to one dominated by PCs and Macs. Increasingly, the professor takes on the work of word processing. Or my mother's gripe: having to pump your own gas. Heck, even a supermarket was a way of organizing things so that the shopper did more of the work. How often are you pouring your own soda at a fast food joint these days?
This is a form of rationalization: using technology to make more consumers do more work. List them, list all the things you can think of where you actually do more work now, to buy something, than you used to do.
See what I mean?
In this case, technology has unloaded the "work" of serving our bread 'n' circuses on to the consumer. You can call this democratization. You can whine about cat bloggers. It's happening.
And we're paying for it, in more ways than one.
Oh, and don't forget to map yourself on my Frappr Map, 'k? http://www.frappr.com/bitchlab :)
----------------------------------- panem et circenses:
This har har (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=133764) which is a spoof of SouthPark called GooglePark, led me to this post from Scobleizer about user generated content at http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/11/03/yahoos-new-pretty-maps-are-doomed-and-so-are-microsofts/
Scobleizer is right. This is what I was calling baking our own bread 'n' circuses. 'Users' are baking their own bread 'n' circuses -- otherwise known as 'original user generated content' and we're 'paying for it' in ways we don't even understand yet.
It seems "free," but there are people making a ton of money on it. Thus, it is costing us -- some way, some how. Most of the people who read this blog don't have to worry about the business of the Web. But now, it's my bread and butter. The corporate clients never had to worry about it. Move to the land of small businesses and Make.Money.Fast.on.the.Internets start ups? It's all about page ranking, link popularity, keywordage - the coin of the Intertubes.
What is interesting is that if you have done both Google Adsense and Google Adwords -- i.e., you've been both an advertiser and someone who puts ads on a blog or Web site -- you can immediately see how to make money. But, so often, these two roles are separated. Most bloggers want to bring in the bucks and have little reason to think they should advertise using conventional techniques. Similarly, people who advertise don't often make their money by producing advertising, they sell content -- though there are some obvious exceptions (like Good Housekeeping. Or, hell, any checkout stand mag!)
Most bloggers put up their ads and then wonder why they don't make any money. First, it's a numbers game. Second, it's a keyword game. Third, those keywords have to be connected to advertisers spending bucks. Finally, you have to have a target audience that is attracted to those keywords.
For the rest, people who are just using blogger Google Ads for a little gravy money, it just seems like an extra that you could do without. But muliply that sort of thing milions and millions of times, and you got serious money. Distracted by this seeming freebie from Google, no one's paying attention to the entities making the big buckaroos.
The big fish have the time and money to put their understanding of the two, Adwords and Adsense, together in order to game the system. Game the system is the wrong phrase, really. They're just doing what they're supposed to do. But, it takes time and capital, which will pretty much assure that only certain content is going to get served up as everyone rushes to follow the models set forth by the winners, who'd already started out with a considerable advantage: money and time to figure out how to game the system.
So, that's another way we're "paying for it." Distracted, we're paying attention to the wrong things. And that will always get you in trouble, whether it is croaks from the frogs of war or not. (http://blog.pulpculture.org/bitchossary/)
---------------------------------------------- Unwitting porn-supporting feminists of Bloglandia - or: Rent Party!
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/wpa:@field(DOCID+@lit(wpa221011010)
"Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord's scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one's difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born."
I thought of it when I read a blogger sneer about advertising and blog begging a couple of weeks ago. I thought of how people actually used to hold rent parties in days of yore. This is the second time I've read sneering about taking blogads and the like from the blog of a relatively prominent and respected feminist blogger. I'm not bothering to link because I have little interest in mud wrestling at the moment.
However, I have to laugh -- no cackle is more like it. Said blogger hosts at blogspot and fancies that she isn't spending any money on said blogging, let alone promoting the forces of marketing/advertising and the like.
I cackle with fascinated glee.
If you're hosting it at blogspot for free, you are doing a whole helluva lot to support your sponsor, Google. That's right: without even knowing it, you've been bought. You're being used for your content, for the social networking information you reveal every time you post a link, for the information about how people get to your site, the browser and operating stats, you name it. It's all being used as information then sold to marketers and then sold to companies on how to sell their products on the InterTubes (tm). And all of it, as always, is used by Google's own team to craft its business plans.
Likewise, her Haloscan comments are in existence because they are a *vehicle* for the Google ads just below the comments, not the other way around. No one wanted to help your ass and give you something for free. They wanted to use you and your commenters to make a buck. Shocking. We need money for food and housing in order to live. IT's shocking, in this here 21st century, I know.
Bummer, you are already 0wned and the worst part is, you don't know it. You closed your eyes to it and imagined the labor required to create Google, Blogger, the templates, the systems administrators, the office staff, the project managers, the coders, and the technical writers all just magically came into the office, pumped out "free" stuff and never asked for a paycheck.
Wheeeeeeeeeeee. It's Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Google gives me stuff for Freeeeeeeee! I don't have to pay a thing! Woooooooooooty.
Let me go down the list to all the advertising you're doing because you accepted a "free" tool to promote your own blog, a "free" tool which you imagined wasn't paying someone's salary or lining their capitalist bank account somehow: Onestat, Sitemeter, Blogorama, Rate Me, Technorati, Frappr, Diarist, Blogstreet, Blogorama, Bloglines, Top Blogs, Extreme Tracking, Blog Hop, Yahoo!
Enough? I'm sure there's more. I'm tired of typing the obvious. All of these outfits are out there to make a profit. They follow a different business model than you are used to. Some, for instance, offer something 'free' with the requirement that you dump code in your template. By getting tons of link backs to their site, it raised its page ranking. They can then sell the backend - much as Barry did at Alas, a blog, in order to help companies get better ranking for their business sites.
Translation Help: You may be a porn supporter without even knowing it.
But, oh no, no one's been bought and sold here! Con job, maybe. But next time, when you talk about how you blog for free, remember you ain't blogging for free. You are giving valuable information to someone. They wouldn't spend money giving away free shit, if they didn't think they'd make money off it. Even if all they do is use the social networking info -- who visits you, who you visit, who you link to, who links back, etc. -- they can turn that into information that is pretty valuable to someone.
Others may use their backend as 'link farms' and they may also take advertising. Voila! That advertising spot is desired by advertisers because of the traffic and page ranking. More link backs, better ranking, higher advertising rates for site that gave you something for Freeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!
It's called Baking Our Bread and Circuses:you're bought and sold just like you are bought and sold when you take blogads. But at least when someone takes blogads we know they're taking blogads. At least when someone takes blogads that someone knows they are being bought and sold.
So, please spare me with the purity bullshit. I'm not even going to get into the whole issue of how one supports oneself in order to have the time to blog because, again, I'd like to meet the lucky souls who never participate in this fucked up system and do its dirty work. We are, all of us, bought, sold, signed, sealed and delivered, prostrated to the bloodied engines of racism, heterosexism, ablism, and exploitation. We have to be: we have to earn livings.
But back to the Rent Party thing. Rent parties were like the blog begging Ms Pure derides. And they took place, often, in a context very unlike the context of the upper-middle class, white world of blogging. As Carol Stack shows in All Our Kin, people had a different code of behavior where it was understood that you had an obligation to something called a community. Hence, all kinds of things went on that were like Rent Parties: ways people came up with to help one another in the face of severe economic and racist injustice. I'm not going to glorify it, Carol Stack sure didn't. In other words, let's not forget that people forged those social practice *because* they were oppressed. Removing them from that context and upholding their actions as virtuous, as if they could be assessed from a realm of Platonic Ideas, would be re-writing history. It would be ignoring the reasons for that need for community in the first place: economic and racial oppression.
I have two more words, too, but I'll refrain.
[1] Said blogger felt she was free to say what she pleased, unhibited by the fact that she takes blogads or begs. No one will try to shut her up. Uh, as this blog's imperiled existence reveals, you can't even say what you want, with only your own conscience to answer to. That's because some asshole (s) have decided they need to cause me grief, in time and money, by attacking my site with a Denial of Service attack apparently because of what I have to say. We could attribute it just to crazy spammers, but if that's the case (and I hope it is), then I do hope someone can point me to instances in which people have lost their hosting account, forcing people to spend money when they didn't have to before, because they were attacked by spammers. Not only would it put my mind at ease, but it might put me in touch with people who know how to deal with the problem.
But if it isn't a spam attack and this is politically motivated, then I'm afraid we aren't free to speak our minds. We aren't free to promote our own political points of view or write our own manifestos or, heaven forbid, offer pointed critiques of the actions and words of our blogmates in Bloglandia. After all, if my site were causing the same problems hosted on Blogger, I'd be booted there too. For the same reasons my old host booted us. Somebody wants money or data or free advertising or content out of you folks, even Blogspot.
So, in the immortal words of BlackAmazon: No. Just No. Also? Kiss My Furry Fat Ass. A nice big wet one, please.
---------------------------------------- Baking your own bread and circuses, deux
Dang! I love the whole "user generated content" thing. In the world of how.to.make.money.fast.on.the.internets, it's all the rage to talk about how the business model is about getting people to generate the content -- blogs, flickr, etc. -- and then making money via third party advertising, selling data collected by tracking your browsing habits, etc. etc.
Build the social networking infrastructure, the people will come to bake their own bread and circuses! (entertainment). No need to hire illustrators or writers or editors, so you cut out the overhead.
I absolutely love the irony of bitching about that (and the ways we're paying for this approach to civic life) and then watching as a company like <a href="http://http://www.chevyapprentice.com/">Chevrolet</a> just manipulates people into playing right along, spreading the word through buzz so they hardly have to spend money on advertising any more either.
They've just conned all of us into doing the work for them. Think about how much more of the work we do to buy consumer goods these days. You used to have your gas pumped for you. Now you don't. You pour your own drinks at fast food places. Olive Garden gives you a carafe of wine, and you pour your own. Now they've got us baking our own cultural analysis and on and on -- all so someone out there can make money and all without us noticing a whole lot.
It's just hilarious when you think about how devilishly clever it all is. And they can even nab you like this: in order for me to engage in cultural critique, I have to link to the fuckers so y'all will know what I'm talking about in case you haven't seen it elsewhere. Even complaining about it advances the cause! And complaining about the complainer will advance their cause!
[1] Someone asked what I mean by baking our own 'bread 'n' circuses'. It's a reference to a phrase used by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. It refers to the cheap entertainment provided by the Romans to the citizenry in order to pacify them. In this case, the government isn't doing it. We are. We make our own entertainment with blogs, forums, etc. The marketing people call it "user generated content." It's that content upon which huge empires are being forged with Adsense and Adwords.
[2]and an IP address because information about how many people LIE is also vastly important, even to social scientists who have similar methods of finding out if people lie. E.g, the NORC survey has a question, "What is your astrological sign?" to see if people lied about their birth month)