You don’t have to look farther than the success of show’s like Black Mirror or Stranger Things to see how, currently, content creation matters to cultural production. While many of the fictional storylines presented in these shows are based on actual technology we have already created and oftentimes already use (across many decades), many of the episodes that employ technology as a jumping off point for cultural analysis speak to the direction with which the producers see our culture forming. For example, we now have the option to link security cameras to our homes that we can access through our mobile devices. We can see who arrives at our doorstep, despite physically being miles away. We have tracking systems in place (like Find My Family) to make sure our friends and relatives are safe while on the move. The creation of that sort of content over screens comes at a significant cost; a cost that has yet to be fully examined in terms of privacy breaches and complete elimination of personal boundaries.
In Yochai Benklers book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,” he argues that “the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: it makes culture more transparent and it makes culture more malleable.” (Benklers, 2006) This is a benefit of our evolving content creation system that is apparent across obvious software like Reddit and Wikipedia but also made available to larger organizations for eventual monetary value through wearable technology and data collection of genre preferences on streaming sites. Neoliberal free labor formed a baseline that culturally and economically, we have expanded to be the foundation of our social interaction and advertising models. Rainie and Wellman explain that: “With internet access and mobile phones, they have community immediately at their fingertips. And when they need a real hug or material aid, transit, cars and planes are often available.” (Rainie & Wellman, 2012) We are constructing the internet to give us more and more community, and I believe that we have crossed over ever so slightly since that statement was written to relying even more on the internet for connecting us with others for physical comfort/material support rather than using transit options.
That said, as we start to test out self-driving cars in a way that becomes more and more real and reliable, we will see our mobility start to be gathered in terms of data, more so than it already is by train companies, airlines and GPS systems. Sure, these technological innovations benefit both individuals and society as the decrease the percentage of human error on the road. But they also come at a larger cost to our personal freedoms.
I believe that Smyrnaios was absolutely correct in his analysis of that the morphing of the commodification of user-generated content has generally been “bad.” Of course, the benefits of user-generated content as a whole are instant. And there is little that humans love more than instant gratification. We love it so much that it allows us to put aside our thoughts of how our wearable technology and phones know store everything from our “private” conversations on our dating profiles to the exact timing of our menstrual cycles to track certain health risks. We are using screens to help us stop smoking, while we make the act of smoking itself more technologically advanced than ever. We are using certain technology to train us to concentrate on our work, while it has become the ultimate source of our distraction. YouTube celebrities are teaching us how to do our makeup (transform our faces) and C-list television stars are showing us what products to buy in videos our feeds present to us. “As people engage in and reshape social media, they construct new types of publicness that echo but redefine publicness as it was known in unmediated and broadcast contexts.” (Baym & Boyd, 2012) None of that information is theirs, or ours. It belongs to the brands, but even more than that, it belongs to the web as a whole. I would go so far as to say that without content creation, there is no social production. I can only imagine that Hauben is rolling in his grave.
We have already hit a point of no return when it comes to the data we have provided company after company with online in exchange for privacy and ultimately, personal technological freedom. What we have yet to reach is the turning point where we see the effects of that information exchange. I think it’s still a ways down the road, past mobile cars and beyond screens we don’t currently know to exist.
Resources
Baym, N. K., & Boyd, D. (2012). Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction (Rep.). doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.705200
Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Rep.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wellman, B., & Rainie, L. (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating System (Rep.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.