The Labornet

I think the “free labor” discussed in Terranova’s essay has always been present in, and in fact an integral part of, every segment of the entertainment/media industry. Music and movies at the first inception were never only marketed by their employed advertisers, but much also by word of mouth and personal recommendations. The updated conception of “free labor” embodied by “NetSlaves” and AOL chathosts merely reflects a side of cultural diffusion more akin to the notion of “labor,” or “unenjoyable work that is expectedly compensated monetarily.”

The free labor of things like blogs and Facebook obviously isn’t intentionally promoting the respective responsible media-parent (except in cases where people might say, verbatim, “Join Facebook!”); rather, it is the textual manifestation of social discourse. Were there a segment of the media industry that “allowed verbal social exchanges,” it would undoubtedly be considered a proponent of “free labor.” Just as the media industry previously capitalized on the human ability to speak, it is now capitalizing on the human ability to communicate over the internet.

The fact that 7 out of 15,000 AOL chathosts decided to “rebel” and ask whether AOL owed them money (ask, rather than demand, for they must not have had any conviction, knowing themselves to be “volunteers”) I think is another side of the stereotypical American “sue anyone for anything” desire for capital. That particular mindset seems to have, from what I know, appeared around or during the time of the Internet’s rapid growth. In fact, the two perhaps came together, but would it be mere coincidence? Though free labor did exist long before the advent of the World Wide Web, did perhaps its textual manifestation result in the American’s sudden realization that they were doing the media industry a favor, and a consequent demand for reparation? Did the Internet cause the lawsuits that led to the labeling of coffee cups with “Caution: Contents Are Extremely Hot?”

PS – Apparently not, since that was in 1992 and it’s extremely unlikely that the very first implementations of the Internet were already having such an effect. But maybe the Internet accelerated the production of such lawsuits through its more confrontational relationship to free labor (I believe we can say “definitely” if we count for the fact that it helped spread the story of that lawsuit widely very quickly).