The Factory of the Mind

 A reflection on Søren Mørk Petersen’s article “Loser-Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation” and Clay Shirky’s video “How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World”

Generally, people do not like to work when they are not getting paid to do so. Generally, people simply will not work if there is not a juicy paycheck at the end of it all. However, when it comes to the hours and hours spent surfing the Internet, not many people seem to notice or mind that they are performing unpaid labour.

When talking about user or “loser-generated content” (Peterson), one is referring to the text, photos, information, comments, videos and links that Internet users share with one another. The more effort a user puts forth in contributing to the Web, the more money corporations make. The potential problem is: users do not consider their time spent on the Web as labour. Generating content for the Web, however, could easily be a full time job. Many people do not sit down at their computers, open up Facebook and think of it as something they could, or should, be paid for. Perhaps this is because the labour is not physically demanding or perhaps this is because the Web offers something in return. “The huge amount of work that goes into each personal site is paid back in an affective currency: the joy and significance these sites bring to their users” (Peterson).

Though most people are not paid to surf the net, there is still a utopian promise at the end of the day. People do not often expect their favourite websites to disappear over night. However, if people stopped contributing their content to the Web, perhaps one day, the Web would disappear.


         Then what? 


         Since people have stopped contributing, there is nothing for them in return. It all boils down to a system of favours. The users create the content and are reimbersed with services as a part of the bargain.

On the other hand, consider how the Internet is helping the people. For some, the Internet is responsible for fame and fortune. For others, the Internet is a means of gathering awareness and money for a cause. Though only a select few labourers receive these bonus cheques for their time spent online, it is undeniable that the Internet is generous in this respect.

Perhaps the Internet is not the only generous partaker in the bargain. As Clay Shirky explains in the video below, users of the Internet are able to spread their generosity, not only by working to create content for free, but because of the causes they stand for.

Our free time online has become a shared global resource that Shirky describes as cognitive surplus: “the ability of the world’s population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global projects.” Whether it is a conscious effort or not, we are all contributing to this cause. Our efforts may be trivial, much like "LOL cats" or instrumental, like Ushahidi, but each contribution is necessary to maintain the cognitive surplus- somewhere between participation and exploitation of labour.

To conclude, we are doing favours for the Internet and the Internet provides us the means to do so. We feed the abyss of the Web because we want to, whether it is for attention, to make someone smile, or to promote a cause for humanity. In the end, the back and forth interaction between the user and the Web will include exploitation to some degree, but I feel that the user can just as easily utilize the Web’s power for the better.