Wednesday, February 27, 2008

User participation in the neo-Fordist economy

After describing her three modes of Web experience, McPherson goes on to explain that these experiences are in fact largely illusory. One illusion she discusses is the feeling of actively participating in the production side of the neo-Fordist economy. McPherson writes, “Rather than being subjected to capital, the worker is now incorporated into capital, made to feel responsible for the corporation’s success” (207). It’s unclear whether McPherson is referring only to employees of a company, but her assertion can be applied elsewhere. Consider online enterprises such as MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. These are the types of businesses profiled by Time magazine in their 2006 Person of the Year, “You.” These companies all rely on user-generated content. All of these websites have employees like any other business, but it is the customers who are contributing most of the material.


This much we already knew. What’s interesting is when we consider McPherson’s comment about being made to feel responsible for a corporation’s success. It’s one thing for employees to feel this way, but now even average customers sincerely feel like producers as well as consumers of a single product, even if that product is owned by News Corp. After spending time on websites like Facebook, one begins to feel like part of the team. I’ve sometimes felt that the successes of Facebook as a business (more users, more profit, etc.) are somehow a tiny victory for me. And what’s brilliant—and maybe just a little scary—is that Facebook et al don’t need advertising to tell me to feel this way; rather, the feeling of participation and responsibility is inherent in the structure of the website and business. This seems to add a bit of a twist to McPherson’s argument about these experiences being illusory, since by adding content to a Web 2.0 site like these, one really is making a unique and substantive contribution to the business.

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