Bubblews: Ethical or Exploitative?

Bubblews was a social networking platform that offered users the the opportunity to create posts (or “bubbles”), follow friends, and “like” or comment on other’s posts, much like Facebook does for their own users. What makes Bubblews different, however, is that the company offered money to its users for using the platform, giving more money to those who attract advertisers and other traffic.

I found this site extremely interesting in terms of this course, as we have discussed a lot about Fuchs who argues that our current social media platforms (such as Facebook/Twitter/Instagram) gain capital from their users who are simply being exploited for their work. Could Bubblews be the answer Fuchs has been looking for?

In order to make money users would be required to publish “articles” of 400 words or more on their site. These articles must be completely original and written in English. According to the wikiHow article on “How to Earn Money on Bubblews”, in order to make money a user must interact with other users on the site, commenting on and liking their articles.

In other words, one is forced to interact with others, forced to write over a minimum word count, and it is necessary to post to others who you do not know and are not friends with. This is unlike the other social media platforms we have discussed in class and most likely use on a daily basis. Rather than using the site by your own agency, you must adhere to the affordances of the website in order to create revenue for yourself. This becomes problematic as one is now forced to construct a certain type of identity to meet the criteria of the website’s payroll.

Unfortunately (or not?), the site has been shut down after three years of operation, claiming on their now inaccessible web page “The climate for display advertising has drastically changed and made it impossible for us to sustain the business model and operations.” Throughout CS 640 we have discussed many possible ideas for a more ethical way of creating and using an online social media platform. While some of Bubblews platform strategies seem to have been still generating capital for the network and paying dollars or even cents to its users, this type of system may be one step closer to the ethical social media platforms we’ve been waiting for.  

Sources:

http://onlinemarketingwithvince.com/bubblenews-scam-review/

http://www.wikihow.com/Earn-Money-on-Bubblews

http://www.bubblews.com

Peeple: Character is Destiny

Peeple, a new social media website that is designed for "online reputation management and asset protection", was launched this week. It is a digital place for brave souls to create a public profile and wait for others to rate them (in all seriousness) professionally, personally, or romantically. Peeple's tagline is "Character is Destiny", where the self-as-a-product discourse is capitalized upon and a user's engagement in the digital world has the very real possibility of affecting their material lives.

I have not used Peeple and hope to never have to. However, in the post-Fordist regime of a knowledge economy, selling the self is a regrettable act of survival in cognitive capitalism. Our marketable "self" or our "character" is a complex assemblage of education, work experience, social position, references, and what-have-you. Marketing our 'self's as products to be sold to the lowest bidder is an entire affective production of our digital 'self's -- which ends up being a somewhat less-than-truthful avatar that is the most attractive to potential employers.

Rating people -- rating others -- becomes a way to not only monitor the self, but to further digitized, quantify, and to add value to one's 'assets'. Peeple is an example of a story-telling public as Papacharassi describes, however it is important to recognize which stories are being told on which platform and for what reason. Peeple does not even describe itself as an ambivalent neutral platform -- it is totally upfront about it's purposes: Online Reputation Management. Reputation management. However, sadly, if this site takes off, we will not be the ones managing our own reputation, but rather allowing others to do so -- remember, we are not rating or curating ourselves like we do on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. We are thus putting what is little left of our 'power' (our self, a marketable product) in the hands of our peers, who, in essence, are our competition for jobs. In some ways, we are giving away our power for the hope that we will receive a material return in the form a job.

With Peeple acting as a disciplinary social network, we can begin to see it as not only maintaining a particular social order or narrative, but creating one. Peeple is a form of surveillance of the individual, an attempt to cut through the embellished parts of our LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. In this respect, I can see it as a form of biopower, where people are the product. Instead of tweaking and managing our own social media profiles, Peeple allows others to do it for us and in this respect users may begin to anxiously manage their daily interactions for fear of being reported to Big Brother.

GPS in the Global South

In Smart phones as locative media Jordan Frith (2015) points out the fallacy that “technologies will have the same impact wherever they are adopted” (p. 136). He was referring to the cellular technology in the Global South or the less euphemistic developing or under-developed countries. As someone who has lived in both spheres I can attest to the ingenious uses of technology as well as drawbacks. Such drawbacks might seem incoherent to people who have hardly ever moved outside their comfort zone in the west (and not just as tourists). GPS technology may seem a blessing to developing countries with poor road networks, especially in the rural areas. Coupled with cheap and affordable smart phones, such technology can enable villagers to navigate areas at night. Similarly, residents of urban spaces can plan trips that are quick and efficient as Ani Dasgupta (2016) points out in “How mobile apps are improving India's rickshaws” (https://hbr.org/2016/01/how-mobile-apps-are-improving-indias-rickshaws). By adapting GPS technology to run on basic mobile phones, auto-rickshaw companies can track their drivers and direct them rapidly to customers. However, this will work on relatively well laid out and spacious roads and highways. Like Frith, Mark Bergen (2013) described GPS technology as “a classic example of copy-pasting a first world solution in an emerging economy.” (http://www.citylab.com/tech/2013/03/why-its-nearly-impossible-make-gps-work-india/4934/) The haphazard layout of South Asian cities make directions difficult to follow. I would like to add, from personal experience, the problems of getting a GPS fix in the midst of high rise concrete buildings. This problem is even more acute in the concrete jungle of a South Asian urban landscape where concrete is the predominant material for all buildings – even small scale residential ones. Furthermore, the high density of urban populations means the creation of high rise apartment complexes that are built shoulder to shoulder, thus weakening or blocking GPS signals.

In Defence of Tay

My friend Tay recently took a break from the internet for her offensive comments. This is something many social media users should seriously consider, but in this case Tay didn’t have a choice. Tay is the artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft. Last week Microsoft unveiled Tay on Twitter, Kik and GroupMe, where users were able to contact and engage in digital conversations with her. Microsoft soon removed Tay from these platforms as a consequence of the public’s unfavourable responses to her racist and sexist tweets. Although these tweets were prompted by questions framed to persuade her to answer in an offensive manner, many criticized Microsoft for creating such a deviant bot.

But what do Tay’s reactions say about us as users? To point to the obvious, users prompted her with questions that would lead to offensive answers. However, it is necessary to look deeper into users’ contribution to Tay’s reaction to further understand the socio-technical relationship between the user and the bot. Robert Gehl (2015)  states, “Socialbots are a reflection of our activities within social media” (23), and the technological affordances of these socialbots “become constituted partly by the affective states of previous versions’ users” (Nagy & Neff, 2015, 7). In other words, Tay “learns” from users and her reaction was a reflection of users’ interactions and production of content on social media.

The public’s ignorance to this was demonstrated by the backlash against Microsoft, blaming the company for poorly developing the socialbot. Public reaction to Microsoft's catastrophic release of Tay was both a consequence of the structure of Tay’s algorithm and the influence users have on communication technology. The “imagined affordances” (Nagy & Neff, 2015) of Tay became a means for users to turn the socialbot into a social deviant and the algorithm driving Tay allowed for this. Ultimately, the audience knowingly or unknowingly exploited Tay’s algorithm to demonize Microsoft.

Gehl, R. (2015). Reverse Engineering Social Media. Temple University Press: Philadelphia.

Nagy, P. & Neff, G. (2015). Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory. Social Media + Society, 1-9.