Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-For-Everybody

I keep thinking about what is missing in the DIY economy, who gets left out. Is it the same people who traditionally have labor that is considered worthless? DIY youth, social participation, and interactivity are all good, but what does it mean if that very thing ("affective labor," in Hardt and Negri's terms) is the hottest commodity of the information age? And I'm doing it, expressing myself and my creativity, but you are turning it to profit. Nicholas Carr calls this "sharecropping" and he has a point in his cynicism about Web 2.0. Do-It-Yourself can bleed too quickly into Do-It-For-Everybody which can morph into Do-It-For-Them ("them" often, these days, being Google).

I'm thinking about this a lot lately because soon after TechnoTravels (HASTAC II) I'm moving on to a conference in Tokyo on "Digital Youth" hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies at Temple University (Azabu Campus) and Sophia University. David Slater is organizing this year's conference along with Mizukoshi Shin of Tokyo University and my colleague at Duke, Anne Allison. Participants are invited from Japan, Hog Kong, Australia, Taiwan, Canada, and the U.S. It's an exciting roster and we will be talking, transnationally, about how young people use mobile technologies to transform personal identity, social connection, and productive activity.

My concern is the bi-directionality of that transformation. How do youth use mobile technologies to transform their relationships? But then how do those creating mobile technologies use youth activity/productivity for data mining and even market research (all those Google stats and social graphis) for the next generations of devices that they then cell to youth so they can transform their next set of relationships. There is some slippage between DIY and Do-It-For-Them. Them R Us? Not so sure. Often those who are not being paid for their labors in this economy are the artists, musicians, and writers who weren't really remunerated in the old economy either. Who exactly is the "everybody" in Clay Shirky's (and I love the book, btw) "Here Comes Everybody"?  How do we parse not just consumers and producers in the "everybody" world, but the transformation of the prosumer into what Nicholas Carr calls the "sharecropper" (I do the work, you take the profits)?  That's a serious issue I'm trying to work through these days.

That's what my paper will be about. The open access issue I keep mulling on this blog is mired in this same willingness to see "everybody" as equal on the DIY creativity side and the same willingness not to notice when "everybody" is gathering all our data and using it for less than egalitarian, collective, collaborative purposes. More will follow as I elaborate these ideas . . . I'll keep you posted!