Create Your Own University

This is going to be a big topic for me in the near future...

... the Web’s infinite niches make for richer possibilities for identity construction—it creates, as it were, a bubble in personal identity. We thereby need a platform where our social production—in this case, of our own identity—can be consumed, where the value of those identities can be realized. We probably never stop to consider what we are doing as a kind of production; instead it seems to us that we are just being social. In that gap, capitalism senses an opportunity.

The work we perform to produce our social being is necessary, inescapable work, albeit work that we have always performed willingly and enthusiastically, since its benefits accrued directly to us. It’s immediately rewarding, so no one needs to pay us to do it. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t surplus value to be extracted from that labor, especially once we are provoked into undertaking it more and more routinely as tastes and trends change and ever wider stretches on the long-tail frontier are opened for colonization.

That's Rob Horning at PopMatters, covering a constellation of topics -- from the nature of personal identity to the economic notion of "jobless recovery" -- in Your Brain is the New Factory Floor (be sure to read pg. 2).

Much of the piece criticizes the ideas promoted by economist and uber-blogger Tyler Cowen in his new book, Create Your Own Economy -- though Horning doesn't mention the book and his criticism is limited to what appeared in Fast Company last month:

more and more, ‘production’—that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations—has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor… You use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other Web services to construct a complex meld of stories, images, and feelings in your mind. No single bit seems weighty on its own, but the resulting blend is rich in joy, emotion, and suspense.

Horning's worry is that while we're all being trivially gratified by online experience, corporations like Facebook are going to come along and (quoting Nick Carr) "sharecrop" real cash value off of all the time and energy we spent, and we could all end up "slaving away there in the Web sweatshop without even realizing we’ve been chained to our monitors." 

I worry about that myself -- as much as anyone does, in fact, for almost as long as I've been blogging -- but I don't agree with Horning's defensive response.

His conclusion is we need to conceive "our various selves as proprietary content to which we retain the broadcasting rights and which we have no intention of licensing for reuse without our express written consent." 

It seems like something the Associated Press might say... 

A more open, progressive, and realistic response would be -- rather than putting a "Property of Me: Hands off!" sign on everything we do online -- to adjust our online activities in a way that we're actually investing our time and attention in something substantial.

In other words, we can simply commit to doing things online that are not trivial; we can create things that retain enduring value for ourselves and our communities.

Most obviously, there are opportunities for artists, writers, musicians, social entrepreneurs, etc., to nurture projects and enterprises that support our offline endeavours. I can think of at least one excellent example... 

Of more universal value is our emergent ability to take responsibility for our own continuing education, and in the process -- unlike in the past when "self-teaching" meant being socially isolated, with little to show for one's labour -- we can cultivate relationships and representations (i.e. measurable accomplishments) that allow us to actually use what we've learned.

So... so what if Google and Facebook "exploit" that labour? What are they going to do with all of "my" data they collect while I consume articles and participate in conversations in my field of interest? 

Well, I would assume they're going to want to give me even more of that stuff... Which works out great for me... 

But only as long as we remain proactive and vigilant. It only works if we continue making conscious choices to invest our attention in things that bring real meaning and value to our lives (which we probably ought to have been doing more anyways, with or without the web).

As far as I'm concerned, as long as we're accomplishing that, Facebook can exploit its F'ing heart out.

Photo cred: Toban Black