Editor’s Note: The article below is a reaction to the previous article by Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, which first appeared on OOWBlog as part of our panel on Facebook. This follow-up to Chris and Steffen’s piece, by Michel Bauwens, first appeared on Al Jazeera’s website under the title The $100bn Facebook Question: Will Capitalism Survive “Value Abundance? He has also published a second follow-up on Al Jazeera titled ‘Occupy’ as a business model: The emerging open-source civilization. Bauwens, whose full bio can be found here, is an active blogger for the Peer 2 Peer Foundation.

Does Facebook exploit its users, and where is the $100 billion in estimated value coming from?

This is not a new debate, and it resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles evern since Tiziana Terranova coined the term “Free Labor”¹ to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labor, first of the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now of the new generation of social media participants like Facebook. The argument can be summarized very succinctly by the catch phrase, “if it’s free, then you are the product being sold”.

It was recently relaunched by an often retweeted article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böehm in their piece: “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free.²” In this mini-essay, they make the very strong claim that “we can certainly position the users of Facebook as laborers. If labor is understood as ‘value producing activity’, then updating your status, liking a website, or ‘friending’ someone, creates Facebook’s basic commodity.”

Internet Privacy and the Workplace

By Chris Prener

March 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

1 Comment

We’ve been posting quite a bit on Facebook here in recent weeks, and I wanted to pass on a pair of new stories that have recently been posted on MSNBC’s website. Each are quite troubling and deserve our attention as digital citizens and as sociologists.The first article, which was published last week, describes how employers (including a police department) and colleges have been demanding “behind the scenes” access to Facebook accounts as part of their “background” checks of employees and/or students. The second article, published just yesterday, describes how a middle school student was forced, with police in the room, to turn over her Facebook password to her school principal. What is most troubling is that this is done, in all cases, to gain access to “private” messages that are not publicly available to viewers of an individual’s page on Facebook.

Each of these stories represent our society’s struggle over how to cope with the brave new world of social media. Facebook has become just the latest venue to criticize the boss or principal (though nothing beats a resignation letter posted on the New York Times’ opinion page). Unlike the water cooler or the local coffee shop, however, the digital footprints left behind on Facebook provide physical evidence of an employee’s displeasure. We lack a cohesive set of legal protections in the United States from this sort of behavior by management (be it the boss or the principal), though such intrusions do violate Facebook’s terms of service.

Until such protections are enacted, some are advising their students and colleagues to take their more sensitive discussions underground. We should all consider strongly the ramifications of our tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts for that job down the road or the one we’ve got. This much perhaps goes without saying. Yet we also need to consider as a society how to protect this speech and ensure that speech that occurs out of the public eye using social media can stay that way.

From Whom Does Facebook Extract Exchange Value?

By jakobrigi

March 3, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook, Uncategorized

Facebook, Labor, and the Possible Perils of Social Media

By Chris Prener

February 22, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

4 Comments

UPDATED 2/23/12 @ 2:30pm EST – Additional Follow-up Post @ Cyberology Published

We’ve all seen the potential for social media platforms to take part in some of the most important social movements of the last year. From Twitter’s use in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries to the widespread use of social media during the worldwide Occupy protests, we’ve seen how social media can bring us together and bring down governments. More recently in Syria, we’ve seen how YouTube can emerge as the sole source of information on the ground in areas where the world’s traditional media may be unable to reach.

Last week, in the wake of Facebook’s decision to “go public”, I wrote a post about Facebook and the potential for the exploitation of its members. After some discussion among the editorial team, we decided to reach out to some of our colleagues for whom social media is a true intellectual passion. We’ve been able to put together a small panel on Facebook and the possibility for labor exploitation that seeks to address the ways in which all members of Facebook help to contribute to Facebook’s monetary value.

While we’re not “anti” Facebook – indeed, we at OOWBlog have our own Facebook page – we think the decision to “go public” by Facebook provides an ideal moment to reflect on the changing nature of business, labor, and leisure in the 21st century.

To that end, please check out my lead post as well as a response by the University of Maryland’s PJ Rey and two scholars are the University of Essex, Christopher Land and Steffen Böehm. We hope you enjoy them!

Update – 2/23/12 @ 2:30pm EST – PJ has also posted a great follow-up piece over at Cyberology where he blogs regularly. He makes some great points and I urge you all to check it out.

Is Facebook “Using” Its Members?

By Chris Prener

February 22, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

9 Comments

Facebook’s decision to file for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission has made headlines and will likely be the most notable tech IPO since Google went public in 2004. Not everyone is rushing to “like” Facebook’s decision to make an IPO, however. The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “Facebook is Using You”, which criticized Facebook’s business plan and argued that the implications of an individual’s online activity extend far beyond the potential for embarrassing photos to surface. In sociological terms, there seems to be an argument surfacing that Facebook is exploiting the labor power of its users. If this is indeed so, Facebook may represent a new frontier for work and labor where even leisure activity can be exploited for the generation of profit.

ZD Net’s Emril Protalinski, who blogs about Facebook for the twenty year old tech site, responded to the Time’s piece and decried the position that Facebook somehow owed its users. Protalinski’s argument rests on the idea that becoming a Facebook member is a voluntary act. Users who enter into this relationship with Facebook receive a service that is free because Facebook can cover its operating costs through advertising revenue.

Facebook is Not a Factory (But Still Exploits its Users)

By PJ Patella-Rey

February 22, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook

12 Comments

This piece is posted in cooperation with the Cyborgology Blog.

Facebook’s IPO announcement has stirred much debate over the question of whether Facebook is exploiting/using/taking advantage of its users. The main problem with the recent discussion of this subject is that no one really seems to have taken the time to actually define what exploitation is. Let me start by reviewing this concept before proceeding to examine its relevance to Facebook.

They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free

By Chris Land

February 22, 2012

Commentary, Panel - Facebook

21 Comments

The stockmarket floatation of Facebook brings together a range of issues in how we understand work and the creation of economic value but we should be careful not to overstate the novelty and conflate the newness of the media with the basic economic logic at work here. As Chris Prener suggests in his post, ‘Facebook may represent a new frontier for work and labor where even leisure activity can be exploited for the generation of profit’, but is this really so new?

In their now classic study of traditional media, Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky explain the basic business model of newspapers as being the production of an audience for advertising. Their analysis suggests the counter-intuitive notion that publishers’ main product is not the newspaper, which they sell to their readers, but the production of an audience of readers, which they sell to advertisers. In short, the readership is their product. This explains why newspapers will often offer a significant discount for students, as this enables them to catch future affluent consumers early on as they establish their media consumption habits. In its more extreme variants, this can lead to the thesis that even watching television can be understood as a form of labor, as by watching TV you produce the audience, which is the broadcaster’s main product – an idea that was neatly captured in an Adbusters’ video a few years ago.