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Everything I Know About Memes, Content Farms and Viral Marketing in Fifteen Hundred Words or Less

In June 2010, The Atlantic ran an article titled “How to Save the News” where James Fallows chronicled the ‘Googlization’ of the news and its effects on the newspaper industry. He noted that, “most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media.” With the rise of Google’s ubiquity, the world has seemed to prioritize traditional media less and less. I’d argue that a ‘disruption’ occurred. As Forbes once noted, a disruption is when technology “takes a left turn by literally uprooting and changing how we think, behave, do business, learn and go about our day-to-day.” Disruptions undermine our daily routine with cheaper alternatives, faster, more efficient technology and smarter ways of doing things. They’re the reason we drive automobiles, use inkjet printers and type things like this out on keyboards to share online with the ever-expanding public. But what have been the consequences of our newspaper disruption?

Somewhere in the last few years, a term arose to describe new traffic-driven news sites that, fueled by developments in ‘Googleability’, can thrive on low-level, easily consumable articles aimed at the greatest common denominator: Content Farms. Historically speaking, content farms undermined traditional news sources in that they offered massive amounts of low-quality content, monetized through ads, and generated through a complex series of processes that prioritized sharability. In July of this year, ViralNova, a content farm with a small staff of 24, was acquired by entertainment company Zealot for a staggering $100 million dollars. At the same time, niche sites like Grantland and The Dissolve have recently been forced to close their doors because, as it seems, the niche sites of the web today can no longer gain enough traffic for them to be economically viable—for them to pay writers and designers living wages for the amount of labor involved. Sites have increasingly been forced to turn towards the sustainable models that viral content offers, at least in the short term.

Unlike traditional media, ads on the web don’t work like print ads. When a company bought ad space in The New York Times a hundred years ago, they had no idea how many views each ad received, or how directly each ad translated to sales. Now with the web, analytics based on clicks, page views and programmatic transactions have arisen to offer insight into the effectiveness of advertising online. And data increasingly has shown online ads to be unsuccessful. Bloomberg found earlier this year that the return on digital advertising is “around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV.” With the knowledge that their advertising efforts online might be unsuccessful, why would advertisers want to put money into online campaigns that they understood to be ineffective?

Following suit, the web got smarter. As advertising dollars poured into the new medium, increasingly, sites found ways to generate fake traffic, giving advertisers numbers based on bot ‘views,’ not human eyes. As Ben Elgin, Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski and Joshua Brustein note in their collaborative piece “How Much of Your Audience is Fake?” for Bloomberg, fake traffic will cost advertisers roughly $6.3 billion dollars this year. “Fake traffic has become a commodity,” they say, “there’s malware for generating it and brokers who sell it.” There’s a growing industry surrounding the sale of fake traffic online, undermining the already-disrupted online news industry to, in short, fake page views to artificially inflate media networks in a short-sighted system—to scale networks, monetize and get out as fast as possible.

Is this legal? Yes. As it stands now, there’s no legal distinction between bot ‘views’ and human views, and certain types of malware—ones invisible to the user—click ads, visit sites, scroll through pages, all running simultaneously behind the browser without the user’s awareness, further blur the line between human eyes and software.

There are a vast number of online ad resources that have arisen in recent years, all promising unique clicks and page views, but at every corner, adept advertisers have become weary of the web. As it generally goes, the more cost-effective options online are generally always fake, but the minimum options on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—sites well-aware of the value of their unique site visits—have become staggeringly expensive. Only companies with the most resources can advertise at all on those platforms, and even then, there are still understandably skeptics.

So what’s a young content farmer to do? In a world where generating unique human page views is still supreme, we’re again left in confusion—shrugging along with fellow writers, racing to latch onto the latest traffic generator in attempt to simply break even, generate page views and make a little money. Sites like Denny’s or Taco Bell have increasingly done this by latching onto Internet Memes—small bits of sharable culture that resonate with a wide number of people online and encourage native spreadability from unique users.

The “Why You Always Lyin'" video on the six-second social video site Vine is a recent example; the clip was uploaded on August 29 and had been looped over 1 million times and gained over 31,000 likes by September 7. As bits of culture become shared in wide numbers, soon content farmers, in an attempt to gain monetizable traffic, latch onto these shared bits of culture, writing and reposting popular content onto their own sites. A quick Google search returns numerous reposts on YouTube from content farms with names like “AlotVines” and “The Best Vines”, as well as from larger content farms like BuzzFeed, who simply aggregated a few funny and popular tweets of the meme to generate monetizable traffic based on readership. Sites like Complex interviewed the young content creator, seeking to gain their own traffic, while others posted videos of elders reacting to the meme, still seeking to milk the last bits of money from the short, chuckle-worthy (at best) video.

This has become something of a rather routine cycle. First, content goes viral. Brands, seeing an opportunity to latch onto the viral nature of this, prioritize coverage of viral content to get traffic, which for them equals unique visits—translating directly to substantial advertising dollars from big corporations. This happens again and again ad nauseam, allowing content farms to thrive, but for how long, nobody knows.

At the same time, prioritizing viral content probably hurts sites seeking to build a sustainable brand and strong, recurrent readership, because the content on the site becomes literally identical to other content farms seeking to be heard (or shared) amongst the noise. Sites are forced to cover the same, menial stories to generate what revenue they can, yet actively hurt their own longevity in the process, creating content largely indistinguishable from other content farms. This is where the niche market becomes valuable, but still not fully sustainable in its own right. When Conde Nast bought Pitchfork this past October, they purchased what they understood to be a cornered market on “Millennial males,” as Conde Nast’s Chief Digital Officer put it. The key to successful monetization, it seems, is in cornering a demographic in a field (and tone) broad enough that viral content can fit within it, both fostering a committed, engaged readership, while reaping the economic benefits of viral articles and content farming. Easier said than done, for sure, but setting sights for media longevity never seems like a bad thing, especially in an era where it feels like every site is struggling just to pay writers and keep the lights on.

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photo by wandertif

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn: Profile Picture Solidarity and Neoliberal Ethics Online

On Friday, November 13, a series of shootings and explosions hit Paris’ Stade de France, Bataclan arts centre, Petit Cambodge restaurant and Carillon bar, among others, killing 125 people and injuring more than 350. While details are still uncertain, the attacks have been claimed by ISIS in a statement revealing, “a group of believers from the soldiers of the Caliphate” to be responsible, seeking to combat France’s “crusader campaign” which ravaged through Syria and Iraq earlier this year.

In the whirlwind of international outrage that has persisted since Friday, we’ve seen governments around the world respond to the destruction. French President Francois Hollande gathered parliament in Versailles, where he called ISIS the “biggest terrorist factory the world has ever known.” Our own president, Barack Obama, said in a statement, “This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity”

Throughout the world we’ve seen enormous expressions of compassion and solidarity in response to the France’s harrowing bombings on Friday. The French Red Cross mobilized 300 volunteers to help the relief effort and Secours populaire française set up an online donation system that also helps volunteers get involved. Facebook implemented a check-in strategy, which allowed those within the geographic limits of Paris (according to their GPS coordinates) to “let [their] friends know that [they’re] safe,” (to quote the site), as well as offered a profile photo filter that allowed users to mask their photos in the tri-colors of the French flag in an apparent gesture of solidarity, all with a single, instantaneous click.

In moments of global panic, we’re all quick to express our solidarity through whatever means we can. Historically, that has generally meant aid—either financially or maybe by providing goods or services of some sort. But increasingly, we’ve seen people take up social media to proclaim their support for those in conflict zones, especially in moments of impulsive, knee-jerk reactions to crises they feel far removed from.

You might ask, “well, what’s the value in changing your profile picture, or sharing a conflict photo on social media, if that doesn’t translate directly to support” but studies have shown that raising awareness on social media often does mobilize citizens to donate, just in significantly smaller numbers.

Remember the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? As the story goes, the Ice Bucket Challenge asked participants to either donate money or have another participant dump a bucket of ice water on their head to “promote awareness” of ALS. After the challenge went viral, a staggering $62.5 million dollars were raised for ALS research from 1.2 million new donors, according to the ALS Association.

But in this instance, I’m still a bit skeptical. With such an easy, one-click mechanism to convert your profile picture to the French flag (or even, in similar cases, to share a photo), do the numbers still translate as evenly to activism? The verdict’s still out on this one, since the event only happened this past Friday, but what about other nations bombed in similar recent attacks? In Beirut? In Kenya? or one on a Russian plane, recently bombed by ISIS in Egypt? It’s interesting what sorts of tragedies our media are willing to get behind.

Where, in 2015, it seems well-understood that the TV news is biased, with its corporate interest almost always upheld by the FCC. But unlike TV, social media sites like Facebook aren’t really understood (by the public at least) to hold inherent biases. They offer us free services that generally let us do what we want (within the constraints I suppose), yet sometimes, even by design (what Ian Bogost would call a bit of procedural rhetoric), they limit the scope of what we see. How so? Well, in this example, Facebook clearly prioritized awareness of the France attacks and American solidarity with the French people. They allow you, quite simply, to express your grief in a certain way, limited only to the flag of one nation. You’re also interestingly given an option to determine ‘how long’ you’d like the French flag masked over your profile picture through a timing mechanism. In short, Facebook wants to know ‘how long’ you expect to grieve the tragedy so they can conveniently allow you to transition back into normalcy, ready to continue your routine life on the website. While generally grief doesn’t work like this (as, I mean, who knows how long we plan to grieve our tragedies, especially ones that have taken our husbands, wives, grandfathers, or children?) This is a fascinating instance of attempts to use procedural rhetoric to define our grief.

The company has yet to respond to dissenters, even though articles on the ‘controversy’ (which I’m using here loosely) have run in The Atlantic, New York Times, and Al Jazeera. When users submit question on the topic to a Facebook Community message board, the site tells them, in true bureaucratic fashion, to submit their complaints through a contact form, where things will be processed as soon as possible.

Other sites have helped us grieve in similar ways. Spotify offered its “Peace” playlist from Spotify France, pairing peaceful songs of human solidarity with a few dated protest songs, like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,”—dated protest songs swallowed up by our own ‘feel good’ neoliberal ethic that historicizes counterculture and uses the façade of ‘mass contrarianism’ to sell ideology.

And this makes sense, given the circumstances. I mean since the 1980s, neoliberalism has basically eclipsed our economic policy to create models of ‘feel good consumerism’ built on cheap, outsourced labor—ones so far removed from our daily existence (and ones that we are so far from informed of) that we can only buy into media narratives that support corporate interest. Media narratives from Starbucks or TOMS Shoes that stir us into activism, telling us that ‘only our purchasing power can save those in need,’ yet at the same time, consciously working to blur the details of the situation to lead us through a carefully-shaped narrative—to a given end where they, quite simply, make money. But what’s at stake for Spotify, or Facebook, extending faux-activist, ‘feel good’ narratives of solidarity to the public for seemingly no pay?

For Spotify, each stream simply means fractions of cents paid to the company. The company currently receives a whopping 30% from each song played on the platform and surely reaps additional benefit from paid subscription fees and 3rd party advertising dollars. But how does Facebook make money?

Well, with each like or share on the site, you aggregate data. You tell Facebook, ‘hey, I like Bruce Springsteen’ or, ‘hey, I support bringing Syrian refugees to the United States.’ Facebook then, when pressed by advertisers looking for someone within your demographic, leverages your data—what you’ve already unknowingly provided them with in your attempt to establish an online identity—to market things. The more data you provide to flesh out your presence on the site, the more accurately the system can target highly-specific products to your interest.

This is worth a lot of money. Where billboards and subway ads surround our daily spaces but are generally understood to just be noise in the void, ads on social sites—ones that largely serve as updated, digital mediums for our transfer of language and expression—blur the line between social and marketing spheres. The most valuable place for an advertiser is in your conversation; through marketing on social media, Facebook allows ads amongst your dialog, blurring lines between your friends and marketers.

So what does this have to do with French flag profile photos on the site? Well, that little bit of data has value to marketers. Much like how the neoliberal ethos, in the absence of the direct sight of the worker, allows brands to fashion ‘feel good’ narratives far removed the realities of production to further their own economic gains, Facebook Solidarity fashions successful narratives of unity by hiding its data monetization policy. While you’re uncertain whether changing your profile picture ‘in support’ of a cause actually does anything or not, it’s in Facebook’s interest to make it as simple as possible for you to ‘show your solidarity’ as a means of aggregating one more bit of monetizable data from users. This data might not be as transparently marketable as other examples, but it still serves as a determinant for who supports certain global efforts and who doesn’t, ostensibly further solidifying your demographic within Facebook’s algorithms to monetize your profile.

The ethos of ‘showing support’ on social media, in all its simplicity, actually helps sites monetize your data. While we may see it as a means of partisan identification, there are certainly larger actors benefitting from your actions online in ways we’re only partially even aware of.

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“Only Huge Original Reporting Will Survive”: An Interview with Todd Van Luling

Todd Van Luling is currently a 24-year-old Senior Staff Writer at the Huffington Post. After briefly interning at BuzzFeed and publishing a few articles on Thought Catalog while at William & Mary, Todd went on to join the HuffPost team in 2013, where he’s published viral articles like “Here’s What Really Happened to the Cars from Pimp My Ride” and “11 Behind the Scenes Stories You’ve Never Heard Before From the Original Power Rangers”. He’s also written for sites like Vice’s Motherboard, The Toast and Flavorwire with a focus on culture writing and what he calls “journalisticals,” something between list-oriented ‘clickbait’ content and more substantive cultural journalism. He’s also published an ebook with Thought Catalog titled Mary & Kate & Ashley & Peter & Paul & Mary, a satire of millennial fiction that “wishes it were Spring Breakers or Super Sad True Love Story or Peter Gallagher”. He currently lives in New York.

First off, thanks for letting me interview you! I know it’s been awhile, but I’m super excited that you’re willing to do this. I think the first question I wanna ask is, well, first off, how do you like working for HuffPost? What’s your typical day-to-day like as a staff writer there?

I feel very, very lucky to have started at HuffPost. W&M didn't have a journalism program and my writing experience was based in upstarts such as BuzzFeed, Vice and Flavorwire, so my early HuffPost experience ended up being a sort of perfect balance between that world and learning "journalism." To learn any skill, it's important to have positive reinforcement right from the beginning, and, at least for me, the meteoric traffic HuffPost articles get certainly felt like a fuel to keep pushing though in the beginning days. Obviously, such a traffic obsession has pitfalls -- the more legacy places have just started allowing writers to see their views -- but for just starting out it's been a helpful encouragement to keep at things.

My typical day-to-day these days usually consists of an interview for a story, transcribing, outlining articles, finding pics for that article, a meeting or two in between and then hopefullyyyy, finding some time to actually write. Lately, I've also been teaching workshops on various internet journalism things. The day starts at 8am and goes until 6ish, but sometimes the interviews fall outside of that window due to availability / the person being across the ocean in another time zone. Usually it's about 55 hour weeks. Also, with an always changing staff in the newsroom, sometimes you have to pick up other roles. My sort of "features" team in the pop culture section has been helping on news writeups in the morning until we fill in other roles, and I'm sure there will be other tasks we'll take on or drop in the near future.

Can you give a general overview of how a piece goes from an idea to a fully finished work on HuffPost? Do you guys pitch ideas to an editor or work on stuff on your own and then (I’m assuming) submit to some sort of editor, then content manager for upload, etc.? How much free reign do you have over the sorts of things you get to write on?

So I usually pitch an idea to my team and then we all sort of talk it out and decide whether or not to go for it. Almost always, the idea get approved as long as it won't take weeks to report or has expenses. An idea with that amount of work/expense can get approved, but the conversation becomes a bit more involved in that case.

Anyway, once a story is all written up with photos inserted and everything, I send it to an editor who changes wording around and gives notes and then that version then goes to a copy editor who does final cleaning and publishes. I have quite a bit of free reign in theory, but am always held to an understanding that in a given week I'm getting around one to a couple million pageviews total, so you can't spend too much time off the beaten viral path on passion projects. If I wanted to really write something, I could do it, but I'd have to find the time to subsidize it with other trafficy things.

How much thought of web traffic goes into what you (and others) write? As I understand it, a lot of sites are effectively leaning towards what gains traffic in terms of sharable ‘listicle’/‘clickbait’ type stuff but for longer/more substantive pieces, is it still approached from the perspective of metrics, or is there more free reign? Is there a way to meet in the middle?

A ton of thought goes into this. So far, that's actually been my main role. In college, I wrote viral things for BuzzFeed when they were just a small team of a dozen with an office in Chinatown. At HuffPost, my initial role was as our first "viral" person, and although that namesake has been disbanded, I still kind of fit in that role / that's what the workshops I lead focus on. Earlier this year, I broke the HuffPost culture section traffic record for a single story with a jokey takedown of Pimp My Ride, that was picked up by Gawker/Vulture/AV Club/NYTimes etc etc. I believe if still you google Pimp My Ride, it shows up before the Wikipedia entry. That's the loose goal for my role right now / to have stories like that, which are based on original reporting and interviews, then go on to get millions of views and nods from other publications.

My role has sort of been inventing ways to do those sorts of shareable/listicle type stories in a hopefully more respectable/journalist way. Journalisticles is the dumb term I came up with for it. This means trying to come up with headlines that still go by the viral method, but don't overstay their welcome too much by having insane promises (restore your faith in humanity), tons of adverbs, or be pandering to emotions (extroverts are the best! introverts are the best! etc etc). We try to make sure there are high word counts, original reporting/interviews, and no corrections while still "going viral." This process is still in very early stages and much of it -- especially my work -- is embarrassing haha, but I like to think there's progress and we're all getting there. I'd like to think we're finding that "middle."

How much interaction is there with advertisers at HuffPost? I know BuzzFeed has this sort of integrated process that works with advertisers to get their content directly into the substance of pieces, does HuffPost do anything like that? Or are the writing and advertising spheres pretty distinctly separated

None from the "writers," at least to my knowledge. I believe there is a native advertising team at HuffPost much like BuzzFeed's -- or really any publication legacy or not these days -- but there is no interaction with them. HuffPost, especially in the last couple years, has been good about this separation at least in my mind.

I know HuffPost is owned by AOL, which is a publicly traded company, do you think there’s ever been any instance when HuffPost was ever hesitant to cover anything for fear of angering shareholders, etc.?

HuffPost is actually now owned by AOL which is now owned by Verizon as of this summer. So far, the business team has been good about maintaining their freedom and continuing their negative coverage about certain practices of both companies. That said, since I'm in the culture section, there isn't really an inherent hindrance -- maybe I could get a quote from "can you hear me now?" guy about how he hated the job or make fun of aim? -- so I can't really say if those sections have felt a squeeze.

I’ve been reading a lot recently about ‘digital labor,’ especially in terms of the sort of immaterial, Internet content-generating that lots of writers, designers, and content-generators for sites like HuffPost do. In short, it seems that what you (and others) do to make web content is often difficult to quantify since it’s naturally a transient practice of work, far removed from, like, building a house or selling a physical product in a retail store or something.

I guess, if it’s not too personal of a question, what is the process like of getting paid at HuffPost? While I understand freelancers typically negotiate pay on a case-by-case basis, do staff writers (and others that you may be aware of, I guess) get paid on a salary? Does how many clicks your work garners ever effect your pay? What’s the process like for negotiating pay and how do you navigate that at HuffPost?

So all full-time employees at HuffPost get salaries / extensive health insurance / 401ks and all that. I started as a "fellow" which meant I was getting an hourly wage and no benefits, but was hired after only 4 months of that. I believe the fellows these days make $15 an hour which is awesome / necessary to even think about living in New York.

Traffic is certainly one thing that dictates salary, but is far from everything. There is no contract bonus system saying, for example, if you get 1 million views on an article, then you get a $500 bonus or whatever number. That said, CPM rates are fairly public knowledge, and so writers do have at least some quantification method for the traffic aspect at least. Judging what is "Good" will unfortunately/fortunately always be more transient as you said. What piece, interview, etc. are you most proud of? What are some things that the role of journalist/content-creator has allowed you to explore and what keeps you interested in doing what you’re doing?

I'm proud of the results of the pimp my ride story and, although it's so silly, I'm proud I got someone to tell me a story about Xzibit casually claiming he was spending his weekend going down to hell to skin the devil to make some satan-skinned boots. Interviews in general are what I'm most proud of and this year I've gotten to talk to quite a few of my idols or people I cared about while growing up. On the super personal scale, getting to interview Phil Elverum of The Microphones was amazing, but on the other side -- people like the original Power Rangers / The Backstreet Boys / Julie Andrews etc etc have been super fun and strange and awesome as well.

The piece I'm most proud of is actually something that has yet to be published / I've been working on it on the side for over half a year. Hopefully, I'll be able to talk about it more openly soon.

Going forward, how do you see digital journalism changing? We’ve seen lots of news sites building off the ‘listicle’ format to introduce more substantive content (essentially the whole format of Vox quickly comes to mind) into short, terse points, followed by heavier analysis and statistics. What do you think is next?

It's going to be very different in even two years, it's beyond in the midst of collapse / rebirth. Facebook and Apple will swallow all of the aggregation-based publications. Only huge, original reporting will survive. Places that have successful subscription models / big and small / will continue to do well. Readers will continue transitioning to streaming so video and podcasts will be far more dominant. If someone finds a way to make illustrations/photo rights cheaper, articles will probably look more beautiful.

At the moment you see all the great niche publications dying off or unable to expand past a staff of half a dozen. This is because nobody goes to homepages any more and advertisers are expecting larger and larger traffic scales and readers are increasingly just settling for whatever news pops up in their Facebook or other social media. This will continue, but the few truly great niche publications will find a way to continue propped up with their superfans. Who knows what will happen to the massive titan publications that have a hand in everything. Will they partner with Facebook? Will they become too ubiquitous to ever truly go away? Will they have enough money saved up to simply transition into whatever's next? I truly do not know.

A great place to start for that answer is The Awl's series "The Content Wars," subscribing to Rusty Foster's "Today In Tabs" newsletter, and listening to as many Longform and Joshua Topolsky podcasts as possible. All four of them continue to be immensely helpful to me and I think they remain the best place to start.

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Peeple and the Illusion of the Web Review

There’s a new iPhone app that’s been stirring controversy on the Internet in recent days. Dubbed Peeple and set for release in November (currently in Beta testing), the app allows user to rate human interaction online in an attempt to offer users a glimpse into past relations of said persons, ostensibly allowing users to know what they’re getting into before interacting with potential clientele. The app brands itself as a sort of safety net for protective parents, offering reviews of character before one hires a babysitter, landscaper or other household employee, effectively updating the ‘background check’ model from the classical workplace into the social media age, making character quantified in stars and a review system.

However, the app isn’t exclusively for rating potential employees. As it stands now (namely the source of its controversy), users can rate any person with or without profile on the network, allowing users to rate social interaction not limited to those with financial transactions. According to sources, users can currently rate character into one of three categories: professionally, personally, and dating. The app attempts to quantify relations to “better choose who we hire, do business with, date, become our neighbors, roommates, landlords/tenants, and teach our children”.

Because of this, the ethics of the app has been increasingly called into question. Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey called it “inherently invasive, even when complementary” and said it is “objectifying and reductive in the manner of all online reviews,” grasping at the central concern of dissenters of the app: with no ability to opt out, people are unable to live as they choose, always potentially under the moralizing gaze of anyone they may interact with. While sites like Rate My Professor or Yelp have a financial transaction at stake, Peeple seeks to reduce all relationships, especially those non-financial transactions that really demonstrate the depth of human character, to immaterial data—reviews, ratings, shares, and likes to determine value in advance, prior to interaction.

We’ve already seen sites like GettingBookReviews.com arise to offer fake Amazon reviews, with estimates at about “one-third” of consumer reviews online to be faked as extensions of marketing. As the New York Times’ David Streitfeld notes, “consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth.” Would the rise of Peeple develop into the same sort feedback loop, demanding positive reviews of human interaction to fuel an increasingly immaterial digital economy built on this ‘illusion of truth’? It’s hard to say this early on (as the app doesn’t officially launch until November) but it’s important to be skeptical when embracing new digital platforms, potentially propped up by intentions we may not fully be aware of. As we increasingly embrace reviews on sites like Uber, Airbnb, Yelp and Rate My Professor as glimpses at truth, we may further fall victim to the whims of marketers we aren’t even aware exist.

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Is XYZ a Feminist?: Digital Labor, Sustainability and the Feminist Think Piece Industrial Complex

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of immaterial digital labor. After being introduced to the term from a recent issue of The Media, I’ve found myself coming to view much of my own work (as someone who’s been an unpaid intern for various digital media companies and writing online, unpaid or underpaid, for almost three years now) in accordance with their definitions of ’digital labor’ and ‘immaterial labor’. For online journalists/bloggers/content-creators working on purely-intangible commodities, it’s often difficult for us to assess the value digital immaterial labor, since it travels without the cost limitations of standard print media and is provided to a public that largely came of age demanding free access to the content on the Internet. With a few notable outliers that had established journalistic integrity and name-recognition long before the digital age (here’s looking at you New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) it’s well-established that free access to digital content is considered ‘the norm’ within media consumption.

This has dramatic effects. Practically all websites are forced to gain revenue (even just to continue their existing ventures) through ads based on metrics—the more clicks, shares or likes an article gets, the more reach its ads have to the public, making the space more valuable to advertisers. This, so far, (as is probably common knowledge at this point) has perpetuated a culture of ‘clickbait journalism’ which relies on “sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs” and to encourage spreadability through social media. While not fundamentally an issue, it often times reduces the nuance of journalistic voices to things that can garner traffic and allow sites to gain enough money in ad revenue to continue to function.

’Feminism,’ a complex, highly ambiguous term for many overlapping ideologies, has often been reduced to clickbait journalism to unify issues vaguely partisan in support of often low-hanging, easily-consumable stances, far removed from radical notions of the word. Since 49.6 percent of the world is women,  it isn’t hard for sites to find a female demographic in support of their position and this often perpetuates what Chanelle Adams calls “The Feminist Think Piece Industrial Complex,” utilizing digital immaterial labor (mostly unpaid or underpaid) to “exploit the young and digitally naive” under the guise of contributing to a larger conversation about the state of contemporary feminism. She sees this as an issue in its ability to “[pluralize] feminism” and “[threaten] to dissolve the importance of community restoration and regeneration.” In short, the Feminist Think Piece Industrial Complex is analogous to the “infamous click-bait question: Is XYZ a feminist?” in its continual search for a uniform, ‘pluralized’ verdict on whether or not something is feminist—in the process, reducing the complexity of feminism to something that can be shaped in the image of the global, for-profit media giants publishing such articles.

Jonah Peretti, founder of the global media site BuzzFeed, once, in his undergraduate years at UC Santa Cruz, wrote a piece titled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution”, where he discussed identity formation in the context of theorists like Jacques Lacan, Frederic Jameson, and Roland Barthes. Where Jameson often saw commodities through a lens of self-identification, Peretti, leaning on Barthes’ reading of Lacan, says that, like the cinema, viewers “’narcissistically identify’ with an image-repertoire that defines the ideological content of a period in history.” For Barthes, this means viewers naturally identify with certain silver screen cinema protagonists which are “producing pleasure, but also communicating and transmitting ideology” for the viewer. Peretti, updating this logic for an early Internet age, asserts that this identification can be extended to Internet identity formation, where, thanks to the acceleration of current Internet speeds, consumers can “assume and shed identities” at an unprecedented rate.

This is the logic of clickbait feminism. When one clicks the link to “10 Female Characters Who Wore Heels In The Face Of Death”, they take pleasure in their identification with the ten women in life-threatening roles, ones proving that they can both defend themselves while looking feminine. While identity formation is not fundamentally an issue, it becomes a bit questionable when sites like Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Elite Daily (among others) use this subconscious identification (which is still often times built on a platform of unpaid or underpaid immaterial digital labor, as with Buzzfeed’s Community, which encourages users to make their own listicles, unpaid) to generate ad revenue, market products, and sell ideology to its 200 Million+ monthly visitors.

I wonder a lot about the world that these sorts of digital media companies are, if not creating, at least fostering and perpetuating. Each day, my Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr timelines are filled with articles, largely from huge, unchecked media companies, on feminism, #BlackLivesMatter, and major (and minor) acts of social injustice—all these sorts of ideological issues that people build their entire world views around. As young people growing up in an age of Tumblr activism, we’re constantly inundated by things to feel outraged by—social injustices, celebrity feminism (or lack thereof), brands assuring us that they too support gay rights. And that model, first and foremost, is just not sustainable. When everyone continually shouts the loudest on the web, no one is heard—everything just becomes “pluralized”—sounds, colors and noise, a feedback loop of hyperbole after hyperbole. And that’s really really terrifying, if not for anything else, for the sake of these social movements—built on real, unsolved, global issues, yet only valuable in their ability to garner web traffic.

When will the hyper-reactionary liberal ‘netstreamers’ of this generation be so overwhelmed in things to care about that they finally, ultimately, uniformly stop giving a shit? Will white people stop caring about #BlackLivesMatter when it stops getting clicks on global media sites? Will men stop empathizing with women once feminism recedes from the headlines? Will the public stop caring about LGBTQ activism when every brand on social media finally stops ‘rainbow washing’? Will the hyperbole of the clickbait headline finally eat itself?

Adams’ last point about needing time for “community restoration and regeneration” is the closest thing to a ‘take away’ I can offer, as a lot of these issues don’t have easy answers. But realize that it’s important within feminism or racial equality (or whatever activist space you’re working in) to recognize the need for space and recovery at times, and to foster a space that allows for such. Here’s hoping the next generation of activist spaces offers more than hyper-reactionary Internet shouting and serve a function greater than just garnering clicks on the web.

[robarcandblog]

NewHive and the Postmodern Web Space

Recently in spats of boredom/creative block, I’ve found myself coming back again and again to browse a relatively new website dedicated to fostering open-ended web design and world building–NewHive.com. Started in 2011-2012, NewHive is basically, to quote writer and digital artist Stephen Michael McDowell, “what I thought the Internet was going to be when I first heard about it in the 90s, before realizing that learning HTML & CSS were prerequisites to doing anything fun”; NewHive allows users to plaster photos, .gifs, videos and 3D renderings directly onto their own site, allowing artists to reclaim the medium in pursuit of lawless creation, expansive spatial/social awareness and limitless world-building. It seems that NewHive finally brings the playful pastiche of postmodernism into being, effectively ‘actualizing’ what postmodern scholars have been theorizing about for almost four decades now (depending on who you ask). But I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.

In his 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (later expanded into a book of the same name), Fredric Jameson outlines his tenants of “aesthetic production,” “schizophrenic” neoliberal economic models and “postmodern hyperspace,” which he says aspire to be a “total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city” or a “Utopia” beyond the constraints of the contemporary city. In one example, he offers John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles as a structure grasping at a “postmodern hyperspace,” that attempts to create a sort of surrogate city that “does not wish to be a part of the city, but rather its equivalent” in its ability to meet all the needs of its guests within the structural confines of the building. The spatial layout of the hotel is designed to disorient the body’s ability “to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world,” as it whisks you from shop to shop, lobby to elevator to hotel room to pool, an endless cycle of pleasure on repeat.

However, Jameson finds that because the building is only a brick-and-mortar manifestation of ideology in the real world of 1980s neoliberal capitalism, it undoubtedly hits a certain limit of practicality, unable to fully embody the utopian ideology it purports. He writes that the Westin Bonaventure Hotel “ought not to have any entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the buildings to the rest of the city that surrounds it.” By having entrances (an essential component for an actual brick-and-mortar building in the real, spatial world), the Bonaventure Hotel fails to live up to its postmodern premise and exposes its own limitations, failing to fully achieve utopia.

But beyond brick-and-mortar architecture (forever premised on practicality, making purely aesthetic/ideological ends always unattainable) digital spaces (namely those like NewHive that lie solely online) allow creators to surpass the constraints of economic practicality to create spaces that can instead exist as pure ideology. Early sites like Douglas Davis’ The World’s First Collaborative Sentence, which built a never-ending sentence from over 200,000 user-contributed edits, proved that digital art could offer user interactivity (space building) on a scale comparable to iconic architectural spaces and, when paired with years of Internet progress, allowed further refined sites like NewHive to develop. 

By giving artists access to net tools, we allow them to work in the media we understand. There are currently 3.2 billion Internet users worldwide–close to forty percent of the world’s population–making it undoubtedly the biggest social revolution in history. Never far behind social development, a cultural revolution has continually evolved in step. Net culture has given us selfies, emojis, web startups, apps–a wealth of cultural landmarks now well-established in both the digital and physical worlds.

Since the beginning of conceptual art (probably), artists have recurrently sought to make art that speaks to social and cultural upheaval–and in our contemporary existence, this quite often results in artists using net tools to critique net culture, offer commentary on global affairs through the staggering reach of the web, or even justify traditional (i.e. physical, non-digital works of) art. Ryder Ripps is probably the best example, just as someone who has had a foot in both the tech and art worlds. One of his more well-known collections, titled Ho, is made up of distorted oil paintings of model Adrianne Ho, jokingly always referenced (at least in its press release) with her “300,000 Instagram followers.” Ripps’ work offers commentary on the status of how the web–with such an enormous, unprecedented userbase and eternal connectivity–has such a limitless potential for cultural and social upheaval, but often seems only to function as an extension of global capitalism (in the fact that many people are willing to follow the Instagram of a popular model, who’s pictures are naturally taken from fashion campaigns designed to sell products).

Ripps’ pieces often work through various web media to offer a sort of meta-commentary on the state of Internet affairs. He wrote a series of poems about his iPhone. He has a photographic series of people at art exhibitions on their phones, a clear jab at those often seen on their smartphones at galleries. He’s made an iPhone game called “Where’s the Pixel?”. Ripps’ art seems like the only logical response to the social and cultural upheaval of the Internet, always speaking in the media we already, subconsciously understand, yet now elevated to playful art very much akin to postmodernists like Duane Hanson’s life-size dummies or Sherrie Lavine’s After Walker Evans.

But learning to code takes time. For those absorbed in the art world, learning to understand (and work within) the framed possibility of the web takes a rich–and often times daunting–understanding of languages beyond just HTML/CSS to others like Java and PHP. NewHive bypasses that in offering a simple (through potentially reductive) platform for site creation. Sites like baby donkey poetic, from artist Penny Goring, navigate a world of aesthetic constraints to create work that moves beyond the limitations of the medium, a fundamental essential to art and art making. Much like photography’s use of understood constraints to offer still-meaningful commentary, NewHive becomes a medium with transparent limitations, still allowing enough aesthetic malleability for creativity to speak.

There’s also the risk that as sites like NewHive grow, they’ll increasingly attempt to monetize their platforms. One of the major detractors from sites like this (as has happened to others seemingly premised on open-source media like YouTube or Skype) is that, first and foremost, to use the site is to submit your data to what is essentially a business. NewHive, while convenient, requires users to channel their data through a third-party that may later sell that information to advertisers. While still in ad-free developmental stages, there’s a risk that as NewHive expands in popularity, the platform could very easily work with advertisers to target ads to essentially anyone viewing the site. As with SoundCloud’s recent integration of commercials into their streaming platform, a site once premised on openness can quickly turn to an advertising landfill at the whim of the creator. To anyone concerned with data privacy, it’s of course safer to approach the open web itself, buying domains, designing sites and essentially reinventing the wheel of web design from scratch. 

More than anything, I’m just interested to see where artists take the medium, as so many of my favorite artists are already working on the Internet to create work that speaks to the 3.2 billion web users previously mentioned. While it may seem natural at this point, the web is still largely frontier; artists have just begun exploring the depth of the medium and, when paired with the democratization that sites like NewHive offer (ostensibly), they can help net art grow to acclaim and global legitimacy.