#hybrideconomy

[ecstadelicnet]

In the coming Age of Superintelligence [and automation] everyone should be entitled to social dividend, “free” money such as UBI, just for being alive. We should not forget that the wealthiest of us would not be as fortunate without civilization. Otherwise, Jeff Bezos would have to forage for food in the Amazon jungle all by himself. Being a human today is more than enough of a fair contribution to receive free money from the government. Going forward we'll see more and more prominent voices vouching for UBI. https://www.alexvikoulov.com/2021/01/hybrid-economy-why-UBI-unavoidable-in-radically-superintelligent-civilization.html #HybridEconomy #UniversalBasicIncome #UBI #BasicIncome #SocialDividend #TaxWallStreet #WealthTax #InheritanceTax https://www.instagram.com/p/CKui2bRASb1/?igshid=1hsn6wrvq5fiu

[ecstadelicnet]

My new article 'The hybrid economy: Why UBI is unavoidable as we edge towards a radically superintelligent civilization' posted on my author blog @ alexvikoulov.com is all the rage today on our subreddit r/IntelligenceSupernova drawing 371 upvotes and 220 comments, and counting! You can read the article here: https://www.alexvikoulov.com/2021/01/hybrid-economy-why-UBI-unavoidable-in-radically-superintelligent-civilization.html #HybridEconomy #UBI #SocialDividend https://www.instagram.com/p/CKuigdHAYqB/?igshid=17rmgd2ccmspw

[fans-users-gamers-blog]

   Fandom has existed as, essentially, a gift economy.  What is a gift economy?  A gift a economy is an exchange of products with no explicit compensation.  Fans write fanfictions over their favorite worlds, such as Supernatural, and post it for the enjoyment of that fandom’s followers.  As fan culture progresses, the world sees it begin to diverge off the path of a gift economy and more towards a commodification.  This can be seen on sites such as Etsy where fan-made items are posted for sale, and typically purchased by other fans.  That being said, why not make fandom a hybrid economy?

   In Nele Noppe’s Why We Should Talk About Commodifying Fan Work, she defines this type of economy with the definition provided by Lawrence Lessig.  The definition states, “the hybrid is either a commercial entity that aims to leverage value from a sharing economy, or it is a sharing economy that builds a commercial entity to better support its sharing aims.”  In other words, the hybrid economy is the best of both worlds, so to speak.  The existence of this economy can already be seen through the internet as Abigail De Kosnik pointed out in her essay Interrogating “Free” Fan Labor.  She states that the “internet depends on free labor,” but along with this labor comes costs of subscriptions, bandwidth, and more.  If De Kosnik and Noppe were to sit down and discuss the economy of fandom, it can be argued that both would agree a hybrid economy should be applied.  

   In her online essay, Interrogating “Free” Fan Labor, De Kosnik argues that there is a constant copyright war being waged, and fans only safe haven from this war is if they don’t sell their works.  The “grey zone,” a term applied to explain the lack of clarity in the legality of fan works,  restricts fans from leaving the gift economy, and allows big business to “sue and harass” fans that appropriate their works.  Noppe would agree with De Kosnik, seeing as in her essay, Why We Should Talk About Commodifying Fan Work, she argues, “some form of legal recognition is probably the most essential condition for a hybrid economy for fan work to be viable.”  In order for a new economy to thrive in the fan world, some limitation of the legal system must be applied.  

   Another issue, but a minor one, preventing the birth of a hybrid economy in fandom is the conflict it could cause within fans.  De Kosnik makes mention that “fans are happy to labor for free” so creating a commodity of fan works could just be unnecessary.  Going along with that, Noppe states that fandom holds close to the values found in a gift economy so they may actually fear money would corrupt their community.  A way to avoid this, as Noppe argues, would be to ensure that the selling of fan works benefits the fans first.  De Kosnik also notes that the commodification of fan work has already began, showing that fans have already started to stray from their economy.  If fandom is directing itself onto a new course, why not go with it?

   Noppe makes mention of the hugely successful Japanese dōjinshi, a Japanese fandom community that exists in a hybrid economy, that has led to increase in revenue for corporations in fan.  She states that in the year 2007 dōjinshi made around “US $320-593 million.”  De Kosnik also made mention of a popular website that operates as a hybrid economy.  The website Television Without Pity(TWoP) allows fan, both paid and freelance, to provide opinions and recaps of television shows in forums.  It has been proven that the content of this site has led to its users watching shows they typically wouldn’t, increasing viewers for the actual corporations that own the shows.  These examples prove that a hybrid economy could be good for fandom as well as big business.  

   By comparing both essays, Interrogating “Free” Fan Labor and Why We Should Talk About Commodifying Fan Work, it can be seen that Nele Noppe and Abigail De Kosnik would agree in saying that fandom should transform itself into a hybrid economy.  They both take notice that, despite fans’ fear of corruption through commodity, the major reason why this economy hasn’t taken off is due to the lack of legal recognition in fandom.  If even a few laws were applied to avoid copyright, this could be cleared up.  They also both provide examples of hybrid economies that function quite successfully.  If a hybrid economy could be applied to fandom the benefits could be numerous, not only for the fans, but big business too.

Noppe, Nele. 2011. "Why We Should Talk About Commodifying Fan Work". Transformative Works And Cultures 8 (0). http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/369/240.

NY, CHIPS. 2012. "Interrogating "Free" Fan Labor". Spreadable Media. http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/kosnik/#.Vq0VQo-cHIV.

[socialarchitectureasrevenue]

The Hybrid Economy

It is clearly evident that ArchDaily utilises a hybrid economy. The business model of ArchDaily relies on the willingness of others to contribute to something for free while making a profit. However members contribute voluntarily and are not asked to by Archdaily. Lessig describes this act as maintaining the loyalty of the community (LESSIG, L. 2008).[13] Another key example is a recent post found on the Facebook page titled: For and Against All-nighter culture – ArchDaily readers respond. The editors at ArchDaily reached out to readers in a previous post. The editors report the figures of 141 comments on the article and 100 more on the Facebook post and encourage the reader to visit the original article (STOTT, R. 2015).[14] This act not only provides information to readers, but employs cloud labour through encouraging conversation and adds to the value of the site.

[qutkcb2062014tutorialgroup6]

Reconceptualising Audiences

The rise of new media has restructured our role as consumers of media across all platforms. We are no longer forced to sit back and simply absorb messages from predominately large broadcasting companies and social agencies in a one-way, top-down model of media consumption (Rosen, 2006). With the introduction of new media, its consumption has developed to allow for the addition of a horizontal flow of communication. This model encourages audiences to engage in “citizen-to-citizen” conversation (Rosen, 2006). Although the former means of consumption still exists and continues to be widely used, the rise of the participatory audience is quickly enabling audiences to give media new meanings through the creation of conversation and empowering consumers to become “produsers” of new media.

The term “produser” is used to describe the convergence of two formerly separate roles within the media – the producer and the user (Bruns, 2007). Today, guided by the formerly mentioned empowerment of the audience, the ‘mediasphere’ has become dominated by user-led content creation (Bruns, 2007). The explosion of Web 2.0. in particular has enabled this shift, with blogging websites such as Tumblr and Blogspot and well as social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube encouraging those, as Rosen (2006) coined, “formerly known as the audience” to speak up and be heard – to not only absorb, but to create new media content. Now more than ever, audiences have the power to chose what, when, where are how to consume media and similarly, have the choice of whether to be an active or inactive consumer of that media (Rosen, 2006; Green and Jenkins, 2011). For example, throughout history news and current affairs have been limited to broadcasting over the radio, television or in print at a set time, with content selected by large corporate bodies (Rosen, 2006). Today, consumers can not only access the news across a number of different platforms such as the Internet, podcasts and YouTube clips, they can also chose to actively respond to pressing social issues through creating their own content, whether it be by posting a status update to their friends on Facebook or blogging on a current social issue on Tumblr. As Rosen (2006) cited in his piece “The People Formerly Known as the Audience”, the public have become “realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable”.

Furthermore, this participatory culture has created ease in the spreadability of new media content. According to Green and Jenkins (2011) audiences contribute in determining what gets valued through their choices, investments and actions. However with media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter hosting an increasing amount of hybrid economies, the question of who really has the power remains. For example, a recent video entitled “First Kiss” posted to YouTube became viral through audience sharing via various social media channels. The video depicts a series of strangers meeting for the first time being filmed kissing. In just one week, the video went viral and currently has over 68 million views. However, what was spread for it’s sparking of human emotion and intrigue was actually just a very clever advertisement for a UK clothing company, WREN (see article). Although the shift towards new media has empowered audiences to have a more participatory role in the consumption, creation and spreading of new media, the influence of commercial bodies is still present.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bruns, Axel (2007) Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation. In Proceedings Creativity & Cognition 6, Washington, DC.

Green, Joshua and Henry Jenkins. 2011. “Spreadable Media. How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy.” In The Handbook of Media Audiences edited by Virginia Nightingale, 109-127. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Rosen, Jay. 2006. “The People Formerly Known as the Audience” PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine, June 27.

[kcb206group4]

The Hybrid Economy Online

From a time where only media producers could voice their ideas and opinions to the public, we are now in a world where the Internet allows the audience to also. The Internet has become a platform for anyone to gain the publics attention to their blog, business or even just a social media post. Although the Internet does give audiences the chance to take control, there are still “way more “spectators and inactives” than active participants and creators” (Sauter, 2014). There are many reasons why individuals are not choosing to take control, from having little knowledge in using new media to their own personal choice. However, although there are not a lot of individuals creating media on the Internet, a lot are curating.

  A trending activity on social media is to curate or repost media such as memes, videos, news reports and more. The act of curating has lead to media posts made by ordinary people spread viral. A perfect example of content being spread viral is the ‘Neknominate’ videos. ‘Neknominate’, believed to have started in Australia, is a game where you film yourself sculling an alcoholic beverage and then nominate a friend to outdo you, then post the video on social media for the friend to continue the game (Wilkinson,  Soares, 2014). This viral game exemplifies how audiences have control to take over new media. However audiences with control may just be the result of media producers taking control back.

  Image sourced from: http://www.quickmeme.com/p/3vujtw

As media producers observe their audience’s actions online, they gain ideas on how to harness the Internet. Users often have the opportunity to comment or review various online content. This gives the users somewhat control, however it is also a form of feeding information to the commercial economy online. Sites have also been created specifically for user spreadability such as Flickr: a popular social network for sharing images and videos, and Slashdot: a science and technology website based on users submitted news topics. Commercial economies are not only taking advantage of user spreadability through certain websites, but also user’s personal social media pages.

  The act of users curating on social media has been acknowledged and taken advantage of by commercial economies for their own business growth. As users often share videos through Facebook, videos are now being made so that users must first share the video before they can actually view it. The purpose of this is to make sure more users are spreading the content, to gain more views. Another example of this is seen in Facebook competitions. Before a user can enter the Facebook competition, they must first either “like” or “share” the page. Spreading content has become the act of two economies working for each other; an economy of users wanting to share in interest and a commercial economy wanting to make money, resulting in a hybrid economy (Lessig 2012).

  The Internet is a platform for not only the media producers to speak to the public but also its’ audiences. Although the audiences have an opportunity to take control and create online content, most are curating existing media. With users curating and sharing their opinion, this allows the commercial economy to take control and harness the Internet. Overall, the Internet is a hybrid economy operated both by media producers and their audiences.

  Sofie Dennemoser

N8400989

  Bibliography

Lawrence Lessig. 2012. “Monetizing The Hybrid Economy.” FORA TV Video, posted February 1. Accessed March 20, 2014. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xghx4r_lawrence-lessig-monetizing-the-hybrid-economy_news

 Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “Week 3 – Creating and Consuming New Media Content.” Lecture Recording, posted March 13. Accessed March 20, 2014. https://lecturecapture.qut.edu.au/ess/echo/presentation/704659c3-1f73-4bdb-97b8-4fa8ae370e77?ec=true

Wilkinson, Peter and Isa Soares. 2014. “Neknomiate: ‘Lethal’ Drinking Game Sweeps Social Media.” Accessed March 20, 2014. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/18/world/europe/neknominate-drinking-game/