ABSTRACT
The commercial models that are rapidly invading and colonizing social life online are spilling over into the realm of the workplace proper-and not just for the bored-at-work network. Consider, for example, a recent account of the use of social networking sites like Facebook by job recruiters in the wake of the global financial downturn. After several months of looking for a job, an unemployed engineer profiled by the New York Times received a “Jobvite” from a former co-worker who found him through an online recruiting application that trawls sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Such applications mark a shift in employers’ use of social networking sites from surreptitious screening resources to recruiting databases and utilities for viral marketing. To avail themselves of employee social networks, companies piggyback applications supplied by so-called “software-as-service” companies like Appirio onto the social networking sites of employees. Appirio’s application, for example, searches the networks and notifies employees “when new jobs open and which of their friends might be a good fit” (Weed, 2009). Aside from generating practical benefits for job seekers and companies, such applications extend workplace monitoring into the online social lives of employees. In this regard, the workplace is catching up with the marketing industry, which has been drawing on the power of interactivity to insert itself into realms of social practice hitherto largely beyond the gaze of market researchers and to convert the information employees generate into what Vincent Mosco (1989) has described as “cybernetic commodities.” If one of the characteristic developments of the interactive era has been the de-differentiation of sites of labor, domesticity, social life, and consumption,
for some categories of workers, it is perhaps not surprising that the monitoring capacity of the workplace is reaching out into the realm of our increasingly digitally mediated social lives. More concretely, if digital technology makes it possible to work outside the office, recent innovations enable the workplace to exploit the productivity of our social lives outside the workplace. Much has been made of the ambivalent or hybrid status of user-generated content creation as a site of both intrinsic reward and potential exploitation (see, for example, Arvidsson, 2007; Terranova, 2000; Banks & Humphreys, 2008). Thus, for example, Arvidsson argues that, “the post-Fordist production process directly exploits the communitarian dimension of social life” (p. 241). By capturing and channeling user-generated activity for marketing purposes, emerging forms of online commerce subsume the potential diversity of social life to narrower commercial interests. One important dimension of exploitation, for Arvidsson, “consists in making the productive sociality of consumers evolve on the premises of brands; to make it unfold through branded consumer goods in such ways that makes it produce measurable (and hence valu able) forms of attention” (p. 251). By contrast, Banks and Humphreys (2008) argue that online forms of co-creation complicate standard critiques of exploitation. Users clearly enjoy and benefit from online activities even as they generate value for commercial websites. The result, they suggest, might be better understood in terms of mutual benefit than exploitation:
Rather than being a zero sum game where if companies derive economic benefit it negates social benefit to the users (and hence is couched in terms of exploitation), is this instead an example of a new articulation of a cooperative and non-zero sum game whereby different motivations and value regimes co-exist?
