Exploitation as Empowerment: On YouTube and User-Generated Content
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To create something that empowers humanity is an effective way of enabling human beings to make progress on lengthy projects. Projects that require multi-generational support to reach their intended outcome will require human beings and their organizations to syntonize around the idea of the empowered individual who is optimally equipped by the sanest method. (See section on sane methodology of technological advancement.) To do this is much nobler than impeding individuals, and in the long run effectively changes the behavior of the organization and can greatly perpetuate the organization. The organization is better benefited by empowered individuals acting as decentralized agents working toward common goals against intricate odds, with little or no penalty for failure.
When an employee, worker or contractor fails, and the reasoning is motivated by loyalty and not sabotage, the response is a psychotic state and desire to succeed. As much as success can breed success, failure is a better mother to ingenuity, because failure creates necessity to succeed. Compounded with the necessity being answered by the initiative, the psychology of the worker is enhanced and, without erratic or frantic attempts at covering one's own failure (the insanity of self-doubt), the worker will yield the successful completion of the task even if the initial deadline is not met.
Rapid development platforms, for instance, often promise results but do not effectively manage their interface optimally for empowering their users. Rapid development requires an inertial, momentous interface. Process and design must merge with interface to provide this empowerment. Because optimal process is waylaid by the consensus of non-scientific input, logic becomes the filter of design and must rule the process. Once the process is syntonized with its instantiation as a tool, the tool becomes optimally empowering. Optimally empowered tools are technically apt, and thus the user who comes to know the apt tool is also apt.
No technology platforms produced by corporations in the 1990s and 2000s have yet to fully grasp the quality necessary to empower their competition. This is because motivation is not present in industry to empower their users who, in most cases, are competition. Yet, innovation will enable the empowerment by demand because consumer demand empowerment. This means that the business tactic of barrier also enters into the psychology of the business. The tool is then evident of this predatory behavior of organizations who seek to advance humankind at a price. This is irrational fear by those in charge of such organizations. By keeping the consumer poor, the organization endangers its own stability and perpetuation and growth. All organizations which prove something mathematically first by basing the tool on a fundamental which is also a tool will fail at true innovation. In its purest sense, innovation occurs when a paradigm is shifted, and a new foundation is built, rather than built upon. It is rare when a new perspective can be discovered of such profound level. Once the foundation is built upon, the limitations of its design, and the repercussions of its socioeconomic impact become the determinative forces in the health of the species.
An observation made by both Sergey Brin and Jawed Karim is that it was surprising to them that people would actually participate in Wikinomic websites. Tapscott and Williams, authors of Wikinomics, define the mass collaborative efforts of Web 2.0 - "Companies can design and assemble products with their customers, and in some cases customers can do the majority of the value creation" (Tapscott and Williams, 289). Value creation is increasingly based on harnessing open source content, networking, sharing, and peering, but the result is not an economic democracy, but a subtle form and deepening of exploitation, in which labour costs are reduced by Internet-based global outsourcing. It is not surprising, in the least, the ironic comment that Brin, in a 2007 lecture to UC Berkeley students, remarked "I don't understand why anyone would do that." Google has relied on usability analysis, a core component of Google's enhancement of keyword searches, which is the same technical automation at the scale of Wikipedia.
A component of Google's system of usability analysis is merely turned inside out and provided to the common user, thus enhancing the value of the end product through its consumers. Unlike Google, Wikipedia is non-profit, thus people are more willing to contribute. In the case of YouTube, YouTube is for-profit, and thus its user base is more self-centered. The quality of egotism is more common among human beings than the selfless acts of editing Wikipedia for the common good. The egotism of Wikipedia is behind the scenes, whereas on YouTube the egotism is the commodity of the scenes. A level of intellectual elitism is present in the Wikipedia itself, whereas the elitism of YouTube falls upon its individual channels.
YouTube is the closing of the gap between consumer and celebrity, and it is the completion of the media loop between social websites, consumer-driven business models and is the tightening of the noose on every user of the web because the innovation of the industry is left to those unmotivated few who control visibility in the marketplace.
Exploitation as Empowerment On YouTube and UserGenerated Content - To learn more about this author, visit Herb Gilliland's Website.
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