Amy Bruckman responds to Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce wrote:

All of this either-or-ness. The truth is and-and-and. /Yes/, online activities promote participatory democracy and the development of new and/or accurate folksonomies, /and/ they also lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions. It doesn't seem as though you can have one half of the equation without the other half.

Mark, 100% agreed! Kurt Luther and I have been having a detailed parallel discussion of all this, and he has some excellent concrete examples. Kurt writes:

A great example of this is graphic design or stock photography. Websites that let people create "design me a logo contests" seem to the bane of many a designers' existence. There have been a bunch of organized efforts (and many more blog rants) about how this type of crowdsourced "spec work" is killing the field of design. (e.g.: http://www.no-spec.com/) On the contrary, amateur designers, students, and designers from developing countries argue for these contests because they create opportunities that simply wouldn't be available to them otherwise.

More closely related to our research, there was a lot
of backlash in the animation community when Mass Animation recruited
animators on Facebook (mostly students) to work on their short film
that screened in theaters and earned royalties. Basically, students
were paid $500 to do professional-quality work for a short film that
(I think) made much more money. I asked the director about that, and
if they were setting up a model that future filmmakers might exploit,
but he pointed me to the students who were (again) super-excited to
have the opportunity. What's fair here?
A possible counterexample: After the success of "Paranormal Activity,"
a very low-budget horror film that raked in huge profits at the box
office, Paramount announced it was going to change its funding model
to produce fewer big-budget films and many more micro-budget films. So
instead of investing a few million in one film, they are splitting it
into funding 10-20 $100,000 films. Are these $100,000 filmmakers less
professional than the million-dollar filmmakers? Hard to say (probably
not), but what if the decimal point moved a few places to the left?
Another interesting edge case is Mechanical Turk. Cliff Lampe's keynote
and many other thinkers (e.g. Benkler) talk about financial vs.
social-psychological motivations, and how the latter are often more
powerful. But Mechanical Turk is doing really well, and the fact that
people are willing to do a huge variety of tasks for almost no pay
flies in the face of some of these theories.

I think the main point here is that when it comes to online
contribution (crowdsourcing, whatever), pay models and volunteer
models can co-exist. It's not an either-or situation. We should be
thinking harder about when people should be paid vs. unpaid, from
both the ethical perspective (what's fair?) and the capitalistic
perspective (does it make the product better?).