Core Response #4 Week 6

Mark Andrejevic addresses an issue that has lingered in my mind since the first class, as what is mostly discussed in the paper accords with my experience of watching television. Watching is only the beginning, followed by a series of post-watching activities – joining online forums, reading other people’s posts about the show and engaging in the discussions.

I want to point out something not so much relevant to my main point at the outset: online fan sites may, to some extent, be seen as a contemporary example of the cultural forum proposed by Newcomb and Hirsch, a platform where various issues can be discussed from various perspectives.

I feel conflicted about Andrejevic’s expression of “the exploitation of participation as a form of audience labor” (37), or put it more harshly, “the exploitation of free labor” (42). Certainly, with the logic of capitalism in mind, the time and energy active viewers invest in elaborative postings on online fan sites can be read as free labor. Incorporating gendered power relations into this discussion, I agree with his analogy between the unpaid, “female domestic drudgery” (42) and the (often) unpaid, (mostly) female online engagement in forms of recapping, postings and more. Andrejevic also mentions a more structural concern – “the active viewer is associated with the postwelfare culture of individual responsibility and self-activation” (34). Taking up Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling,” I read this concern as an effort to characterize the lived, affective experience of capitalism in the digital age.

But meanwhile, it is tempting to draw a distinction between labor and recreation, although the boundary is far from clear. To me, postings on online fan sites really come down to recreation, or personal enjoyment, as no overt coercive force is used to make it happen. Although these actions are embroiled in the digital economy, the invocation of concepts like exploitation tends to overlook how the public actually experience it as a practice of everyday life and what its realistic significance and value are to the public. Just as singing by the river is a form of recreation, spending time on drafting a savvy post can be another form of recreation. In many people’s eyes, recaps and postings can simply be what they do in the leisure time for fun, not holding out “the prospect of shared control” (27). Although with the intrusion of the internet world into the physical world, the fun can turn into a huge source of stress and anxiety, this kind of activity should not be examined for the most part in the light of capital logic. Put more broadly, how do we make sense of the fact that people today spend too much time on their mobile phones? Should we interpret it as … they are exploited by tech companies? It is partially true, but a rather humanistic dimension needs to be included. On an individual level, it also raises questions such as, how to balance the intention, time and involvement of internet use and of physical life.

Andrejevic is not the poster boy for economic determinism. Yet, especially the latter part of the article with a heavy emphasis on the economic base prompts me to think about other ideological trends that can possibly intervene in the discussion going on here. Personally speaking, I lean toward its democratic promise, which has to do with my personal experience of engaging in such kind of online discussions. Even if we take in the logic of capitalism, referring to concepts like exploitation, in this case, does make sense. There is an emotional part of myself refusing to categorize my online activities as such.