AOL sent out an email to its movie writers today informing them that they will no longer be paid. The email goes on to encourage those same freelance writers to continue working for free.
What do you think about AOL and its current handling of writers/managers? Post a comment below.
First of all, I am disappointed that whoever posted this item doesn’t know enough to know that “it’s” is the contraction of “it is.” The question should have been phrased, “What do you think about AOL and ITS [without the apostrophe] current handling of writers/managers?”
Having said that, I would like to argue that AOL is merely jumping on the bandwagon of corporate expropriation of the creative labors of the army of “citizen” laborers that populate the Web– who have been suckered into believing that visibility on the Web, even if this merely profits corporations, is its own reward. The voluntary cultural labor that this mindset creates is then exploited by corporations for profit. Andrew Ross has perceptively characterized this phenomenon as the principle of “cultural discount” whereby “artists and other arts workers accept non-monetary rewards – the gratification of producing art – as a compensation for their work, thereby discounting the cash price of their labor.” This freely donated labor, he points out, has found its way in “the funky milieu of the Webshops, where work looks almost exactly like play.” In an article I recently published in New Media & Society ( see “Cooperation with the Corporation? CNN and the Hegemonic Cooptation of Citizen Journalism through iReport.com,” vol. 13, issue 2 (2011): 314-329), I pointed out CNN–and other members of the corporate media formation–are exploiting the free labor that citizen journalism produces for profit.
Farooq,
Thanks for catching the error and for posting your comments!
The problem is that quite a few journalists, like me, will make that calculation: platform plus prestige, minus payment, is still worth it. This from the Christian Science Monitor, why I hate writing for free, but sometimes do it anyway: http://jordanink.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/slave-labor-blogging-isnt/.