social media

via Huff Post article “Majoring in Debt“

There have been three things on my mind this week. The first is the labor of graduate students and adjuncts. The second is student debt. The third is the Facebook IPO and who makes money off of what. Yup, it’s going to be one of those kinds of posts.

Yesterday, I mentioned the amount of labor that is going into teaching and she sat me down and she told me that her momma saw the amount of work she was doing as an instructor and student and said “Honey, you are an indentured servant”.

Breathe.

She went on to tell me, yes #allcity you need to teach and you Love it, but you are here to leave with a finished product. Your work is brilliant, write and keep writing, find a finished product by someone in your field and decide how much attention your teaching will receive. Learn what the unstated rules are and proceed accordingly. #jesusbeaFenceforBlackgirls.

I was both relieved by her words because I did plan on writing all day, even though I have a slight temperature. I tend to have some of the best ideas about writing when I have a temp. I was also bummed out by her words, because I thought, what if she were not there to say these things to me. But she is, and I am grateful.

I know that the US graduates more law students than there are lawyer jobs, and I would imagine that there are more undergraduate students graduated than their are entry-level jobs. The fact that there are more trained people than their are jobs allows for employers to pick the employee who is willing to accept the lowest pay. How is this humane?

Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article up earlier this week titled “Among the Majority” by Michael Bérubé about the state of academia and how 70% of jobs are taught by people who have part-time contracts.

The article has several nuggets.

The first is that,

Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities.

The second is that,

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40 years ago, 80 percent of America’s college teachers enjoyed the protection of tenure, whereas now only 54 percent do.

In the third point, he quotes John Rhoades saying,

colleges promote themselves, especially to first-generation students, as a pathway to the middle class — but, increasingly, colleges do not pay middle-class wages to their own faculty members. The contradiction is deepest at the lowest tiers of the academic hierarchy, where, Rhoades said, underpaid adjunct faculty members are effectively “modeling what is acceptable as an employment practice.”

I think that what many people are unable to see is that the status of graduate student workers and adjunct employees isn’t an exception to the rule but more like the rule in 2012 and beyond.

In a culture were undergraduate students are routinely saddled with tens and thousands of dollars up debt upon graduation, how can this not be a version of indentured servitude? School loan debt is greater than credit card debt in the US. Yet, if you are working class, and the first person in your family to go to college, who in the hell is going to tell you that Sallie Mae and them are going to want their money rain, shine or earthquakes.

Which brings me to the Facebook IPO. As a scholar I do political economy, so I am always paying attention to how money moves. I had several questions after having seen the $100B IPO numbers.

How is it possible for company to be “valued” at 100 billion dollars when it doesn’t make a material product?

What does it produce? I will wait. #SmoothesSkirt. It doesn’t produce anything material, you do. It is your personal information, or the personal information of the nearly 800 million users.

If a corporation’s primary duty is to it’s shareholders what is to stop them from compromising user data for profit?

David Rushkoff states that,

the more money Facebook takes on, the more like money it will become. In other words, when a social media company is a social media upstart, it will have vastly different motives than the motives it has when it’s responsible for acting in the best interest of its shareholder — a requirement for being a publicly traded company.

I am not sure what to make of all of this, however I do know that it isn’t sustainable.

1 million of the 1.5 million college instructors are teaching on a contract as temporary employees, student debt is higher than credit card debt and Facebook just IPO’d with a 1 billion dollar valuation.

Thoughts?

Analog House

I have been thinking about a REALLY theoretical piece on the merging of our virtual worlds and our real (material) worlds (And the merging of Human Beings and corporations as well) and I haven’t been able to wrap my head around it.

One of my research interests is technology and the self, so I KNEW I would have to write it.

Lotta shit to grapple with.

I have been talking to S.bot, whom older readers know is
a dear friend and a marketing mucktey-muck. She helps me to see the big picture regarding technology. She subscribes to Venture Capitalist newsletters to see where the billionaires are placing their stacks.? So when she talks I listen. Her three major assertions are that:

a.The move is to get us all on the grid, so that our movements can be monitored.

b. Marketing and content are not the thrust of the internet and making money, the information engineers are the ones who will get cake, along with the information analysts. Engineers create programs that have marketing embedded in them Facebook, Gmail, Four Square, no content (or your personal) is what drives this machine.

c . Consequently (liberal arts) students who can analyze massive amounts of data will be incredibly valuable. The system has transitioned into information gathering, organizing and analyzing.

d. The goal with information and surveillance data is to get us to consent to what is called bio-metrics under the guise that we need to do this for global security purposes, convenience or both.

The first thing I asked her was why would anyone care whether we are on the grid.

Her response, was that if we are monitored, we can be controlled.

Think about it, the more information you have about a person (reading their blog, Facebook, Twitter, online resume), the more you can anticipate their next moves.

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Social Media may be the grandest example of manufactured consent that we have ever seen.

Which brings me to why I feel a little less paranoid and was ultimately motivated to get my words down on paper. <<–hahaha. I know.

On Chartreuse’s blog this morning, looking for a post that I want to respond to,? I came upon a Newsweek article article by Daniel Lyons about Facebook and how social media is “monitizing” our privacy. There three important quotes:

What’s happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It’s what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.

The real holy grail is your list of friends. With that information, marketers can start sending more targeted messages. If you like a certain movie, or album, or mountain bike, your friends will probably like those, too. So they’ll be good targets for ads for those products. Of course, your friends are not going to buy everything you do. It’s not pinpoint accuracy. But the data helps marketers “narrowcast” their advertising. And it sure beats buying commercials on TV or splattering ads all over the Internet.

The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they’ve created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more?in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.

These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of “monetizing” our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself?the “social norm,” as Facebook puts it?so that what we’re giving up doesn’t seem so valuable. Then they must gain our trust. Thus each new erosion of privacy comes delivered, paradoxically, with rhetoric about how Company X really cares about privacy. I’m not sure whether Orwell would be appalled or impressed. And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley?

And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley?

Honestly, I am not certain that they are mutually exclusive.

Thank you for hanging in there with me.

Thoughts?

Did the Lyons article help bring what I said home?

Am I reaching?

What does it mean to live in a surveilled world?