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Geographies of Free Labor: Conceptualizing and Analyzing the ‘Transmediascape’
Abstract
Our contemporary popular culture is at the same time unprecedentedly intriguing and hard-grasped. When trying to describe the vast landscape of branded, interconnected commodities that largely constitute this culture, it is easy to run out of words. While we have grown accustomed to saying that new media accelerate the pace of this culture, we remain less prepared to talk about its spatiality. This paper suggests the notion of 'transmediascape' as an analytical framework for discerning the fuzzy geographies of present-day multi-platform – or transmedia – productions as well as ongoing changes in mediated forms of cultural production and consumption. Briefly put, the concept refers to the materialization of transmediality into a landscape of media platforms and augmented places and the routes between these. As an analytical concept for studying the spatiality of transmedia endeavors, the term can be applied to research with disparate foci. In this paper, we apply the notion of transmediascape to an actual case of cultural production within the music domain, with the specific intent to make manifest the ways in which consumers are invited into these landscapes as co-producers, or, as is our outlook here, as free labor. In doing so, we are ultimately able to go into a discussion about the power dynamics that play out between different agents involved in the making of transmediascapes.
... Thus modern audience visualisations and metrics are linked to, but not limited to, earlier types of static audience metrics and measurements, but are more engaging for the users and may therefore extend the influence of the data, even as the data which is tracked and measured extends. Interactive elements are also often designed to trace a particular route or lead the user through a story (Fast et al., 2017), structuring the preferred route. ...
Although the audience as an industrial media product has been scrutinised by scholars for decades, the visual presentation of the audience has been nearly absent from scholarly analysis. This article examines the interfaces that Facebook uses to present its audience to three different user groups (ordinary Facebook members, publishers, and finally advertisers) using a social semiotic analytical framework to analyse visuals, interactive elements and desired user paths. The interface displayed to ordinary users, the Facebook Friends page, uses a visual language with roots in the college yearbook, showing rows of faces with minimal available interactivity. This interface preserves the humanity of the audience, suggesting egalitarian social structures and timeless space outside Facebook’s ordinary flow. The interfaces displayed to institutional users, Page Insights and Audience Insights, for publishers and advertisers respectively, are quite different, characterised by a multiplicity of charts and high interactivity, with a clear path for the user that ends in ‘boosting’ your page or ‘buying’ your audience. The Audience Insights pages for advertisers feature advanced interactive tools which use the conventions of experimental science. These two interfaces do significant rhetorical work, dehumanising and abstracting audiences into data quantities which can be packaged as products, and encouraging publishers to focus on the production of data measuring engagement. Both the promotion of the value of data and the elision of audience work and surveillance, graphically represented in the different interfaces, help platform businesses like Facebook strategically, by increasing the value of their data and by suppressing audience concerns about surveillance.
In Transmedia Work Karin Fast and André Jansson explore several key questions that frame the study of the social and cultural implications of a digital, connected workforce. How might we understand 'privilege' and 'precariousness' in today's digitalized work market? What does it mean to be a privileged worker under the so-called connectivity imperative? What are the social and cultural forces that normalize the appropriation of new media in, and beyond, the workplace? These key questions come together in the notion of transmedia work - a term through which a social critique of work under digital modernity can be formulated. Transmedia work refers to the rise of a new social condition that saturates many different types of work, with various outcomes. In some social groups, and in certain professions, transmedia work is wholeheartedly embraced, while it is questioned and resisted elsewhere. There are also variations in terms of control; who can maintain a sense of mastery over transmedia work and who cannot? Through interviews with cultural workers, expatriates, and mobile business workers, and ancillary empirical data such as corporate technology and coworking discourse, Transmedia Work is an important addition to the study of mediatization and digital culture.
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