{"id":3559,"date":"2011-04-04T16:56:34","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T21:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=3559"},"modified":"2011-04-04T18:13:38","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T23:13:38","slug":"beware-social-medias-surprising-dark-side-scholars-warn-ceos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3559","title":{"rendered":"Beware Social Media&#8217;s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO&#8217;s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jeffrey R. Young has an article in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education enjoining us to <a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Beware-Social-Medias\/126813\/\">Beware Social Media&#8217;s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO&#8217;s<\/a> (March 20, 2011). The article is about a South by Southwest Interactive conference that brought together researchers and industry.<\/p>\n<p>One of the big trends is using crowdsourcing or micropayments to get work done for free or very little. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor warned that this could be exploitative.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Mr. Zittrain began his argument against crowdsourcing with the story  of the Mechanical Turk, a machine in the 18th century that was said to  play chess as well as a human. But the contraption was a showy fraud; a  man hidden inside moved the arms of a turban-wearing mannequin. Amazon,  the online shopping giant, now offers a crowdsourcing service it calls  Mechanical Turk, which lets anyone, for a fee, commission unseen hands  to work on tasks like proofreading documents or identifying artists in  musical recordings.<\/p>\n<p>The similarity of crowdsourcing to a man shoved inside a box means  the practice isn&#8217;t exactly worker-friendly, the professor argued. &#8220;In  fact, it&#8217;s an actual digital sweatshop,&#8221; he said of the many sites that  use the approach.<\/p>\n<p>Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they  could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued.  He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate  students seeking spending money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder if anyone has proposed a code of ethics for crowdsourcing? Thanks to Megan for sending this to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jeffrey R. Young has an article in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education enjoining us to Beware Social Media&#8217;s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO&#8217;s (March 20, 2011). The article is about a South by Southwest Interactive conference that brought together researchers and industry. One of the big trends is using crowdsourcing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3559\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Beware Social Media&#8217;s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO&#8217;s<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,27,18,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference","category-media-and-news","category-philosophy-of-computing","category-social-networking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3559"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3562,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559\/revisions\/3562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}