Blog Post 1 

(The Productivity of Online Fans)

Yan Wing Yee

20034581

Andrejevic through the article” Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans” showed argues that an interactive economy is emerging in contemporary society. The new media was marked by interactivity to erodes the traditional boundaries between producers and consumers, therefore allows consumers to participate in the production process, but the users of TWoP websites are more skeptical about whether the producer are willing to listen to the audience.

The purpose of these sites is not intended to persuade the producers, but to show their talents in front of the community, indicating that the media has not fooled them. It is same as the reality show or the singing talent show, the participation of ordinary people and the audience with voting rights, they are cultivated as a universal subject of labor desires, effectively helping the "automatic “or “free” labor required for capital, the consumption and exploitation of labor. This is what the Terranova have pointed out “Simultaneity of labor as something which is voluntarily given and exploited. (p. 33)”

This phenomenon is showing that business monitoring has become an important part of our communications infrastructure. However, stripping does not mean that workers are not happy with the success of collaborative efforts. In my opinion, I am still not sure why many participant would willing to do various self-exposing such as show their living place, show their weakness and bad habits and so on to the world, although, participant might gain some good feeling when they are showing on the TV show, simultaneously they could not get any reward and everyone could saw what fool they make.

Besides, while audiences participate in interactive viewing and voting on website or phone, they also doing something free labor work for the company, as Terranova said "The Internet does not automatically turn every user into an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject. The process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the category of free labor signals the unfolding of a different logic of value", it was transformed into a kind of Productive self-expression.

Words: 343

Reference:

Andrejevic, M. (2008). Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans. Television & New Media, 9(1), pp.24-46.

David Morley,Television,Audiences and Cultural Studies (London:Routledge,1992) pp.148-149.

Terranova, Tiziana (2000) Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy, Social Text 18(2), pp.33-58.