extremely parasitic
The blogosphere has been abuzz about Google Image Labeler, which uses data generated by users to categorize and label images. Like the ESP Game, users try to guess what another anonymous online user uses to describe the image. When the users’ labels match, the label is used to categorize the image. Tim O’Reilly discusses the potential of using games to get humans to label unstructured data like images. Citing a video by Carnegie-Mellon professor Luis von Ahn he notes, “In 2003, 9 billion hours were spent playing solitaire. By comparison, it took only 7 million human hours (6.8 hours of solitaire) to build the Empire State Building, and only 20 million human hours (less than a day of solitaire) to build the Panama Canal.” Clearly, if humans have the spare “processor cycles” to play a repetive game like solitaire, Google can benefit by getting people to do its categorization work for free.
Although no one’s forcing people to label images, I do wonder about the social implications of a profitable company taking advantage of all of this free labor. In “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” Tiziana Terranova discusses how companies like AOL take advantage of free labor to manage their operations and create content. For example, AOL uses “volunteer” community leaders to manage discussions on the online service, duties that are essential for keeping the for-profit company’s content family-friendly and civil. I’m simplifying her argument substantially, but she takes issue with the abilty of capital to generate profit off of work done for free. Moreover, this labor is gendered – the masculine work of open-source developers is regarded as a surprising contribution to society, while the feminized work of managing people in the case of the AOL community leaders is taken for granted.
I wonder if a similar thing is going on. Neither von Ahn nor O’Reilly make gender claims about solitaire, but I suspect it’s a game largely played by receptionists, call center employees, and other pink-collar workers to pass time at work. Can we read Google Image Labeler as a situation where Google does the masculine heavy-lifting of writing code for money while users do the feminized work of classification for free?
