the state of the unions: youth, the sheep market and hollywood labor
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Ellen Seiter (eseiter@cinema.usc.edu)
Stephen K. Nenno Chair in Television Studies
Professor of Critical Studies
USC School of Cinematic Arts
10 October 2008
The State of the Unions: Youth, The Sheep Market,and
Hollywood Labor
Draft version, not for citation or distribution
Aaron Koblins brilliant art project The Sheep Market
poetically makes the case for why we need to abandon
digital utopianism and take a sober look at the realities
of digital labor market. Koblin used Mechanical Turk,
the online system for outsourcing digital labor created by
Amazon, to hire 10,000 users to create a drawing of a
sheep. Koblin paid each user two pennies per drawing and
then displayed all 10,000 drawings on a website where each
drawing could be viewed individually and also purchased in
an enlarged framed version for about twenty US dollars.
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Koblins work highlights the cottage industry nature of so
much media and artistic production, and the curious
willingness of the young digerati to work for nothing, or
for pennies per task. Koblin reports that over 7,000distinct users made the drawings, that the average time to
complete a drawing was under two minutes, and that the
hourly wage was sixty-nine cents per hour. Mechanical Turk
might seem a far cry from the creative guilds that have
dominated professional Hollywood production since the
1930s, The Screen Actors Guild, IATSE, the WGA, the DGA
the ASC. Admittedly it has the advantage of far greater
access than the notoriously closed world of the guilds (see
Caldwell, 2008). Yet it vividly illustrates what could be
lost in terms of a living wage, health benefits and fair
working conditions if Hollywood were to subvent the guilds
and go the way of Mechanical Turk. Koblins project
highlights the fascination of digital media: each of the
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drawings is quirky different, the interactivity of the site
gratifies the user searching for a favorite: the drawings
vary from the crudest, most hastily done to the clever and
polished. The whole concept is postmodern, witty, ironic.
And for those obsessed with living and working on-line, you
can take your two cents of pay in amazon.com credits,
instead of cash. Mechanical Turk refers to a stage trick
for magic acts, in which a dummy of a Turk (the
orientalism is startling from a PR perspective for a firm
with global ambitions like Amazon, but is in keeping with
the smug display of erudition (digging out a historical
example with its blatant racism) and political
incorrectness. Mechanical Turk is not an operation for
everyday users, but for digital entrepreneurs, who feel
above and beyond the old media, old economy concerns trade
unionists might raise about exporting labor.
Yet the Sheep Market also underscores the potential
ruination of media employment when models of IT outsourcing
are applied to it.
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Hollywood does not necessarily have to look outside
the US to outsource talent to non-union labor. They can
also rely on the infusion of young talent, with advanced
digital skills, who have been heavily influenced by
libertarian cult of the amateur, and who view the unionized
professional as a mere impediment on their path to quick
fame and fortune. into the Hollywood labor pool threatens
to convert a professionalized community with collective
bargaining to what Geert Lovinck calls the creative
(under)class, the virtual intelligentsia, the precariat
(the contemporary worker who faces more job uncertainty
than her proletariat precursor). ( 2008xii).
Educators have perpetuated unrealistic expectations of
the convertibility of digital media skills into employment
in the creative industries, just as city governments have
hastily subscribed to Richard Floridas highly flawed
creative industries argument to envision a new kind of
local economic infrastructure based almost entirely on fun,
stylish media jobs: Web design, fashion, video production,
gaming (Lovinck. 1997) The proliferation of computers inthe lives of youth and the broader availability of desktop
video, animation programs such as Flash, non linear
editing programs such as Final Cut Pro, have accelerated
the numbers of those aspiring to work in the entertainment
industries. In fact, the rapid spread of digital media as
communication technologies and leisure among youth has
encouraged legions of students (and often their parents) to
dream of escaping the dull grind for a cool job.
Of course, tales of the boy wonder tinkering in his
garage with Super 8 film who becomes a Hollywood star
director have been around since the 70s with the phenomenal
success of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They are
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potently given new life every time a director gives an
Oscar speech like this one (the Coen Brothers at the 2008
Oscars):
Coen Brothers: Best Director Acceptance Speech 2008
Ethan and I have been making stories with movie
cameras since we were kids. In the late '60s when Ethan was
11 or 12, he got a suit and a briefcase and we went to the
Minneapolis International Airport with a Super 8 camera and
made a movie about shuttle diplomacy called "Henry
Kissinger, Man on the Go." And honestly, what we do now
doesn't feel that much different from what we were doing
then....We're very thankful to all of you out there for
letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox,
so thank you very much.
Speeches of this kind inspire young people everywhere to
envision a magical journey where the schools traditional
boring curriculum is abandoned in favor of digital media
courses and the hope of a lifetime of play in the sandbox
of cool toys that are now largely digital.
Andrew Ross notes the way that the youngest jobcandidates replace more mature workers in the new media
firms he studied.
For those who had spent years in the trenches learning
Web skills, it was a ceaseless struggle to stay ahead
of software upgrades that threatened to render these
skills obsolete. The Web developers trade was
increasingly standardized, as the industry developed
programs and idioms to accomplish Internet work with
the same degree of efficiency as in the software
development sector. Throughout history, elder
artisans had possessed the fullest knowledge of the
trade, and they passed it on to youthful apprentices.
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In the modern technology industries, this order no
longer applied. The newest recruits were often the
most skilled because they were up to date on the
latest technologies. (2003, 263)
The treadmill of computer upgrades and self-learning has
increased rapidly as some skills have been more widely
disseminated. One of the most significant aspects of
digital communication has been its provision of new forms
of social networkinga democratization of access to social
capital, unfettered by the restrictions of physical space
and geography. Although technological determinists
championed these networks as more open than previous forms
of networking, such as church membership, school attendance
or country clubs--- there is a way that digital networks
might increase class cohesion and the exclusion of those
poorer or less educated.
The digital realm appears to be more open to larger
numbers of participants than other fields: a meritocracy
of talent, young people being discovered from their You
Tube posts without bothering with the costs of film school.Stanley Aronowitz has argued that what is hidden in most
discussions of media jobs, is the ways that they impose
tremendous levels of financial risk. These most desirable
kinds of jobs in terms of closeness ofcool media,
informal work environments and flexible schedules are
scarce, and even at that they have evolved to impose far
more risk on individuals than similar white collar jobs.
Young people famously use digital communicationsinstant
messaging, cell phone texting, social networking websites,
texting, to maintain their social capitalat least with
those peers who can afford to keep up with costly
requirements of these technologies. Yet there is nothing
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inherently democratic about the young and the wired. In
fact the libertarian tendencies embedded in the rhetoric of
Wired magazine and the like, directly oppose the
codification of professional standards and the blue-collar
aura of trade unionism. The dilution of any sites
exclusivity threatens the value of the social network.
Social capital is crucial to the convertibility of cultural
capital into employmentfor youth with digital skills; the
school to work transition is as much about connections as
it is about talent or skills. The lack of social capital
screens out working class youth from employment in the
highest income and most challenging jobs in the digital
realm. The lack of economic capital bars them from the
assumption of risk that the new media industries have
foisted on employees by promising stock options and the
hope of vast financial rewards. Good jobs in new media are
jobs for the young, the well-connected, and those with
enough family capital to float them through lengthy
education, long periods of employment-seeking in expensive
housing markets. At the trendy new media firm Razorfishthat Andrew Ross studied, a personnel officer explained
that diversity usually means race and gender, it rarely
means age, background or class. Everyone here has a
similar educational background. (30)
New media jobs are prime examples of the ways that the
intersection of economic, cultural and social capital
function according to some new rules and demands in the new
economy. Gina Neff defines this work as entrepreneurial
labor in her study of workers in Silicon Alley in New York:
These cool jobs are especially attractive to the young.
What is required to pursue entrepreneurial labor is an
acceptance of much higher risk than other industries and a
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greater personal responsibility for ones career through
constant self-training and social networking. In his
interviews with hundreds of workers in the new media
industries, Andrew Ross noted that even in the progressive,
humane workplaces advances in corporate democracy could
turn into trapdoors that opened onto bottomless seventy-
hour-plus workweeks. (18) Besides extended period of
unemployment this also entails the acceptance of jobs with
no benefits, long hours, part-time work, and short-term
contracts. As educators it is important to think through
and to talk about with young people the realities of these
forms of creative work.
Because cultural work is prominently featured in
popular discourse, especially in visual images, and
associated with trendsetters, beautiful people,
hipness and cool, this problematic normalization of
risk serves as a model for how workers in other
industries should also behave under flexible
employment conditionswithout strong stabilizing norms
and regulations of workplace behavior and rewards,media workers develop entrepreneurial labor in the
dual hope that they will be better able to navigate
uncertainty and maintain their association with a
hot industryeven when that industry is marked by a
winner take all inequity in both income and status.
(Neff p. 308)
Thus a new industry and a new form of social networking
reproduce the old class advantages of a pre-digital
generation.
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Digital Content Creation has shaken the media
industries by providing new distribution outlets for
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creative work and a demand for new skill sets among
creative workers, something that has exacerbated its
favoritism of the young. Two important effects are the
expansion of dreams of making it in the creative
industries and the promotion of a new model of training in
which young people are encouraged to invest enormous
resources in training, self-promotion, technology, and
unpaid content creationwhat is called entrepreneurial
labor. Entrepreneurial labor may not be new to
Hollywood--schmoozing of all kinds, unremunerated work, and
vast investments in self improvement--- have been a staple
for a century. Digital labor has the potential to vastly
increase the degree to which media corporations can manage
to off-load the costs of media production and entice
potential employees to invest huge amounts of time on
unremunerated tasks. Fan activities are one example of
this: in the realm of television, fans now provide free
focus groups, publicity and advertising on a vast scale
(Seiter, 1999). Digital content creation has been
exploited by studios, talent agencies and televisionnetworks to undermine the creative and craft guilds in
Hollywood. This can be seen, for example, in the flurry of
activity at talent agencies to establish divisions devoted
to web 2.0 content who signed up web talent in the months
before the strike began. Those efforts have produced a few
examples of on-screen talent being discoveredand bypassing
SAGmuch the same way that reality show contestants
sometimes transition into being celebrities. Relatively
few writers, directors or producers made the transition,
however, although many were briefly dazzled by stories of
webcasts striking lucrative deals. In retrospect, it is
clear that most of the digital content creation that was
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signed by traditional talent agencies was either on screen
or the kind of person who was familiar enough with the
technical and sociological properties of web 2.0 to be able
to assist in the design of viral marketing campaigns, such
as those that now dominate the music industries.
Labor statistics indicate that the most likely job to
be found for young digital wizards is in the sphere of
marketing. That is the only growth area in media jobs
(especially those linked to television) today, and most of
those are in consulting. Consulting jobs are those most
likely to resemble the kinds of casualized work offered on
Mechanical Turk: the employee pays for the digital set up,
work is contracted on a free lance basis, no benefits and
no office space are provided.
The digital divide as it separates creative workers along
generational lines is a matter not merely of ability and
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innovation with new technologies, but also a matter of
experiences in the labor market. Does the model of
entrepreneurial labor common to the web, online video,
and video gaming, threaten to unravel decades of union
struggles in the creative industries in the US? Young
aspirants to film and television understand little about
labor market forces, compared to their elders, and this has
been fostered by the rampant digital utopianism of the last
decade.
The easy availability of desktop media production and
distribution through YouTube and Facebook, has increased
the ranks of students aspiring to be Hollywood directors.
Enrollments in production courses and applications for film
school are booming: at the USC School of Cinematic Arts
about twenty-four applicants vie for each undergraduate
place in production each fall. Most of them want to
direct, rather than work in media in any other capacity;
and most of them want to work in film, not tv. In truth, it
is far more likely that they will end up working in
television, not film, and in some role other thanwriter/director. Of course, for decades the young have
headed to Hollywood with dreams of making it. For this
reason alone, it is amazing that creative workers in
film/tv enjoy collective bargaining and union
representation, when union membership nationwide is at an
all-time low and white collar professionals in all lines of
work an extremely difficult group to organize. The issue
in this strike revolves around compensation for work
distributed on-line. Fear of the young informed
discussions during the writers guild in two important ways.
The current generation of film school students eagerly
gives their work away for free in hopes of being
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discovered. Student complaints at all the major film
schoolswhere copyright for creative work produced in
classes is held by the school, not the student-- center on
restrictions about posting creative work online. Second,
students are accustomed to using the Internet for
entertainment to such an extent that no one is sure they
will miss (especially network) television if it goes away.
As one tv showrunner put it "Kids today, you take TV away,
they'll say, 'Big deal,' and they'll click on the
computer."
The season of labor negotiations shone light on the
dual and interlinked threats of the young and digital
distribution to the old media system of professional
guilds. One of the lessons of the last season of labor
negotiations in Hollywood is that the writers, those with
the least digital and most traditionally academic skills,
ended up with the greatest pull in negotiating to secure
their ability to receive a decent wage in return for
handing over the copyright for their creative labors to the
production companies and studios they work for. Since thewriters contract was settled in the spring, enormous
anxiety settled on creative workers in Los Angeles. Would
there be a TV season? Would the traditional fall schedule
be wall-to-wall reality shows? These fears were
underscored by relatively few orders for dramatic series, a
gigantic boost in reality shows on cable, and short orders
even for those series that were contracted. By
comparison, the Directors Guild of America settled quickly
and prior to the WGA with few demands for digital residuals
(the terms give the networks free use of any television
programs on line for nearly a month before any residuals
kick in). The Screen Actors Guild fought hard for terms
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similar to the writers, and insisted on payment for on line
streaming. As a result, the leadership was ever more
stridently redbaited in the Hollywood press, AFTRA poached
significant segments of its membership (covering background
actors), and a new slate of leadership was voted in last
month. IATSE negotiations are up next, but because that
union has been dominated for years by the corrupt
leadership of Tom Shortdespite challenges from notables
such as Haskell Wexlernot much is expected of the
negotiations.
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Recently, networks I learned of a new means of
bringing outsourcing models into weekly network TV
production. While this has long been the practice in the
animation industries, television production, because of its
demanding schedules, has remained clustered around Los
Angeles and New York. So this makes the remake Knight
Rideran interesting example of one of the shows that was
greenlit for production in the spring despite the labor
uncertainty. Knight Rider was an 80s fantasy series about acar K.I.T.T. (loosely based on HAL from Kubricks 2001) who
guides and comically speaks to the star. The lead was
played by David Hasselhoff in the original version.
The show was a favorite of fans of sci-fi and television
kitsch. (Of course, Hasselhoff gained unparalleled YouTube
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celebrity after his drunken burger-eatingoff the floor
incident was videotaped and posted. Hasselhoff has found
new life on network television as a judge on Americas Got
Talent, and his Baywatch episodes have assured his
energetic fan base in Germany.) The new production
benefited from significant external funding through product
placement of a Ford Mustang as the series car (formerly a
Pontiac Transam). The importance for my argument of Knight
Rider is that the show is very special effects heavy.
Special effects promise to be tremendously cost saving for
tv productionone of the most viable options besides
reality programs, daily news shows, and animation that can
be quickly produced in Flash or Maya. The program hired two
young, non-union effects wizards straight out of film
school who had backgrounds in software writing. These two
design all of the special effects for the show on
computers. After they are designed, they are outsourced to
South Africa and then returned within a week for the final
cut of the show (see Anand 2001, 2006). Knight Rider has
performed dismally in the ratings, and the show is besetwith problems meeting its production timeline: apparently
waiting for hard drives to be returned from South Africa
with special effects is slowing down the post-production
process, and the show is running several weeks behind its
target airdates on completing episodes.
So for now, the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors
Guild, the Writers Guild, AFTRA and IATSE still dominate
Network television, and television is the medium, moreso
than film, that can coordinate labor actions most
effectively, less of these creative workers are needed the
more a show can be filled with special effects. Even
while the talents of middle-aged workers, still expecting a
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family wage with benefits, have been downgraded, deskilled
and forced to work back-breaking schedules due to just-in-
time post-production modes. Yet union members are are
still not cheap enough. A great deal of film production
has moved to right to work states such as Louisiana and
Georgia that eagerly court film and television production
but employ local talent mostly at lower skill levels.
Young computer wizards, however, with advanced software
skills, are eager to step in and devise new and cheaper
ways of producing special effects, computer graphics,
archiving of digital material, flash animation -- talents
learned from their youthful practice on the world wide web.
To return to the WGA and the lessons to be learned
from their negotiations this year. The WGA employed
several classic tactics of trade unionism. Their chief
organizer had come from a background in the Ladies Garment
Worker Union. The WGA made a key alliance with the
Teamsters in the years before the strike, honoring their
picket lines at the studios and thus able to call upon the
Teamsters to return the favor and help the WGA shut downstudio televisoin production during the strike. The
leadership prepared the membership through over a year of
internal organizing lengthy educational seminars designed
to give members the larger economic picture on digital
media and the impact of conglomeration on film and
television.
The strike itself produced proclamations from the
digerati about the demise of the old guild model and the
need for the writers to switch to the silicon valley model:
Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, suggested in his blog
that writers turn to the Silicon Valley model: talent
attracts venture capital, artists shares ownership with
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venture capital shareholders, everyone makes a fortune, and
the quality of the media created is better than before.iIn
this scenario, unions are an inconvenient feature of an
anachronistic system where talent must band together and
engage in adversarial collective bargaining to try to
extract a share of the ongoing economics of their output.
Presumably the adversarial nature of labor management
relations vanished in Silicon Valley, when all talent
became owners. In the Los Angeles Times, Patrick
Goldstein criticized the WGA for not understanding that
classic union organizing no longer works in the digital
age.
The WGA is fighting the good fight. But the glory days
of Norma Raeare gone. Real change in today's world
comes from the energy and ideas of entrepreneurs, not
from labor negotiations. To take control of their
work, writers have to cut out the middleman.ii
Digital utopianism threatens decades of union
struggles in the television industries, that have fought
the endless lines of eager young people (especially those
with parents who can support them indefinitely) who are
willing to do anything to make it.iiiThe WGA radically
threatens the cybertarian view of new media that has
dominated the discourse of DIY, user-generated content,
blogging and all things Web 2.0., by pointing out that all
this media production for the Internet is unremunerated
all the videos, photos, and blogs posted on the web (and
thereafter the property of the website owners).
Of course, silicon Valley could learn a thing or two
from the WGA. Jaron Lanier argued in an editorial for the
New York Times(Pay Me For My Content!) that designing the
Internet so that content is always free was a mistake. A
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computer scientist, Lanier has defected from the Internet
idealist position because, he argues, business
opportunities for writers and artists have decreased and
the only business plan in sight is ever more advertising.
One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone
is aggregated.Lanier plainly critiqued the YouTube model
in December 2006: The Web 2.0 notion is that an
entrepreneur comes up with some scheme that attracts huge
numbers of people to participate in an activity online .
What is amazing about this idea is that the people are the
value and they also pay for the value they provide
instead of being paid for it.ivMaybe giving it away isnt
such a good idea after allv. It brings the concerns of the
middle aged, health insurance, mortgages, etc., to spoil
the party of convergence media as a dazzling route to self-
expression unfettered by material or economic constraints.
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When the strike began in 2007, the undergraduates and
graduate students in the cinema school had to be told what
scabbing meant. They had to be sternly warned that if they
took the places of their professors in the writing division
on television shows or film re-writes, they would not be
greeted with warmth and friendship in the future. They had
to be informed that rules existed barring future membership
in the WGA for those who cross picket lines and accept
writing jobs replacing union writers. What surprised me
about this, was that despite nearly universal membership in
the WGA among the faculty, the subject of unionism, and
employment had not yet been broached. In fact, when
Miranda Banks and I attempted to host a panel with WGA
president Patrick Verrone, our dean hesitated on the
grounds that the school could not be viewed as taking a
side in the strike.
Conclusion
The favorite theme of charter schools in the US is digital
media. And every charter school in the US that specializesin digital media encourages students to dream of making it
in the creative industries. The best education that could
be provided to students and digital artists is the one that
exposes them to the dangers of a Sheep Market future,
allows them to evaluate critically the neo liberal euphoria
of digital entrepreneurship, and places labor relations at
the center of the new media curriculum. In my book, The
Internet Playground, I laid out the negative impact that an
emphasis on computer learning has had on elementary school
education (see also Berliner, Cuban). More recently, I
have used the analogy of digital learning and classical
music training, following closely on Bourdieus work on
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social stratification as expressed in cultural familiarity,
to expose the irrationalities of investing in digital
literacy on a large scale at the primary education level.
Now, in my work at a university that is expensive,
exclusive and promises to jump start careers in film and
television, my reservations grow.
In the field of digital media education, it pays to be
optimistic. The government, and the many business
interests that have targeted education as a field for the
sales of hardware and software, like to hear that digital
media is a superior delivery system. In other words,
there are powerful economic interests behind the promotion
of the digital in education. As Menchnik has notes, this
has made the line that separates benevolent, authentic
concern for student learning enrichment from self-
interested entrepreneurship [can be] difficult to
ascertain The rise of digital technologies has coincided
with the blockage of educational opportunity, intensified
anti-immigrant policies, and a disturbing increase in the
numbers of children living below the poverty line.The economic crisis may finish off expensive
educational experiments that require constant hardware and
software upgrades and have weakened the influence of
teachers over curricular priorities. But technology firms
have already won the battle: by influencing advanced
students everywhere to invest heavily in prosumer
equipment, by successfully advancing the expectation that
every student will purchase her own lap top, digital camera
and editing software, storage space, and fast connections.
Now that media making is disseminated on such a broad
scale, it is fascinating how many pedagogical principles
considered radical in the 70s have now been pushed down to
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the lowest levels of the curriculum. YouTube provides
thousands of examples of what was once considered radical,
Brechtian, experimental filmmaking in burgeoning film and
art school programs in the 70s. But the curriculum posits
a universe of user/consumers without providing any
information about the economics of media. As Lovinck puts
it The ontology of the user mirrors the logic of capital
in so many ways. The user is the identity par excellence
of capital that seeks to extract itself from rigid systems
of regulation and control..the user is the empty vessel
awaiting the spectral allure of digital commodity cultures
and their promise of mobility and openness. (2008, 240).
discussions of topics such as media conglomeration or labor
practices find no place in digital literacy that takes the
user as its starting point: Representation and culture
dominate.
Media education is an expensive business, and whether
it is the charter high school franchise High Tech High run
by the Gates Foundation, or the USC film school with its
175 million gift from George Lucas, the direct influence oflarge corporations on the curriculum can be keenly felt.
The digitization of media work has made costs even more
prohibitive. While the overall costs of production have
famously been lowered due to desktop video, the planned
obsolescence of so much hardware and software, the
treadmill of upgrades and replacements, and the soaring
costs of technical support, cause digital production to
strainif not breakthe budgets of educational institutions
at all levels. At the high end of elite private education,
the costs are increasingly passed on to the students.
Besides paying tuition costs of nearly $30,000 US per
year, the students tend to provide their own cameras,
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laptops, digital storage and software. At the low end,
the same pressures make domestic access to high end DSL
connections, computers and software a near necessity for
top students, thus skewing the enrollment at even public
schools originaly designed to serve low-income families
towards those who can afford new laptops (Seiter 2007) .
As the economic crisis worsens, the wisdom of putting
educational standards such as economics, history and
regulation back in the curriculum, and increasing
skepticism about the legacy that the last decade of
corporate intervention into the public school systems
becomes evident. As the consequences of media deregulation
are highlighted by the global economic crisis, a shift from
cyberlibertarianism to citizenship education, labor history
and economicsand at the risk of sounding hopelessly
stodgyliteracy rather than digital literacy-- is long
overdue. The Writers Guild membership, after all, have the
lowest levels of digital literacy and the best education in
traditional subjects such as history and literature of all
creative laborers in Hollywood. We need to develop anideal of strong digital literacy that would encompass both
the capacity to author in ways that might impact civil
society and an understanding of the political economy of
new media, that includes not only challenges to
intellectual property and copyright, but also an analysis
of wealth distribution and the potential for exploitation
in digital labor involving computers
Aneesh, A. (2001) Skill Saturation: Rationalization and
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iMarc Andreessen, Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valleys Image, blog.pmarca.com(12 November 2007). See also Marc Andreessen, Suicide by Strike, blog.pmarca.com
(4 November 2007). http://blog.pmarca.comiiPatrick Goldstein, Come on, writers, script your futures,Los Angeles Times(20
November 2007). http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-gold20nov20,0,3720809.storyiii
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position among computer scientist is compatible with his work as a for Linden Labs(Second Life), which has a stake in promoting ways to monetize content.
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