The State of the Unions: Youth, The Sheep Market and Hollywood Labor

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    Ellen Seiter ([email protected])

    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    Draft version, not for citation or distribution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.

    ------------------------

    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.

    ------------------------

    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

    post-industrial work Theory and Society Vol. 30 no. 3

    (pp. 363-396)

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    ---Virtual Migration: the Programming of Globalization,

    Duke University Press 2006.

    Banks, Miranda and Ellen Seiter (2007) Spoilers at the

    Digital Utopia Party: The WGA and Students Now FlowTV

    http://flowtv.org/?p=968

    Berliner, D., and B. Biddle. 1995. The Manufactured Crisis:

    Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on Americas Public Schools.

    Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley.

    Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic Wacquant (1992) An Invitation to

    Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL University of Chicago

    Press.

    Bourdieu, Pierre, et al. (1999) The Weight of the World:

    Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge, UK:

    Polity Press.

    Cuban, Larry. 2001. Oversold and Underused: Computers inthe Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Lovink, Geert (1997) Strategies for Media Activism.

    Presentation, Code Red event, The Performance Space,

    Sydney.

    Lovinck, Geert (2008) Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical

    Internet culture (New York: Routledge, 2008).

    McGrath, Ben (2008) It Should Happen to You, in Steven

    Levy, Ed. The Best of Technology Writing 2007 (Ann Arbor:

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    University of Michigan Press and University of Michigan

    Library), 349-366.

    McKercher, Catherine and Vincent Mosco, Eds.(2007)

    Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (Lanham,

    Maryland, Lexington Books).

    Mosco, Vincent and Catherine McKercher (2008). The Laboring

    of Communication (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books).

    Neff, Gina, Elizabeth Wissinger and Sharon Sukin (2005)

    Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: Cool

    Jobs in Hot Industries Social Semioticsvol. 15, no. 3

    Dec. 2005 307-334.

    Peters. Michael A.(2006) Building Knowledge Cultures:

    Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge

    Capitalism. Lanham Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

    Schofield, Janet Ward, and Ann Locke Davidson. 2002.

    Bringing the Internet to School: Lessons from an Urban

    District. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

    Seiter, Ellen. 2008 Practicing at Home: Computers, Pianos

    and Cultural Capital in Tara McPherson, Ed. Digital Youth,

    Innovation and the Unexpected (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT

    Press).

    Seiter, Ellen. 2005. The Internet Playground: Childrens

    Access, Entertainment and Mis-Education. New York: Peter

    Lang.

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    Seiter, Ellen. 1999. Television and New Media Audiences.

    Cambridge: Oxford University Press

    Warschauer, Mark. 2003. Technology and Social Inclusion:

    Rethinking the Digital Divide.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    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

    David Hesmondhalgh, Television, Film and Creative Labor,Flowv.7.http://flowtv.org/?p=938iv

    Jaron Lanier, Beware the Online Collective Edge 12/25/2006http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06.2_index.htmlLaniers unusual

    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.