America Online volunteers Lessons from an early co-production community

ARTICLE INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav www.sagepublications.com Volume 12(5): 451–469 DOI: 10.1177/1367877909337858 America Online volunteers Lessons from an early co-production community ● Hector Postigo Temple University, USA ● This article continues previous work that analysed the case of America Online (AOL) volunteers from critical perspectives of immaterial and free labor, and incorporates newly acquired documents and interviews by the United States Department of Labor (DOL) with volunteers. Specifically, this article puts forth the AOL volunteers’ case as an instance of co-production that eventually met its demise when organizational changes resulted in the rise of a labor consciousness among some volunteers that made the ongoing relationship impossible. This article shows the types of co-productive labor that took place during the height of the AOL/volunteer relationship and the structures put in place to help AOL harness the power of a free distributed workforce. The research posits that the success of the co-productive relationship was a function of a balance between a numbers of elements: (1) the perceived reasonable compensation on the part of volunteers, (2) social factors and attitudes towards work such as a sense of community, creativity, and (3) a sense of accomplishment. ● ABSTRACT KEYWORDS ● AOL ● co-production ● free labor ● passionate labor Introduction In September of 2001, the United States Department of Labor (DOL) closed a three-year investigation into the labor practices of the once giant Internet service provider and web portal, America Online (AOL). At issue was the use, by AOL, of an extensive volunteer force (14,000 men, women and children) 451 Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 452 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) to run the basic operations of its bulletin board systems, chat rooms, tutoring sites and more. Volunteers were asked to enforce the terms of service (TOS) among the user base, they created content using AOL’s content creation tool called RAINMAN (Remote Automated Information Manager), submitted time cards and work logs, managed other volunteers and contributed to their respective community areas. In return for their services AOL volunteers received either credit hours that could be applied to their monthly bill or, when AOL transitioned to their flat rate service, a free ‘overhead’ account worth about 20 US dollars (Bagby, 2000; Postigo, 2003a). This article continues previous work that analysed the AOL case from critical perspectives of immaterial and free labor and incorporates newly acquired documents and interviews by the DOL with volunteers.1 Specifically, this article puts forth the AOL volunteers’ case as an instance of co-production that eventually met its demise as organizational changes and the rise of a work consciousness among some volunteers made the ongoing relationship impossible. This article shows the types of co-productive labor that took place during the height of the AOL/volunteer relationship and the structures put in place to help AOL harness the power of a free distributed workforce. Digital communication networks and technologies facilitate content production within the nurturing milieu of online community and participatory culture (Hartley, 2005, 2006; Jenkins, 2006). At the same time, the fact that communication networks and content are owned by businesses places the productive and social endeavors of volunteers and amateurs within the capitalist orbit. The characteristics of labor and capital that theories of free and immaterial labor describe are more readily obvious when the relations between capital and the social factory are mediated through digital networks (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Terranova, 2000).2 Yet despite the interpretive power of these theoretical approaches some questions remain over whether the conditions of these productive free labor communities can be understood solely from a perspective that sees their relations to capital as another form of capitalist exploitation of media consumers. Thus, while the theoretical lenses of immaterial labor and free labor have occupied analysis of productivity in digital networks for some time (Hartley, 2005, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Kucklich, 2005; Nieborg, 2005; Postigo, 2003a,b; Sotamaa, 2004; Terranova, 2000), this article attempts to shift the analytical perspective and ask what kinds of institutional and work conditions existed in the case of AOL to create fruitful co-production initially and then discord between volunteers and AOL ultimately. The article assumes a more grounded perspective on the view of work; one that accounts for the values and goals held by volunteers as they confront participation in co-production and thus it shies away from claims of false consciousness on the part of volunteers who willingly engaged in freelabor. The concept of co-production and an analytical approach grounded in the experience of work from the volunteers’ perspective opens up the possibility that these productive communities, working in tandem with business, may experience labor in ways that are difficult to classify; where labor is Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers wrapped up in ‘community’ and other social experiences and values. I conclude that the collapse of the co-productive relationship between AOL and its volunteers was less about money or being justly compensated (a notion that shifts depending on who you ask what ‘just compensation’ actually means) and more about control over work and a notion of reasonable alternative rewards. Ultimately this article touches on a number of themes regarding social, cultural and material production in digital networks that show a more complex view of the relations between media industries and those that co-produce for them. These include the role of community and sociality in blurring the perception of work as work, the implications of this condition for the very definitions of work and labor, the idea of passionate labor, and the negotiations that both businesses and free labor communities undertake to make sense of their complicated multifaceted subject positions and interactions. America Online and its volunteers: Co-production of the ‘AOL experience’ America Online, once a darling of the internet dot com bubble, benefited from and helped drive the ‘irrational exuberance’3 of the information economy popularized in the 1990s. At its most successful juncture, AOL held a controlling interest in media giant Time Warner, boasted over 25m subscribers worldwide and had the largest internal web community of any portal or Internet service provider. Key features of the AOL experience were chat rooms, bulletin boards and other ‘community’ areas that were available only to AOL subscribers. In these areas, members could create content, communicate with other members who shared similar interests, and if they wanted to, surf the World Wide Web. AOL was ahead of most of its early competitors in that it understood that a relatively easy to use interface and the ability to communicate with other members were essential features of the online experience. AOL actively marketed and fostered its extensive communities and sold them as part of its services. In many ways, AOL was ‘Web 2.0’ a decade before the World Wide Web embraced the idea (as a marketing scheme or as a reality); AOL knew how to exploit user participation before YouTube or MySpace. AOL started business as a short-lived online game distribution company (known as Control Video Corporation or CVC) for the Atari 2600. After a series of reinventions and renamings the company changed its business strategy and began providing bundled Internet services for owners of the Commodore 64, Apple II, and Tandy (Swisher, 1991). From even its early days AOL was dependant on volunteers to help create and maintain the chat rooms and bulletin boards that hosted the social interactions of AOL’s communities. Volunteers had a number of designations, such as chat room ‘Hosts’, Bulletin Board Monitors or Forum Leaders, Guides, Online Teachers, and Managers. Being a volunteer was a community affair that many of them Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 453 454 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) enjoyed, but as the business grew, and changes in the organizational structure of the volunteer program took their toll, these volunteers came to view their work from a different perspective. The sections that follow discuss the ways AOL harnessed the work of volunteers through its use of online tools and training. The article then describes organizational shifts at AOL that lead to a collapse of the co-productive relationship. Lastly, I conclude with some thoughts on how to best understand this case study and others. Tools of the trade: Creating content for AOL Early on in the history of the volunteer/AOL relationship the volunteer/ employee distinction was quite fluid and volunteers were designated as ‘remote staff’, a classification that did not necessarily distinguish them from paid employees doing similar jobs. Based on the stories of ex-volunteers, court documents, and news media reporting on the AOL volunteer program, it is quite clear that AOL engaged in active co-production with volunteers from the very beginning of its service.4 AOL volunteers not only facilitated and maintained the communities that frequented chat rooms and bulletin boards; they were actively creating official AOL content as well (Postigo, 2003a). Volunteers, for example, not only had significant access to chat and bulletin boards, but also had access to AOL’s development tool, called RAINMAN, which they could use to create official content. AOL provided tutorials for using RAINMAN, which explicitly explained the technology and encouraged volunteers to use it. These tutorials noted: RAINMAN is essentially a scripting language … There are no special programming techniques to learn, if you wish to change something about a page, you can almost certainly do it in a few simple and meaningful commands … You can change anything just by addressing the object by its name or id, and then selecting the changes you wish to make. (AOL) Beside the possibility of using a scripting language, RAINMAN also had a GUI which made making changes to the AOL design (such as adding forms for users to fill out) even easier (see Figure 1). Volunteers were also encouraged to use a software program called PowerTools to help in their duties, which included reporting content on forums or reporting bugs in the system (see Figure 2). Typically volunteers would purchase PowerTools at their own expense, something they were more than willing to do since it made the process of writing reports and interacting online easier. Besides these content development and monitoring tools, volunteers also had access to a volunteer-only section of the AOL system, called CLHQ (Community Leader Headquarters). In this area, volunteers could interact with each other, ask questions, and pursue their own online community. The Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers Figure 1 Forms Catalog from RAINMAN interface allowed volunteers to choose which types of forms they wanted to create for a specific site. Figure taken from the website ‘CL Program Archives’ at http://www.angelfire.com/blog/clprogram/index.html community area for volunteers also served as a gateway to training and education as well as an entry point to the AOL store where volunteers could get employee discounts on AOL sponsored products (see Figure 3). With tools like RAINMAN and access to community learning areas and supplementing those tools with their own macros and commercially available add-ons like PowerTools, the volunteers in the early days of AOL (pre-1996) were able to design menu items, implement AOL artwork and design the look and feel of many sections of the AOL interface. This constituted an astonishingly large amount of control by a volunteer workforce over the production of content in one of the world’s largest Internet companies. When the organizational transitions took place at AOL, the ability of volunteers to use RAINMAN was specifically taken away in hopes of gaining more control over the operation of the portal. Ultimately, the bulk of the work that AOL volunteers provided was not content creation in the conventional sense but rather the creation of community, connectivity and social interaction, which became central components of the AOL experience. Training the volunteer workforce and creating the AOL experience AOL subscribers who wished to become volunteers had to undergo extensive training. If a member was hired as a Chat Host, for example, he/she would Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 455 456 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) Figure 2 Top panel, forum reporting tool used to report violation of the terms of service (TOS). Bottom panel, bug reporting tool used by volunteers to report bugs in the software. Figure taken from the website ‘CL Program Archives’ at http://www.angelfire.com/blog/clprogram/index.html Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers Figure 3 The interface for the Community Leader Headquarters (CLHQ). Figure taken from the website ‘CL Program Archives’ at http://www.angelfire.com/blog/ clprogram/index.html have to take four online training classes (each lasting 1–3 hours) with a subsequent examination, testing their knowledge of policies and the technologies of AOL. According to an interviewee in the DOL investigation, the classes were quite thorough with one class involving a chat room simulation that the trainee had to manage (Anonymous, 1999b). Chat hosts had a slew of duties, which included keeping the flow of the chat going, asking questions in chat, dealing with problem members, and contacting AOL staff if issues arose. Hosting also took some preparation and many hosts would write macros (programs that allowed predefined text to be typed with a single key stroke) to help in their chats as well as use other tools to help them write their shift reports and logs. Chat hosts also had a minimum time commitment that they had to meet, two two-hour shifts per week, but many took longer shifts (Anonymous, 1999a). Volunteers such as Chat Hosts were issued a 67-page training manual that covered topics such as how to welcome members to the chat, how to engage members in chat, and how to handle challenges to the TOS (Terms of Service) and host authority. Most importantly the hosts were told they were expected to present a friendly welcoming attitude towards members. After passing the initial training a new host would have to work with an experienced host for at least two months before he or she was allowed to host a chat room alone (Anonymous, 1999c). Lastly, before beginning training all Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 457 458 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) AOL volunteers were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement about the operations of AOL, this fact was noted by almost all of the 40 volunteers interviewed by the DOL. The training manual for volunteers and the sources interviewed by the DOL are a rich data pool for understanding how volunteers created the ‘AOL Experience’. From the point of view of AOL, the chat rooms, bulletin boards and other sections frequently maintained by volunteers were seen as communities. These communities, so far as AOL was concerned, were part of the service package that the business provided to consumers and it fell to volunteers to help maintain the communities so that members would feel welcome, entertained, guided and thus keep coming back. The ‘AOL Chat Host Training Manual’ exhorted volunteers to ‘stay informed about what is happening in the community and understand the needs of the members who visit area’s chats’, to ‘demonstrate good humor in dealing with challenging situations’, and share their experiences and therefore give ‘fellow community members the ability to choose and manage their own online experience’. AOL also noted that a primary responsibility of a Chat Host was to engage members in chat and thus drive the conversation (essentially provide facilitation for interaction). They were told to ask questions such as ‘Where is everyone from?’, ‘Why kind of music do you listen to?’, ‘Can anyone recommend a good movie?’ and other ‘Conversation Starters’ (AOL, 2005: 6). Volunteers clearly were expected to entertain the group with games and other activities during their hosting shifts. The AOL experience, defined by a sense of community and entertainment (at least where chat rooms and other social areas were concerned) was created in part by volunteers working as communication facilitators. Furthermore, from interviews with the DOL, it is clear the volunteers also functioned to maintain order within the various communities through AOL. An overriding theme throughout the interviews that the DOL conducted with volunteers was the idea that for the most part AOL would not have been able to make sure that members adhered to the TOS (especially with regard to online conduct) if not for the presence of volunteers who had the ability not only to report violators but also ‘gag’ them from communicating in chat rooms. Many noted that chat rooms, bulletin boards and other social areas would be ‘chaos’ if not for the volunteers. One interviewee, when asked how she thought AOL benefited from volunteers, noted: Without volunteers, there would be no one to answer member questions or to enforce TOS ... in the past [volunteers] programmed menus (or created how AOL looked to members). If AOL eliminated guides and chat hosts, they would have to hire more people ... volunteers help communicate with members and help members access AOL services. (Anonymous, 1999d: 36) Lastly, it is clear from the interviews conducted by the DOL that volunteers who were interviewed at that juncture were constructing themselves as employees and making an argument as to why they should be compensated. However, it had not always been the case and for volunteers, certainly a sense of community had always been a reason (along with picking up technology Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers skills and potentially being hired) for participating in AOL’s volunteer system (Postigo, 2003a). Thus it seems that the sense of belonging and producing a product (community) that was rewarding and engaging seemed to provide for volunteers a sense of accomplishment that precluded thoughts of outright monetary compensation. Regardless, there was an attitude change among some volunteers and that change reflected organizational shifts at AOL. Organizational change, AOL and the volunteers A clear organizational shift began in 1996 as a result of two key events in the history of the AOL/volunteer relationship. The first key event involved an exvolunteer, Erol Trobee, who had been let go from the volunteer program and had sued AOL for earned credit hours he collected during his volunteer time. Prior to 1996, AOL charged its subscribers an hourly rate for access to the AOL network and the Internet. Volunteers under this pricing structure would earn ‘credit’ of two hours of online access for every one hour they volunteered. Under the arrangement, volunteers would pay their monthly charges and AOL would then refund them the earned hours. In his lawsuit, Trobee claimed that AOL owed him about US$600 in earned hours, which he was not able to use because he had been let go. Furthermore, he argued that according to AOL’s own description, he technically qualified as an employee and was entitled to that compensation. In court he was able to produce an employee manual that essentially described his duties as those of an employee and the court was prepared to award him damages. To prevent being charged with labor law violations, AOL settled the case out of court but was jarred into conducting an internal investigation on the legality of the relationship between AOL and its volunteers. In an internal memo, John Gardiner, corporate counsel for AOL, noted that there were elements of an employee/ employer relationship between AOL and its volunteers. In that memo, Gardiner laid out a strategy for how AOL should reorganize its relationship with volunteers to diminish the possibility of getting into legal trouble again. He proposed that AOL structure its relationship with volunteers and treat them as either private contractors or outsource their work entirely, in lieu of these strategies he noted that AOL should hire the volunteers outright (Gardiner, 1996). Either way, he believed that by creating an organizational layer between AOL and the volunteers the company could continue to benefit from the work of volunteers without being seen as an employer. The second key turning point in the history of the volunteer case was AOL’s conversion in 1996 to a flat rate system for billing subscriptions. Under this new system, subscribers would pay a flat monthly rate of US$19.95 for unlimited access. In the aftermath of the pricing change, AOL experienced its most rapid subscriber increase flooding its networks and significantly changing the volunteer culture. AOL volunteers saw a surge in volunteer recruitment, their once hourly credit accounts were converted to monthly Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 459 460 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) credit accounts worth at most US$19.95, and the sense of small community was lost (Postigo, 2003a). For AOL, the surge in volunteers and subscribers made managers realize that they had little organized control over the volunteer force that was producing content, guiding new members and otherwise acting as AOL representatives without structured oversight. Given these key events, AOL restructured its volunteer workforce by placing their management under a proxy organization called AOL Communities Incorporated (ACI), which would manage volunteers (now called community leaders or CLs) in the Community Leaders Organization (CLO) created by AOL. In the midst of this reorganization some volunteers’ understandings of their relationships with AOL began to shift. Management began playing a more active role in controlling volunteer work even as their own ranks were populated by volunteers. AOL stopped referring to volunteers as remote staff, they instituted different volunteering requirements and took away their ability to use RAINMAN. This amounted to a significant decrease in the amount of control volunteers had over their work when compared to the way things were prior to the organizational change. According to documents from the DOL investigation, AOL hosted a number of forums and chat rooms all of which used AOL volunteers to run their communities. One interviewee in the DOL investigation noted that, ‘prior to 1996 a conservative estimate would be that 90% of what the AOL paying membership saw, did, used and processed was created, managed and maintained by volunteer, unpaid workers’ (Anonymous, 1999c: 30). The material realities of the transition to a flat pricing system struck many volunteers as a shift that disincentivized volunteering. One interviewee noted that during the years of credit hours: If you were online, the meter was running and the bill usually came due prior to credits being posted. Therefore, it was often more likely the case that one paid to work, but it appeared that some compensation was realized that one’s over bill from AOL was reduced. Average bills for people who volunteered were $300–$500 a month, which was incentive for them to volunteer to begin with ... that and simply that these people like helping people and had formed personal communities online. (Anonymous, 1999a: 30) With the new pricing structure the monetary incentive had been greatly diminished and some volunteers looked to social incentives to rationalize staying on. One particularly salient example is that of the Academic Assistance Center (AAC), a group of volunteers that helped student members of AOL with homework and academic issues. Following the transition to a flat pricing structure, one AAC volunteer noted that the shift had brought about, Significant concerns among AOL’s CLs [volunteers] who have previously been ‘compensated’ for the voluntary service through free time credit reimbursements or ... free accounts ... the free credit time is completely valueless now. (Anonymous, 1999e: 40) Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers This interviewee went on to note that a number of the volunteers (especially in the AAC) were outraged over the fact that the company would be profiting so much (given the pricing changes) from the work of AAC volunteers, many of whom were professional educators with strong commitment to social justice. This volunteer argued that volunteers in the AAC would naturally wonder if their talents would not be better served by volunteering for non-profit education organizations rather than for AOL who was now making even more money from their work given that credit accounts were no longer the means of compensation. To address the issue and to acknowledge the sense of community (both online and offline) that many volunteers felt, this particular volunteer suggested that AOL donate a portion of the profits generated by the work of AAC volunteers to non-for-profit education organizations. This, he argued, would incentivize the AAC community, which had a general commitment to social justice, given that the pricing structure was no longer an incentive. This particular volunteer called on his fellow teachers to organize and fight for this new incentive system, noting: Stand up for yourselves, Stand up for your pride, your profession. Stand up for the rights of children ... this message has been sent to several AAC leaders ... and Steve Case [CEO of AOL at the time] himself. If they fail to respond in good faith we must be prepared to do something about it. This could ultimately mean a ‘sit-down strike’ or a letter campaign. (Anonymous, 1999e: 40) Ultimately, the pricing change and the organizational shifts at AOL positioned volunteers to reexamine the reasons why they volunteered in the first place. Whereas, before the incentive of credit hours, the community, the possibility of transition to a paid job, and altruistic motivations had compelled them, after the changes in AOL some volunteers became disenchanted with the organization, feeling like they had lost control of their work. No longer able to rationalize their participation from the perspective of compensation, they began to reexamine the reasons why they volunteered in the first place, seeing themselves as employees rather than volunteers. In the midst of this change came calls from various volunteers to restore the sense of community and altruism they had felt when the first joined AOL. When they protested or thought of organizing, AOL would summarily dismiss many of them from the volunteer pool (Anonymous, 1999e). Those volunteers that were let go from their positions began to organize around various online communities to discuss and share information and stories about their experience at AOL. Many of them felt a sense of injustice when they were released or ‘fired’, as they came to call it. Mostly, this was due to the way in which AOL would release them. Often it would happen shortly after they had made some public remark against the company, as in the case of the AOL volunteer in AAC who called other volunteers to organize against the company. Volunteers would sign on using their overhead account names (their AOL volunteer accounts) only to Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 461 462 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) receive a message that the account was no longer active and that they had been released from the program. Appeals were often not successful and the company would not respond to questions, giving only terse reasons for their release such as TOS violations or conduct unbecoming of an AOL volunteer. Eventually Kelly Hallisey, an ex-volunteer, and others prompted the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate AOL’s labor practices and filed a class action lawsuit for back wages. Hallisey founded observers.net an online community for ex-volunteers, where she posted internal documents concerning AOL’s labor practices and billed the organization as a watchdog group keeping an eye on AOL and its use of volunteers. While observer.net is no longer active, other communities of ex-volunteers have surfaced on the World Wide Web and ex-volunteers continue to congregate and discuss their experiences as AOL volunteers (Anonymous, 2008). The volunteer program at AOL was officially closed 8 June 2005 and volunteers received a letter from AOL giving them the general reasons for closing the program. According to AOL, community leaders were no longer needed since the majority of users were now savvy enough about online community and they needed little guidance. AOL wrote: As online communities continue to grow both across the Internet and on AOL, we’ve found that community members have become more savvy and independent, desiring to actively participate in, and shape, their own community experience. Community is still the heart of the AOL experience; this change simply ensures that AOL’s Communities recognize and reflect the voices and contributions of all of AOL’s members. (AOL, 2005: 1) This was a less than accurate reason. AOL members were very savvy about community online even in 1996 and volunteers were still required to enforce TOS and create the community. More likely, the reason for letting the volunteers go was because of AOL’s decline as a major player in the Internet portal/Internet service provider business and the ongoing class action lawsuit, which as of June 2008, appears as if it will end in a victory for ex-volunteers (Greenberg, 2008). The description of the volunteer experience so far shows that a coproduction relationship existed between volunteers, that prior to organization shifts and pricing changes this relationship flourished but then began to decline ending in the termination of the volunteer program amidst an ongoing lawsuit by ex-volunteers. How can we understand the culture that allowed co-production to flourish and the changes that created a shift away from this model? I now turn to a discussion of the theories that have been used to conceptualize the work of these volunteers broadly within postindustrial capital, participatory culture and emerging theories of co-creative labor. The article then concludes with the perspective of passionate labor as a way of understanding the conditions of co-creative labor. Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers Free labor, participatory culture and co-creative labor In 2000 Tiziana Terranova, in an influential article, sought to understand the relations of production in digital networks. Drawing on work from Maurizo Lazzarato, she deployed the concept of the social factory: as some of our social/leisure interactions come to take place in digital networks they can be commoditized and value drawn from them by capital. Thus we become a digital, social proletariat, where our activities are always inside capital (Terranova, 2000). Ultimately all the work of AOL volunteers and generally anyone who produces content online can be viewed as being, in some form or another, part of a free labor system of immaterial labor that is characteristic of post-fordist, information economies. This perspective has found receptive ground among video game culture theorists, for example, who think about the meaning of fan production (be that fan fiction or video game modifications) from a critical theory perspective (Kucklich, 2005; Nieborg, 2005; Postigo, 2003b; Sotamaa, 2004). More broadly, this perspective can be adopted to understand and explain the labor relations of other co-productive communities throughout digital networks like the Internet. Thus people contributing to Amazon.com’s consumer reviews and ‘List Mania’, Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) program, contributors to YouTube and MySpace and other countless users are part of a network-wide system of free labor. It is important to point out that Terranova does not outright situate free labor as necessarily exploitative, noting that people are not dupes and that they are cognizant that their work is valuable even as they choose to give it away. She suggests that there is enjoyment as well as exploitation in the process (Terranova, 2004). Questions remain about the framing of free labor as both exploitation and enjoyable or freely given. It certainly seems that the relationship between them implies a subject position on the part of those doing the work that is nuanced and complicated and that must be explored. The duality of workers’/ volunteers’/fans’ subject position suggests that labor relations as they exist in cases of co-creative labor are a result of not only the technologies, the post industrial ideology and its subsequent arrangement of labor, but also of the phenomenology of those volunteers and fans who are doing the working. How they see themselves is as important to co-creative labor as how the structures of capital tend to organize them. In fact, there is reason to believe that in instances of co-creative labor, fans/volunteers and businesses should be allowed to co-construct each other (Banks, 2005). From a fan studies perspective, Henry Jenkins suggests that the increasing inhabitance and productive nature of life in digital networks is the coming of participatory culture to the masses. In his concept of convergence culture, digital technologies and easily created/distributed information and content have the potential to make fans (a participating, creative audience) of us all. His perspective is a positive take on production in digital networks where participation affords media consumers the chance to help build a diverse media Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 463 464 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) content ecology and helps create meaning and value (Jenkins, 2006). John Hartley (2006) has also espoused a similar viewpoint, noting that ‘the developed world is witnessing a shift from representations “of” and “for the people” to those “by the people”’. Speaking on the comparison between television and new media like the Internet, he notes that, ‘television is heading into a post-broadcast phase of interactive innovation and do-it-yourself production, brought on by the coming-of-age of the Internet, which combines individual creative content and global scale in a way that was hardly thinkable in the broadcast era’ (Hartley, 2006). Taken together, Jenkins’ views on the power of participatory culture and Hartley’s advocacy for creative citizens seems to lend some hope that there may be, in some near future, a compromise between content makers and content appropriators or co-producers where everyone benefits. These perspectives suggest that a massive change is needed in the way many old media companies do business. These viewpoints also indicate that widespread reconfiguration of creative workers’ identity (both within organizations and outside in productive consumer collectives) will take place in the future of media production (Deuze, 2007). There appears to be an underlying tension between a free labor perspective and a participatory culture perspective that centers on what each believes will be the outcome of the overlapping and at times conflicting forces of participation and exploitation. Layered over these theoretical considerations are neo-marxist interpretations (Terranova being one of them) of labor relations and production in the information economies where capital is up to its old tricks, but doing it amidst the fluidity of digital networks; destabilizing work, creating ‘precarious labor’, and creating a liquid life where uncertainty is the norm (Deuze, 2007; Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2000). From these theoretical perspectives, it seems that the AOL volunteers certainly did feel ‘precariousness’ in their work (even if it was not paid labor). Their organization changed dramatically and they were never in any position to challenge the dictates of the company or the market, even as they experienced a sense of participation within the company, co-creating content and fostering community. Theories of co-creative labor begin to answer questions raised earlier in this article (such as how to frame the activities of fans/volunteers as a relationship being shaped by and shaping business). Specifically, John Banks and Sal Humphreys press us to ‘move beyond marveling at the phenomenon of user generated content to understanding its place in economic, business and socio/cultural circuits’ (Banks and Humphreys, 2008: 402). Their work on the relationship between the Australian videogame company Auran and fans clearly illustrates the dynamic relationship that shapes both fans and business. They note that in cases such as Auran’s, we witness a ‘co-evolution of two economies (the social/affective and business)’ that produce a newly constitute state of social/labor relations governed not only by an economic rationale but by a cultural calculus as well (Banks and Humphreys, 2008). In such a case, meaning matters as much as money and the newly constituted relationship Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers between business and fan/volunteers is one that accounts for both the economic and the social. The idea of ‘social-network markets’ used to conceptualize co-productive relations in their case study defines the key characteristic of co-creative relations: ‘a process by which economic outcomes sit alongside significant social and cultural outcomes’ (Banks and Humphreys, 2008: 405). The notion of social-network markets is congruent with the aims of this article and adds an important macro-social perspective to the details of work experiences illustrated in the case study of AOL volunteers. If social-network markets explain the co-evolution of a business/culture ethic that organizes labor relations in new media environments then the idea of passionate labor describes the conditions of work under this new system. Shifts in those conditions result in tension that motivates co-creators on the participatory side (fans and volunteers) to retreat into to discourses of traditional labor relations of exploitation and work, a phenomenon noted in this article and by Banks and Humphreys. It is worth pointing out that to say that there is a return to a labor discourse in instances of co-production breakdown does not suggest that it may be outmoded or that conditions have moved beyond its power to articulate the power dynamics between capital and workers. Rather, the observations suggest that conditions of work structure the availability of those discourses as possible rhetorical strategies to help volunteers or fans articulate how they understand their current conditions. Creative labor has found itself in this position before, experiencing a tension between a discourse of passion or love for one’s work and needing the discourse of labor to legitimate its demands for fair treatment in an admittedly exploitative relationship. For example, Andrew Ross has noted that musicians and academics suffer from similar experiences when it comes to valuing their work, encountering a discourse that attempts to leverage the rewards of doing passionate work against just compensation. Ross suggests that such a discourse could in the long term be harmful to creative workers as they find themselves increasingly incorporated into institutions under the effects of market liberalization (Ross, 2000). Undeniably, conditions exist both in the experiences and expectations of volunteers and fans and in organizational structures that allow for understanding work either as passionate labor or as exploitation, facilitating a discourse that expresses love for one’s work and a calculus of social rewards or necessitating a discourse that presses and compares those rewards with monetary compensation and market value. But what are those conditions? Conclusion: Passionate labor and a grounded view of co-production The answer to the questions raised above lies, in part, with the idea of passionate labor. Economist Michael Perelman in a study of inefficiencies in labor and the productivity of leisure activities asked, ‘What explains why people whose time may be worth $1000 per hour may want to restore a car or do fine Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 465 466 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) woodwork instead of just hiring a craftsperson to do the job or a modest wage?’ (Perelman, 2000: 68). In other words, what motivates people to work for free when the context is leisure, while they demand to be paid for the same work when the context is different? Perelman believed that ‘by changing the context of work, most people will work with a joy and enthusiasm that will produce economic outcomes that are far superior ... ’ (Perelman, 2000: 68). While Perelman used his concept to explain a way in which inefficiencies in labor markets can be minimized, he struck at the central question of alienation and the idea of meaningful work. In co-productive relationships such as the one presented for AOL or countless other cases (such as modders for PC games), the structural conditions of passionate labor already exist and they do so alongside a whole set of norms and desires that at times are congruent with passionate labor and at times opposed. In the case of AOL, community making was that passionate endeavor that volunteers engaged in and their discourse shows that they had a commitment to making their virtual environments better. At the same time, the institutional conditions at AOL prior to 1996 favored their passionate stance. Overhead accounts that credited them by the hour made their volunteerism functional as well as altruistic, they saw themselves as saving money. Volunteering for AOL, at the time of the emergence of the World Wide Web as powerful cultural symbol of the information economy, promised them access to a potentially improved income and this also was a reason for volunteering. When the conditions changed; when their volunteer accounts were converted; when they were not allowed to make content; when jobs did not materialize and when the organizational structure positioned them at arms length from the workings of the company, the idea of volunteerism and its context became alienating. At that point the confluence of passionate labor with the other considerations (money, creativity, community) became incongruent and the co-productive relationship collapsed. For many volunteers, who worked for AOL prior to the widespread institutional changes, volunteering was not work, they were in fact very motivated to participate in the volunteer program despite the ‘work like’ demands. In a classic study of the motivation to work, sociologist Fredrick Hertzberg and his team noted that positive attitudes towards work were tied to a job’s ability to allow for creativity, recognition, and responsibility as well as salary and advancement. In fact salary and advancement were secondary to the first three (Herzberg et al., 1993). If we think of the case of AOL prior to the organizational shift of 1996 in the volunteer program, the relationship was at a moment of confluence between perceived just rewards (the credit accounts) and apparently rewarding context (creating community and altruism). An ideal co-productive environment then, should balance rewards (monetary and personal) as they are perceived by the non-professional community (the volunteers, in the case of AOL) with its own need to control work. Theories of immaterial labor and post-industrial economy and work are good for understanding the power flows that remain at the hands of capital writ large but there is also a need to understand the position of those actually Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 Postigo ● America Online volunteers involved in co-production where values vary and what counts for meaningful work is at times more important than money. If we are to understand the nature of work in these conditions it is useful to think of it as passionate labor. Passionate labor in this sense, describes the structural conditions of cocreative work, the subject positions of those doing free labor and the discourses and perspectives they make possible. The notion of social-network markets can be seen as the ethos that informs passionate labor, in that way passionate labor can take many forms but it functions under the ethos of social-network markets. The conditions of work (its contexts) are important in preserving co-production because if the context shifts, the conditions that make up the co-production experience become inconsistent and the perceived rewards are not enough to rationalize continuing in co-production. For businesses, this means releasing control over creativity and management to an admittedly unruly labor force. At the same time it means incentivizing the various factors that motivate co-production: community, creativity, and monetary compensation. Notes 1 Many of the interviews cited here were conducted by investigators of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division based in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The documents for this article were procured through the Freedom of Information Act. The DOL deleted the names of interviewees and investigators to protect their privacy. The citations from these documents have the title of the volunteers (host or chat host) instead of their names. 2 Social factory is a term used by Maurizio Lazarrato to explain capitalist hegemonic expansion into areas of social life that were rationally difficult to exploit for profit (Lazzarato, 1996). 3 The term used by U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, to describe the sometimes unwarranted enthusiasm with which investors flocked to the technology sector during the 1990s. 4 Here co-production is understood as the relationship that exists between commercial producers of content or goods and free labor of fans, hobbyists and others that contribute to the maintenance and further productions of those goods. References Anonymous (1999a) U.S. Department of Labor Investigation America Online Volunteer Program: Interview with ChatHost 1. Anonymous (1999b) U.S. Department of Labor Investigation America Online Volunteer Program: Interview with Chathost/Monitor. Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 467 468 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 12(5) Anonymous (1999c) U.S. Department of Labor Investigation America Online Volunteer Program: Interview with Forum Leader. Anonymous (1999d) U.S. Department of Labor Investigation America Online Volunteer Program: Interview with Guide/Board Monitor. Anonymous (1999e) U.S. Department of Labor Investigation America Online Volunteer Program: Interview with Online Teacher. 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(2003b) ‘From Pong to Planet Quake: Post-Industrial Transitions from Leisure to Work’, Information, Communication & Society 6(4): 593–607. Ross, A. (2000) ‘The Mental Labour Problem’, Social Text 18(2): 1–32. Sotamaa, O. (2004) ‘Playing it My Way? Mapping The Modder Agency’, paper presented at the Internet Research Conference 5.0, Sussex, September. Swisher, K. (1991) AOL.COM. New York: Three Rivers Press. Terranova, T. (2000) ‘Free Labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text 18(2): 33–58. Terranova, T. (2004). Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. ● HECTOR POSTIGO is an Associate Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. His research focuses on new digital media. Specifically, he studies video game culture and online environments. His research focuses on value production on the Internet and a study of social movements and their use of hacking and social networking technologies. Address: Temple University, Dept of Broadcasting, Telecommunications & Mass Media, Annenberg Hall, 2020 North 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. [email: hector.postigo@temple.edu] ● Downloaded from ics.sagepub.com at TEMPLE UNIV on January 24, 2015 469