I've just read "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" by Trebor Scholz, which I'd been meaning to do for some time now. What led me to the essay was Leisure Art's use of it as citation in a larger critique of the concept of immaterial labor as it is applied in contemporary contexts. I had originally intended to respond to this response, arguing against the notion that we should be creating new theoretical frameworks for each new media/socio-political environment we find ourselves in, but I found myself reacting more strongly to Scholz's suggesting that users of networked social media are the subject of exploitation.

Scholz is by no means the first to take this position, nor does he do it from any unreasonable perspective. In fact, his analysis is spot-on despite my disagreement with his conclusion. I found this quote to be a pithy way to phrase things:

"After the gruesome dotcom experiences, such massive investments would not be placed without predictable return. Certainly, the two examples of MySpace and YouTube are extremes but they are also the platforms where most people currently contribute online content. Networked sociality is the product."

Networked sociality is indeed the product. Yet I would claim that this sociality - in most cases - benefits the users, proportional to their constitutive labor, more than it does the creators. If the service does not provide a signficant value for the users, the users will cease to use it. Look at all the failed social networks, without venturing to far in to a guess, one can easily say that most of them were for-profit operations. No one uses them - no networked sociality was produced. As a result, the cretors saw no profit.

I use del.icio.us on a daily basis. My participation adds value to the site and was part of the aggregate participation that made it an attractive buy for Yahoo!. I use it to find interesting articles, pictures, and videos that interesting people in my network post. There is a great amount of value in this for me. I'm not about to call up strangers and ask them what they've been reading, then, if I like it, call them up every day to find out what's new. If what I give Yahoo! in exchange for exposing me to such texts as this very article is that shred of virtuosity, which in aggregate made del.icio.us valuable to a large corporation - I'm fine with that. I'd hardly think I've been duped.

One benefit of corporate dependence on network sociality is that it means there will always be space for creative and critical intervention. As soon as MySpace starts cracking down in a serious way on people bending its rules with such purposes, its value as a venue for network sociality diminishes.