Chinese Gold Farmers in the Game World
Gold farmers producing virtual
commodities for foreign gamers in “factories” perform a labor that seems to be…less
exploitive? Although farmers work 12-hour shifts for meager wages, they are
also provided with meals and dorms and for the most part love their jobs, so
much so that some farmers reported being willing to work for free. Jin argues
that inside the virtual game worlds, farmers are “simultaneously the ‘master’
and the servant” and in the factories, their “exploitation is entangled with
empowerment and productivity is entangled with pleasure.” I had a mixed
response to the whole thing. It was heartwarming to think of the workers as “making
a living off their hobby” but the accounts of harassment made me think about
how pent up racism/xenophobia can be directed in especially cruel, almost
cathartic ways toward farmers’ avatars because it’s not “real life.” And even
in these virtual worlds, farmers have to assume Western identities and
mannerisms to the best of their ability.
Mostly, the whole “economy” was struck
me as absurd. It only got weirder when I did a quick google search. Apparently some
prison guards force inmates to play games to build up credits that the guards
can trade for real money? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam
And then in this article, the
author documents the “army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity
in order to protect the rest of us.” These content moderators, working mostly
in the Philippines, screen highly traumatic videos like beheadings for
companies like YouTube.
These two stories begin to show a
trend of “virtual economies” reproducing the same patterns of exploitation as
physical ones. During discussion on Friday I want us to think about what other
kinds of unexpected virtual (or non-virtual) labor sustains our online
activities.
Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research
These were all good questions to
ask when trying to evaluate the ethics of a specific research project involving
the internet. Two things stuck out to me most: 1) the idea of people caring
less about restricting the flow of information than they do about ensuring that
information flows appropriately; 2) the complications of privacy. Even if
people are posting/generating content in “public spaces” they might have strong
expectations of privacy and perceive an implied restriction on how that
information can be used by other parties given its specific context. Also, how
do we think about privacy when a threat exists of future technologies making it
possible to identify what data that right now is functionally anonymous?
Chapter 6: work and commerce
Apparently anxieties about
surveillance of online activities by companies/the government is a mostly
American concern; in most of the authors’ field sites, surveillance by family
members was a more pressing concern. The varying stories of how social-media integrated
with commerce in their different field sites built on our last discussion about
the context-depended meanings and uses of social media.
Ethnography in Virtual Worlds
The difficulty in obtaining truly
informed consent made me think about the “terms and conditions” we blindly
agree to before downloading apps that collect our data. Is social science
research a watered down version of Facebook’s data mining? Of course, the “profit”
from the data is significantly less for Anthropologists than for Facebook.
The authors came down pretty harshly on creating
false profiles or “lurking” when conducting online research. Their argument was
that such tactics are “subterfuge” and poison the reputation of researchers as
well as being untenable methodologically and practically. Last class most of us
seemed to feel ok about lurking—did people’s opinions change after reading
this?
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