enculturation

A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture

Discourses on Reciprocity

Several rhetorical strategies analyze complementarities and confrontations between markets and voluntary reciprocal exchanges. These analyses may focus on their separateness or on their blurriness, but often they assume that the interaction itself is viewed one way or the other by interactional participants. For instance, supermarkets usually facilitate impersonal commodity exchanges; birthday gift exchanges are often voluntary and personalized. When one goes into a supermarket, one does not expect the supermarket check-out clerk to give them a gift or vice versa. Customers may receive a “coupon” issued by the corporate entity of the store. However, this is not usually an interpersonal gift exchanged between the shopper and the clerk; it is a marketing tool to attract additional commodified exchanges. On the other hand, birthday gifts are often voluntary between peers; friends typically do not expect a check as payment for purchasing a birthday gift. Similarly, on YouTube, when two friends decide to watch each other’s videos and give feedback, friends do not typically expect that their time will be monetarily compensated. No invoices or payments are exchanged.

One rhetorical strategy in understanding exchanges in digital environments is to emphasize the differences between market and reciprocal exchanges. Many scholars focus analytical energy on investigating how nonmarket, reciprocal exchanges offer positive benefits that markets cannot provide. This type of analysis stresses the categories’ separateness, insofar as market practices (such as leaving a check on the table after a dinner party) would pollute interpersonal relationships upon which reciprocity is based (Benkler). A YouTube participant would likely be surprised if a video maker sent them a check after the participant viewed their video and provided feedback as a courtesy. Although this rhetorical strategy acknowledges instances of blurriness—such as when IBM employs specialists to create platforms from open source, nonmarket development—this framework generally emphasizes the positive effects of lending resources or time (Benkler). These nonmarket exchanges, it is argued, stimulate creativity, increase overall efficiency of information generation and distribution, and facilitate self actualization by enabling people to pursue important interests that lie outside of employed work (Benkler; Petersen; Lange and Ito). In a nutshell, reciprocal behaviors between peers are coded as “good.” For example, in the case of certain fandoms, exchanging creative artifacts such as stories or videos produced by a close-knit group of fans is advantageous given that participants may be sensitive to publicly circulating copyrighted material. Such practices help participants have fun and creatively express themselves in ways that “deliberately [repudiate] a monetary model” (Hellekson 116).

This line of argument about collective good tends to stress the positive aspects of anonymous giving and reciprocal exchange, rather than exploring how reciprocal giving practices may be controversial or contested (Osteen). Yet, reciprocal exchanges may be problematic, as will be argued below in certain cases on YouTube. The fruits of an individual’s labors may be used in ways that do not necessarily benefit all interactants equally (Mauss; Sahlins). Anthropologists have shown that giving something often implies an obligation that the giver expects to be addressed in the future (Douglas). Many authors build their case about the positive aspects of reciprocity by using Mauss’s classic definition of a reciprocal giving cycle in which there is an obligation to give, receive, and reciprocate. Scholars draw on selective aspects of Mauss’s model to stress the positive value of being vulnerable and socially obliged to others (Hyde). However, numerous examples in the anthropological literature show that reciprocal expectations that fall outside of purely market exchanges can also be competitive, onerous, and driven by a need to accumulate asymmetrical amounts of prestige or power rather than to benefit interactants or address the common good (Mauss; Sahlins).

Another rhetorical strategy is to analytically treat certain market and nonmarket sectors as separate entities, while simultaneously recognizing that they are blurred in ways that do not benefit participants equally. For example, what is often perceived as frivolous online activity can be characterized, in many cases, as actual labor that benefits certain entities in information and entertainment industries (Terranova; Senft; Ito). Participation in the form of making videos, leaving comments, and interacting is “translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (Terranova 37). For example, a person may make a video on YouTube for fun, say of his/her cat playing the piano. The video may suddenly receive millions of views. In the early days of YouTube, when only very popular video makers were invited to participate in the partner program and receive compensation (often in the form of ad revenue) for their work, most video makers were not compensated for even popular contributions. So, even though the cat video provided entertainment for many, the investment in equipment and effort would go unrewarded from a monetary perspective. Even after YouTube expanded its partnership program and enabled many more participants to share in ad revenue for a popular video, the actual amount of money received may be, according to some partners in their videos, quite minimal (say a few dollars per month). Scholars showing how market and nonmarket practices are blurred would likely argue that YouTube benefits from these successful videos in a way that exploits participants’ labor.

Imagine further that someone takes time out of their day to watch such a video and post feedback in the form of a text comment. Perhaps the feedback includes a suggestion about new equipment. Or the comment may contain advice about how to position the cat or make it easier to photograph so that the video is even more amusing. In this case, expertise is given but not compensated. If the video maker heeds the advice and buys new equipment or changes techniques in productive ways, then the video maker may have a better chance of attracting viewers. Better videos benefit the corporate entity of YouTube as more people enjoy popular videos and coming back to the site and seeing its advertisements. Higher quality videos may also benefit the video maker, who may even receive compensation in the form of ad revenue. However, the critic who voluntarily provided crucial feedback will likely never be compensated.

Scholars analyzing exploitative dynamics rightly argue that the effort is deliberately misrecognized as frivolity rather than non-paid labor even though its effects may benefit corporate entities and some individual contributors. Participants’ viewing and commenting practices, even if anonymous, or more precisely, pseudonymous, may be advantageous for an online video sharing site. These practices contribute to creating an ambience of an active and popular site. Such activity also stimulates participation and interest from advertisers, who may place ads on the site. Yet, individual contributors such as commenters routinely do not receive compensation or a share in the fruits of their effort through advertising revenue.

Reciprocal interactions and forms of online participation have been called many things, including “immaterial labor” and “affective labor." Immaterial labor is seen to produce an “immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication” (Hardt 94). For Maurizio Lazzarato, immaterial labor is “defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (132) They include skills like “computer control” as well as creative “activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion" (132). Within the category of immaterial labor, Michael Hardt more specifically defines “affective” labor as that which concerns the “creation and manipulation of affects” in a way that produces intangible, albeit corporeal products including: “a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community" (95-96).

In a way, the term “immaterial” is a misnomer, insofar as it leads to an assumption that there is a clean separation between creativity and affect on the one hand, and on the other, the material conditions and practices in which affect is produced and later physically instantiated. In other words, having a thought or reaction to a video and then transforming that feeling into a comment to post online is accomplished within a material framework that requires physical manipulation of a device. The motivation to post a comment might be stimulated by an affective response to a video or may spring from a need to give the video maker a sense of connectedness or accomplishment. Once this feeling becomes encoded and distributed as a comment, it becomes a materially instantiated and recognizable thing. Comments, as things, can be quantified and used as a metric for many purposes. For example, YouTube can use view counts and comment tallies to see which videos are most popular. YouTube may not care about the affective thought communicated, or the social relationship that the comment indexes, but the comment-as-thing or view-as-thing can be counted and used as one metric of video viewing consumption.

Long ago, Mauss described how reciprocal giving might include not only material things, but also service (Mauss; Carrier, "Gifts"). Since so much of affective behavior or “services” become physically instantiated in something, it can often be difficult to separate the two. For instance, as James Carrier argues, when someone gives a “gift” of a meal, is the “gift” the meal itself, the labor required to prepare it, the labor required to serve it, or perhaps some combination of these efforts ("Gifts" 122)? In the area of online participation, for instance, among LiveJournal blogging participants, Pearson distinguishes between object-gifts which include “the exchange of physical objects or monetary gifts” and “effort-gifts” which are “created through the effort, skills, or knowledge of the giver." However, because effort-gifts, which resemble the services that Mauss long ago spoke about, often have a physical instantiation on YouTube through manipulatable comments, rating systems, and measurable time spent watching them, it is inaccurate to call them “immaterial.” Rather, this category of “effort” includes producing objects, time, attention, or other physical or affective communicative behaviors that may be instantiated in physical indexes.

Scholars speaking of misrecognized labor in online sites are rightly concerned with how markets exploit the voluntarily exchanged affect, sense of community, and self-expression that many online environments are said to facilitate through comment- and video-posting mechanisms (Terranova; Andrejevic, Reality, "Exploiting"). They are understandably concerned with how such creative and voluntary labor often becomes part of an exploited online proletariat that is seduced into participation by motivations of creativity, self-expression, and intellectual immortality, when in fact participants are simply being used to further a selective group’s market ends such as recruiting cheap labor for unspectacular digital tasks (Ross) or mining creative inspiration (Arvidsson). Their participation may also be used for corporations to collect behavioral statistics for the purposes of monitoring desires and selling back those desires through advertisements (Andrejevic, Reality, "Exploiting"). Many scholars are rightly concerned about the problems that stem from such one-way appropriations of affective labor by market entities (Terranova; Hochschild).

Notably, appropriations do not move only in one direction. Carrier has also pointed out that it is possible for people to transform market items into personal possessions that reflect affect and social relationships. The “work” of “appropriation” might be defined as “converting [an] object from commodity to possession” wherein people feel a more lasting and intimate relationship with objects and how they reflect and produce social relationships ("The Work" 111). Once a commodity has been appropriated it becomes, “inalienable,” or intimately and lastingly associated with its owner, such as a broach handed down over generations (Weiner). A structural analysis would discount such personalized appropriations of commodities, and would quite likely be more concerned with the exploitative processes of commodified use of free human labor (Pauwels and Hellriegel 390). Yet, simply because objects or labor are obtained or used within a commodity system does not negate the meanings that people ascribe to such objects and interactions in ways that reveal a more personalized reciprocal exchange. In the YouTube case, for example, YouTube may see a “view” of a video as a commodification metric, but it may have quite a different meaning for two friends who pledge to view each other’s videos for mutual support. The same behavior then, is seen as both part of a market commodification system of entertainment, as well as a reciprocal exchange of two friends’ time and attention.

Some scholars argue that user-centric discourses about “community” fall in line with YouTube's intended goals to monetarily benefit from the site (Pauwels and Hellriegel 389-90). However, it is also important to understand that YouTube responds to actions of its users to profit from dynamics that it arguably did not foresee (Pauwels and Hellriegel 396; Burgess and Green 63-64). For example, despite the fact that participants eventually used the site for collaboration and community, these uses were not originally “built in” to the mechanism and features of the site, a fact which problematizes the idea that stimulating “community” was always part of YouTube's original blueprint.

As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green point out, despite its community rhetoric, YouTube's architecture does not really invite collaboration (63). When I began fieldwork in 2006, for example, YouTube did not have a “video response” feature. It became clear over time that people were responding to other people’s videos not only by posting text comments, but also by uploading a video of themselves talking about a prior video, so that videos could take on a very targeted, interpersonal, and communicative use. In interviews, creators who wanted to commercialize their work took advantage of this dynamic and deliberately began creating videos meant to stimulate responses through visual, rather than textual channels. For example, popular YouTube participants might have contests in which they asked people to post videos of their viewers engaging in an activity, or talking about personal inspirations. Eventually, a separate category was created on YouTube, so that people could self-identify their video as a “video response” to a specific video. Of course, people may or may not identify their video this way. But these kinds of interactions between actual usage and newly-added, hard-coded features illustrate how practices and meanings are mutually influenced by participants and YouTube.

These differences in understandings of how the site should be used necessitate an ethnographic investigation that explores the contestations over the meaning of practices in particular reciprocal encounters on YouTube. Clearly, YouTube benefits from the free labor of its contributors, but not all of the contributors attach the same meanings to their efforts. To explore these nuanced ideas about reciprocity and market entanglements, the following analysis draws on data from more than 100 videos, interviews of more than 150 participants, and direct participation through my YouTube account (called AnthroVlog), in which I posted at least one video per week for one year. I also attended in-person, YouTube meet-ups across the United States. The study incorporates material from a range of participant types with varying levels of popularity. For example, the analysis considers practices of people receiving millions of views on their videos (as amassed over a few days or weeks) as well as behaviors of creators with very small view counts in the hundreds or less (as amassed over months or years).

The following discussion acknowledges the applicability of discourses that recognize both the benefits and problems of reciprocal behaviors that are entangled with a corporate agenda. The article will examine peer-to-peer contestations about the meaning of certain reciprocal behaviors on the site. Not all interactants judge particular behaviors, whether they emerge from reciprocal gifting or market commodification of entertainment as automatically “good” or “bad.” Some may welcome paid compensation and happily participate in a commodified entertainment structure, while others eschew what they perceive as harmful peer-to-peer reciprocal practices. The following discussion will examine contested discourses about three specific practices: 1) posting comments; 2) subscribing to other YouTube participants; and 3) deleting one’s videos. It will investigate how particular problems emerge when different interactants within the same encounter hold dissimilar views about the meaning of reciprocity on YouTube.