ABSTRACT
By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues. However, many collective action efforts never succeed: while the web's affordances make it easy to gather, these same decentralizing characteristics impede any focus towards action. In this paper, we study challenges to collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, we sought to understand online workers' unique barriers to collective action. We then created Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical Turk community in forming publics around issues and then mobilizing. We found that collective action publics tread a precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling and friction, balancing with each step between losing momentum and flaring into acrimony. However, specially structured labor to maintain efforts' forward motion can help such publics take action.
- Asen. "Seeking the 'Counter' in Counterpublics." Communication Theory, 2000Google Scholar
- Beck, E. P for political: Participation is not enough. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14(1), 1, 2002.Google Scholar
- Benkler, Y. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Beyer, J. L. Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization. Oxford University Press, 2014.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cranshaw, J., and Kittur, A. The polymath project: lessons from a successful online collaboration in mathematics. In Proc. CHI 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dahlberg, L. Computer mediated communication and the public sphere: A critical analysis. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 2001.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dewey, J. The public and its problems: An essay in political inquiry. Penn State Press, 2012.Google Scholar
- Dimond, J. P., Dye, M., Larose, D., and Bruckman, A. S. Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization. In Proc. CSCW 2013. Google ScholarDigital Library
- DiSalvo, C. Design and the Construction of Publics. Design Issues, 2009, 25(1), 48--63.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Earl, J. Pursuing Social Change Online The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet. Social Science Computer Review, 2006, 24(3), 362--377.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Earl, J., and Kimport, K. Digitally enabled social change: Activism in the internet age. Mit Press, 2011. Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ehn, Pelle. Work-oriented design of computer artifacts. Vol. 78. Stockholm: Arbetslivscentrum, 1988. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Foucault. Two lectures. In Gordon (Ed.), Power / knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings,Google Scholar
- Fraser, N., and Kate, N. Transnationalizing the public sphere. Polity, 2013Google Scholar
- Goodwin, J., and Jasper, J. M. (Eds.). The social movements reader: cases and concepts (Vol. 12). John Wiley & Sons, 2009.Google Scholar
- Habermas, Jürgen. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. MIT press, 1991.Google Scholar
- Hill, B. M. Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action. Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 2011.Google Scholar
- Hirschman, A. O. Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states (Vol. 25). Harvard university press, 1970.Google Scholar
- Irani, L. C., and Silberman, M. Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In Proc. CHI 2013 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Irani, L. The cultural work of microwork. New Media & Society, 2013, 1461444813511926.Google Scholar
- Keegan, B., and Gergle, D. Egalitarians at the gate: One-sided gatekeeping practices in social media. In Proc. CSCW 2010 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kittur, A., and Kraut, R. E. Beyond Wikipedia: coordination and conflict in online production groups. In Proc. CSCW 2010 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kittur, A., et al. The future of crowd work. In Proc. of CSCW 2013 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kraut, R. E., et al. Building successful online communities. MIT, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kriplean, T., et al. Integrating on-demand factchecking with public dialogue. In Proc. CSCW 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kriplean, T., Morgan, J., et al. Supporting reflective public thought with ConsiderIt. In Proc. CSCW 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Le Dantec, C. A., and DiSalvo, C. Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design. Social Studies of Science, 2013 43(2), 241--264.Google Scholar
- Lee, C. et al. "The Human infrastructure of cyberinfrastructure." In Proc. CSCW 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Luther, K., and Bruckman, A. Leadership in online creative collaboration. In Proc. CSCW 2008 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Martin, D., Hanrahan, B. V., O'Neill, J., and Gupta, N. Being a turker. In Proc. CSCW 2014 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Muller, M. Participatory design: the third space in HCI. Human-computer interaction: Development process, 2003, 165--185.Google Scholar
- Open-Source, E. O., Healy, K., and Schussman, A. The ecology of open-source software development. In Dept. of Sociology. University of Arizona, 2003.Google Scholar
- Riles, A. From Comparison to Collaboration: Experiments with a New Scholarly and Political Form. Law and Contemporary Problems 77 2014Google Scholar
- Rudy, P. "Justice for janitors" not "compensation for custodians".Rebuilding labor: Organizing and organizers in the new union movement, 2004.Google Scholar
- Schmidt, K., and Bannon, L. Taking CSCW seriously. In Proc. CSCW 1992Google Scholar
- Shaw, A., et al. Computer supported collective action. interactions 21.2, 2014, 74--77. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Star, S. L., and Strauss, A. Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work. In Proc. CSCW 1999 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Starbird, K., & Palen, L. (How) will the revolution be retweeted? In Proc. CSCW 2012 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Suchman, L. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. Oxford Press, 2006 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Suchman, L. Practice-based design of information systems: Notes from the hyperdeveloped world. The information society, 2002, 18(2), 139--144.Google Scholar
- Taylor, A. "Out there." In Proc. of CHI 2011 Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- We Are Dynamo: Overcoming Stalling and Friction in Collective Action for Crowd Workers
Recommendations
A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers' Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk
CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsA growing number of people are working as part of on-line crowd work. Crowd work is often thought to be low wage work. However, we know little about the wage distribution in practice and what causes low/high earnings in this setting. We recorded 2,676 ...
Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk
CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAs HCI researchers have explored the possibilities of human computation, they have paid less attention to ethics and values of crowdwork. This paper offers an analysis of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a popular human computation system, as a site of ...
How many crowdsourced workers should a requester hire?
Recent years have seen an increased interest in crowdsourcing as a way of obtaining information from a potentially large group of workers at a reduced cost. The crowdsourcing process, as we consider in this paper, is as follows: a requester hires a ...
Comments