Author Archives: emilymalone

What’s mine really is yours: the sharing economy is here to stay

Three Market Forces Drive the Collaborative Economy

This year’s university graduates will be graduating into a workplace which is significantly different from previous years, as Australians turn towards the emerging realm of the sharing economy.

The sharing economy is fuelled by collaborative consumption, meaning that consumers are moving away from traditional, centralised organisations and instead enlisting the services, skills and information shared by peer-to-peer communities. It is founded on the notion of access, rather than ownership.

Instead of booking hotel rooms, millions of people are now choosing Airbnb to fulfil their accommodation needs, which allows homeowners to rent out spare rooms in their apartment or house at their chosen rate. Similarly, taxi companies are facing serious threats from business models such as Uber and Lyft which connect passengers with drivers in a ride-sharing service.

Uber has arrived at a time when the Australian taxi industry is fundamentally flawed and is in desperate need of reform. Their innovative business model has seized a gap in the market and is now offering a more efficient, safe, and accountable experience.

The NSW Government has placed sanctions against the use of Uber, and other governments across Australia are currently debating its legality. Now is the time to assess how our consumption habits are changing with the arrival of the sharing economy, and adapt into these trends so that we can fully reap their innovative benefits.

Last year Time Magazine named collaborative consumption to be high on their list of 10 ideas that will change the world.

The sharing economy is driven by a very deep social and economic shift that has been enabled by developing technologies. Businesses in the sharing economy have found a way of matching ‘I need’s with ‘I have’s.

Open marketplaces such as Airtasker, Freelancer or oDesk allow users to outsource their skills to the highest bidder. This enables a more flexible use of talent, and is part of the growing casualisation of work which is fundamentally reshaping our conception of work and the employment market.

This is a reaction to the growing need to stay competitive in the globalised international marketplace. Skills are now being shared across national borders and jurisdictions to go wherever the money and demand is. What has resulted is a virtual global village, or a global market square, where skills and service are traded, bartered, and shared, extrapolating a model that is hundreds of years old.

Some organisations such as Google, Facebook, and more locally, NAB, are already using this trend to their benefit. By utilising strategically designed work spaces and the technique of ‘hotdesking’ they allow more interaction and collaboration between colleagues.

Melbourne City Council has also encouraged the use of shared resources with the Melbourne bike-share scheme, community rooftop garden projects, and carpooling schemes for city commuters. Collaboration on this scale can reduce waste, contribute to more community building, and invest in local economies.

The sharing economy is empowering because we are no longer passive consumers. We now have a changed role to play in the economic makeup of our societies. We are creators, collaborators, contributors, financiers, producers and providers.

The sharing economy is fuelled by reputation. The currency with which peers trade is trust. Modern consumers are placing their confidence in peer-reviews and recommendations, much more than advertisements or direct communication from a company. We seek the advice from users with similar backgrounds and experience, rather than trying to cut through the spin of corporations.

However, more organisations must continue to shift how they conduct themselves amidst the modern marketplace, by readjusting their understanding of the patterns of work. No longer are there strict working times, as the lines between personal and professional continually blur.

We need to readjust our expectations, as this cohort of graduates may be an army of digital-natives who are both flexi-workers and micro-entrepreneurs. This is an incredibly empowering time, however it does not come without criticisms.

Opponents of this trend warn that further generations will face worsened conditions and less job security. Many organisations resist the advent of new technologies for fear of change. However, major industry players believe that the collaborative revolution will be as big as the Industrial Revolution.

There are challenges that need to be overcome, such as existing legal structures which do not offer space for the emerging roles of the sharing economy. Copyright and intellectual property laws will continue presenting difficulties in instances of co-creation. The contractual rights and obligations of a flexible worker must be strengthened. But traditional models are outdated, and do not allow for the innovation and connectivity provided by our networked, multimedia age.

We are encountering a crucial paradigm shift in how we live, work, play, create, learn and consume. The employment market must prepare for modern graduates to live and breathe the characteristics of the sharing economy.

Symposium 05: Network Literacy and Hypertext

Leftover Symposium 04 questions:

  1. Should network literacy be focused on in earlier education?

    • Can it be taught formally? 
      • Yes absolutely, and it should be. Some parts of it are already in practice, but not enough. Arduino is a service which is being used in school to teach children about how to make computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than the average desktop computer.
      • To some extent, you graduate from school being quite disempowered from networks because things have consistently been gatekept for you.
    • What do you think the solution is? Should we let kids teach themselves through doing?
      • Adrian believes the only way you ever learn anything is through doing, and I agree with him. I have, and always will be, a kinaesthetic learner.
      • Kids teach themselves how to do things. The issue is facilitating this in a way that they learn the how and why of things instead of the didactic ‘do this’ and ‘do that’.
      • School systems often take out the ability to think critically, as the architecture of school education is all tailored towards passing exams and getting good scores on essays and projects. You get trained to think that bell curves are natural order, but really they’re an educational ideology/construction. It’s been shown that information retention rates drop off exponentially after this type of learning, so it’s not necessarily a valuable method.

“We unlearn how to ask good questions. Problem with that in an age of distributed expertise, is that if you can’t ask good questions, you can’t find good answers. That’s the world we’re going into. Things are not black and white, it’s very grey and the skills you need to navigate this world are different.” – Adrian Miles

Symposium 05 questions:

  1. How is hypertext relevant to us as media practitioners?

    • Adrian says, how is it not? We deal with structures like that on almost all of our internet usage – such as YouTube (clicking from one video to another), Buzzfeed, news websites, Twitter, etc.
    • Elliott tells us of dual screening mentality which is a rising concern in the media industries, which says: ‘okay, we get your idea, but what’s the second screen going to be showing?’ As in, how are you going to utilise the network affordances by doing more? i.e. online webisodes, podcasts, building communities online, etc. Heritage media are doing this, but only slowly. They use it to shore up their existing model, as opposed to drastically changing it. They think ‘more is better’.
    • There’s a big gap, an opening to step in and properly use non-linear structures in storytelling. Adrian thinks that this is a waste that this isn’t working yet.
    • When moving into digital, content became highly granular (small chunks), and it becomes about the relationship between each other. Temporary relationships. This is how things get meaning, with the infinite multiple relationships between the parts. How we make stuff then had to change, because the end now doesn’t matter. And now the reader/audience power dynamic changes as well. Hypertext realised this.

  2. What predictions about network literacy should we be aware of?

    • Those who are network literate will engage with technology and come out on top better.
    • Media industries are changing drastically. However, history is not linear so we don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s a series of accidents.
    • Things to be aware of:
      • Physicality of the network – servers, infrastructure
      • Legal battles which may restrict or create affordances
      • Political battles, legislation, copyright.

  3. What are the consequences of being network illiterate?

    • You will have a reduced capacity to engage or develop appropriate strategies to engage.
    • Your only ability to understand will be through someone else – you will be dependent on them telling you what it means.  Think about what could this mean for creativity; corruption?

Symposium 04

Adrian was shocked in this week’s symposium to discover how little it seemed our cohort knew about the validity of certain internet content. I think, perhaps, that this was a stretch too far as I would hazard a guess that most of what we subsequently heard about looking for cues for legitimacy, such as locating which type of domain it’s coming from, was not new information for many in the lecture theatre. Where I thought the discussion turned very interesting though was when talking about how and why these practices are emulated, undermined, and impersonated (such as by The Onion, an American parody news site).

I think a similar area which is equally interesting is the rise of Twitter accounts which impersonate various organisations or people. Such as Vice Is Hip, Fake Pinterest, or even this article showing what might happen if Disney Princesses had Instagram.

However, I think these types of humour rely heavily on a more widely understood humour of parody, as opposed to impersonation.

We then listened to discussions about network literacy and its relation to print literacy, including what limitations and affordances both have. Adrian explained that we have a tendency to confuse form and content, which I wholeheartedly agree with. It was also interesting to hear Adrian say that the spaces within which network literacy happen have to be performed. They do not preexist us, we actually have to actively do them.

Adrian also reminded us that literacies, which exist in hundreds of forms, are always enacted in very minor detail. His example of ordering a lemonade in America illustrated this well. He explains that the varying social etiquettes of literacies complement and contest each other. They are not clearly defined, but entangled and messy, interacting and embedding themselves in our social practices.

We were reminded that we constantly rely on third parties to do things for us, leaving us disempowered due to our constant reliance on expertise. For example, we may know about books and how to write one, but we don’t necessarily know how a printer works. Similarly, we know how to curate our online presences with content, but we might not know how to build a web page. This is the sort of network literacy that needs to be ramped up in order to participate fully as effective media practitioners in our changing media landscape.

Introducing: The Green Jui-thie

Here is my recipe for the ultimate green jui-thie (juice cross smoothie) which I have been loving for the past few weeks. At the start of each week, I make up a batch of four-five smoothies. I keep them in the fridge in airtight bottles, ready to tote into uni/work each day. They last surprisingly well, and are super delicious thanks to the beautiful mint and refreshing cucumber taste.

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Ingredients: (Makes four)

  • 1 lettuce
  • 3 handfuls spinach
  • 1 bunch mint
  • 2 cucumbers
  • 5 pears
  • 5 oranges
  • 5 carrots
  • 3 apples
  • Water, as needed
Apples have a surprising amount of caffeine to really wake you up in the morning.

Apples have a surprising amount of caffeine to really wake you up in the morning.

My secret ingredient - mint!

My secret ingredient – mint!

Instructions:

  1. Juice the carrot and oranges to provide the liquid base of your smoothies.
  2. Chop up remaining fruits and vegetables and add to high-powered blender.
  3. Blend for 1-2 minutes until smooth. Add additional water until you reach desired consistency.
  4. Enjoy straight away, or refrigerate for up to four days.

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For your daily dose of nutrients and minerals from vegetables and fruit in a delicious drink, give this recipe a go and let me know how you like it. The carrots give you masses of vitamin A, while the spinach gives you a great portion of magnesium and iron. The oranges give you a hit of vitamin C which is sure to keep the winter bugs at bay.

Symposium 03

Here are some of my musings from what was discussed in the first Networked Media symposium i was able to attend (I’m now two weeks post-arthroscopic surgery and can return to my regular activities! Hooray!):

The first question raised was ‘how much freedom do we have when writing critically of others or others’ work before we become liable for defamation or copyright infringement?’

Large copyright sign made of jigsaw puzzle pieces

We must begin to understand the rights and responsibilities of someone who operates a blog. As a blog owner, you are responsible for everything that is published on your blog – including in the comments. There is a difference between opinion and critique – we mustn’t make claims that are derogatory or defamatory towards people and dress them up as fact. The ‘truth’ is not a defence, and similarly, authorial intent counts for nothing. Regardless of if you intended for something to be offensive or not, if it has been perceived as offensive by someone or someones then it is.

There is a lot of complications when ascertaining whether your published material is ‘in the public interest’. Also remember that these laws differ between jurisdictions and across national borders. This is one of the growing concerns media professionals are adapting to in the face of globalisation, having to now work across a number of legal structures and licenses. 

It is up to the copyright holder to take action, however this area is becoming more and more aggressive, with entire law firms and organisations being dedicated to trawling the internet to find examples of copyright infringement (such as PPCA and APRA). Disney is a great example of how some organisations are being more lenient of traditional copyright law in order to benefit their audience-base who, in this example, formed such a community around the culture of Frozen (2013) where over 60,000 fan-made covers of the song ‘Let It Go’ have been shared across social media and have been collectively viewed more than 60 million times, even though these were all technically breaches of copyright.

We then spoke about the grey area of embedding. Adrian agreed that the existence of an embed button pretty much means you can use the content on your own site, because it is somewhat understood that the original source are the ones bearing liability. However, where this becomes a serious issue is when a user downloads the material and re-uploads it themselves instead of directly embedding it. The content is now being hosted on your own site, meaning you are infringing copyright.

Readings 03: Network Literacy, Loop Learning and Essays

Reading 03.1

Adrian Miles’ reading was useful to help me think about the following things:

Becoming a peer: The blogging world, and indeed the world of networks, is all about successfully participating as a peer. Sharing, linking, and commenting on other users’ content ensures that you are being an effective user and producer – or a ‘produser’ as Axel Bruns has described.

“To be ‘good’ at network literacies is to contribute as much as it is to consume.” – Adrian Miles

Print literacy vs network literacy: Print literacy is reinforced over many years of traditional education, with emphasis being placed on books, reading, writing and essay-writing being “the major forms for the expression of knowledge in the humanities”. However, with the rise of ICTs, knowledge is now being formed, shared and disseminated in drastically new forms, and we need to strengthen our network literacy skills and reinforce them in the same way that print literacy has embedded itself in our culture of learning.

RSS, tags, and folksonomies: These are all network tools which allow content to communicate between themselves and gather in locations other than where they were originally published. This allows for easier, faster and more efficient information flows between users, and it also allows the individual appropriation of content for different purposes.

Reading 03.2

I didn’t get around to reading all of Mark Smith’s article about Chris Argyris. From the brief scan I did, it seems to be about single-loop and double-loop learning, and I’m interested in learning what that means so I must remember to finish this reading next week.

Reading 03.3

In Paul Graham’s The Age of the Essay he gives a run down of the history of ‘the essay’, particularly how it’s used in education and how we inherited our traditional form of it. However he then goes on to explain to “give the other side of the story” about how essays can achieve different things if we write them well.

Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.”

Graham claims that “due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature”, meaning that essay writing has been devalued into something that is perceived as boring and pointless (to the masses). However, I found this idea problematic as I have always been one of the 0.00001% who loved my English studies in high-school, and essay writing in this style was always a favourite activity of mine. I am definitely familiar with the groans and mumbles about essay writing that came from my peers though, I just personally always thought that essay writing was a really beneficial activity that taught me some great skills such as critical thinking and the importance of good editing.

Graham advocates that essay writing should be about working something else, and that we should write them for ourselves to help this process occur, instead of writing them to prove a point or be convincing. He says that essays are about surprises, and “surprises are things that you not only didn’t know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.”

Where I did find myself fundamentally agreeing with Graham was in his insistence for encouraging people to ask questions. I’ve always been inquisitive, and used to thoroughly tire my parents out with question upon question when I was younger, and I believe that a questioning disposition can get you a long way.