Persona Rights in Young People’s Labour of Online Cultural Production: Implications for New Media Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis rests on the argument that the social internet as a commercial space is basically subtended by the appropriation of user labour, in the form of what has come to be called “user-generated content” or UGC. Especially it seems for younger people engaged in the labour of UGC, online content creation also inculcates them into an economy of creative labour. As a kind of apprenticeship for more formal creative industry careers, UGC creates value for both online platforms and for the users’ development of a branded online identity. \n \nIdentity work – which in this investigation mainly entails negotiating dimensions of age and gender (and to a lesser extent, class, race and ability) – constitutes an integral part of the value of UGC for individual careers as well as for commercial platforms, but also for the broader civic reverberations of online cultural production. Networked production and sociality are becoming more and more central to conceptions of contemporary citizenship alongside those of economic agency. To this end, the commercial imperatives of the social internet that tend to determine persona rights online, namely rights around privacy and intellectual property, demand re-evaluation in light of UGC as a labour practice. \n \nLegislative protections for Canadians’ persona rights are currently under debate, but internet regulation faces a number of challenges and thus should be accompanied by other strategies for bolstering people’s persona rights online. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to enumerate recommendations for policymaking around privacy and intellectual property in UGC environments, but also to suggest ways for young people to retain their persona rights while engaging in the UGC labour of online cultural production. \n \nThe research questions guiding this thesis follow from its central goal of re-evaluating internet regulation from the point of view of UGC as apprenticeship labour. As such, the overarching research question asks, how might new media policy approach the issue of user labour in online cultural production to protect persona rights? This question invites an answer in the form of recommendations for policymakers, but the structural constraints of policy as a top-down protective mechanism requires alternative modes of addressing persona rights issues from the bottom-up, for instance in media and policy literacy initiatives as well as in participatory technology design. These conclusions stem from the project’s overview of policy research and scholarly work, but also from its analysis of four case studies that illustrate some of the activities and experiences of users in their early-20s, who are deeply engaged in the labour of UGC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".