Critical analysis of user commodities as free labour in social networking sites: A case study of Cyworld
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how young SNS users engage with SNSs with a case study of Cyworld. It focuses on the political economy analysis of Cyworld primarily in two ways, both through the commodification of SNSs as an emergent Web 2.0. technology and the appropriation of users as free labour, because Cyworld is engaged in the commodification of what can be understood as free labour. The political economic overview of Cyworld is meant to unpack some structural elements of this new cultural practice. However, it also contextualizes an attempt to understand the role of users in the reproduction of capital relations towards user commodity via the modification of Dallas Smythe's audience commodity to user commodity. As Cohen points out, these sites can be situated within more general capitalist processes that follow familiar patterns of asymmetrical power relations between users and owners, commodification, and the harnessing of user power. It therefore discusses the commodification of Cyworld and its users in broader perspectives, such as ‘user as markets’, ‘user as advertising-medium labor,’ and ‘user as content-creator labor,’ as well as ‘user as free labor’ rather than analysing SNS users from a narrow-minded free labour perspective in order to map out the comprehensive commodification process of Cyworld users.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".