usership

Paid Usership forum

rr — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:46:02 +0000

Sunday, 21. March 2010 - 18:45 - Friday, 31. December 2010 - 18:45

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Paid Usership

rr — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:40:24 +0000

Paid Usership: remunerated content

Renée Ridgway

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Contrary to mainstream practice – with its residual romanticism of solitary authorship and single-signature value – we at n.e.w.s. contend that value is always collectively produced through linguistic cooperation (polemics or just idle chatter) – that is, through the collective intellect. Of course people already get paid for online content – but they are often the wrong people, because they are not all the people who worked to produce that content. Our paradoxical objective is to leverage the potential of participative technologies and communities to ensure that user-produced value be remunerated. Because n.e.w.s. is a non-commercial platform, without any institutional structural subsidy, we have been investigating alternative models of exchange and collaboration, retooling our critical lexicon: instead of the seemingly self-evident binaries of producer/consumer, we have opted for the more inclusive and extensive category of usership – of the paid variety.

Over the past twenty years, people working in the cultural sector have come to use the web not only as a means of communication and distribution but as a medium for artistic and curatorial production, such as online contexts for the analysis and development of art-related activities. But it is also the place where people engage in discourse about the nature of those precarious forms of knowledge and labour produced within it. The challenge of facilitating return generated not only from attention getting but also from finding means of ensuring sustainability through potential models of gifting, immaterial labour, surplus capital and niche development could all be plausible models for paid usership.

Gift, Debt and Return: speculations on the cultural economy

Okay, so everybody wants to be paid to use. But the very idea continues to sound pretty counterintuitive even to the most open-minded, and downright heretical to orthodox twentieth-century economics. Let’s quickly run through some of the conceptual underpinnings of the whole notion.

Be for Real: the Usership Challenge to Expert Culture

Stephen Wright — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:31:41 +0000

Stephen Wright

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One of the questions I struggle with most regarding art is whether or not to continue using the word at all. On the one hand, it designates an amorphous set of symbolic configurations and activities by and large so at odds with what I refer to when I use the term, I wonder if I would not be well advised to look for a different word. Yet on the other hand, I am loath to yield the monopoly on the use of that term to those whose usage I find so uncongenial. Admittedly, the word’s usage has shifted considerably over the past 30,000 years, but at present the balance of power is so squarely in the hands of the molar worldart artworld (institutional market, museum-based production and other such normalising institutions of expert culture) that molecular (or minority) practices seeking to bring some heterogeneity to bear are condemned to marginality. Indeed they are relegated to parasitical status; uninvited guests at the table of the host whose values they abhor. So I am torn by a reasoned and almost visceral desire for exodus and a no less heartfelt and stubborn desire to hold my ground. Can anyone help?