Cognitive Exploitation of Audiovisual Content: The Youtube and XVideos Cases

YANSEN, GUILLERMINA; DOLCEMÁSCOLO, AGOSTINA; RABOSTO, ANDRÉS

Viena

Conferencia; The 5th ICTs and Society-Conference: The Internet and Social Media at a Crossroads: Capitalism or Commonism? Perspectives for Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory.; 2015

In the present paper, we propose an approach to the phenomenon of user exploitation on the internet -the so called prosumers- based on an empirical study of two major platforms of audiovisual content: YouTube and Xvideos, two of the most popular providers of AV content on the Web. We understand that both of these sites match one of the biggest business models on the Internet, based on advertising and nonprofit production of content by users. With both of these sites as examples, we propose an analysys of a specific type of social relation, a fundamental element of these models, a byproduct of the established tension between knowledge production and the appropriation of profit, which we call ?cognitive exploitation? (Zukerfeld and Kreimer, 2014).While this particular type of social relation manifests itself in different ways, our work focuses on informational cognitive exploitation, linked to the production of objectivized knowledge in goods composed entirely of digital information (photography, audiovisual content, data, etc.).