Creative labour & the Gift Economy

An area of interest about the blogging phenomenon is the idea of creative labour. These food blogs that the essay explores are well-kept, aesthetically pleasing and are updated on a constant level. In addition these bloggers do not rely solely on their blogs for their income, all of them have stable day jobs as can be seen from the fact that Heidi is a photographer and food writer who has been featured in The Washington Post, Garrett, author of Vanilla Garlic is a food writer based in Sacramento while Shauna, creator of Gluten Free Girl is a freelance writer. According to Rossiter (2006), such creative labour shows evidence of the fragmented post-modernist society but more importantly, it provides a platform to contest the ‘labour-power’ system of the capitalist society that we currently reside in. The new ‘labour-power’ system as Rossiter goes on to describe is in the form of intellectual property whereby unless such creativity is placed under the appropriate economic, social and political environment, it will retain its potential to be translated but will not deem any wages. Continuing this idea of the audience and creative labour is Sean Cubitt’s (2005) article ‘Distribution and Media Flows’ where he states that the audience not only pays to consume information, they are now paying to contribute to this public sphere. In the case of these food bloggers, they are paying for the bandwidth they use, spending their time and energy to do free labour, contributing to the blogosphere without earning a wage. This idea of a gift economy is according to Ippolito (2001) is what attracted many internet users to sharing on the internet without expecting payment but now such an economy is disappearing. This then brings the essay to question whether blogging is succumbing to the traditional paradigm of power, where users have to now pay the producer of the service or information that they want to access. The gift economy could have probably been perceived as a challenge to the typical notion of a power relationship because people did not have to pay to be part of the internet culture. Ippolito states that the fact that people have to pay yearly fees to retain their domain names is already obvious that the gift economy is diminishing (160). This shows that the blogosphere, because users can create blogs and maintain their blogs for free, is still located in this gift economy. Yet, if they do want to increase the freedom they have to customize and increase the potential of their blog, they can pay a sum of money to create their own domain name, without having to keep the ‘.blogspot.com’ tag. 101cookbooks is an example of a blog that has shifted from the amateur ‘.blogspot.com’ to its own domain and as another blogger from deliciousdays.com, suggests, the domain name is part of the ‘sell-ability’ of the blog as a business. Therefore, it reverts back to the traditional paradigm of power, those with power buy the domain name to keep those who have less power at the bottom. Yet perhaps the internet is still more democratic than other media platforms in that anyone, as long as they can afford a domain name, is free to buy one with much ease, on the other hand, buying a media company is much more complicated.