Invisible Labor and Digital Utopias | Audrey Watters

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-05-15

Summary:

"This is the transcript of the talk I gave this afternoon at a CUNY event on "The Labor of Open"

Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak to you. I’m quite honored to get to kick off your event here, and I hope I can say some things that will be provocative and maybe generative for the kinds of discussions you’re having today. As I’ve thought about what I might say, I will admit, I had to do a lot of reflection about what my relationship is to “open.” Because it’s changed a lot in the last few years. I don’t want to make this talk about me. That would be profoundly unhelpful and presumptuous. But I also don’t want to make that word “open” do work politically (or professionally) that it hasn’t done for me personally (politically and professionally). And while I understand that for many people “open” is a key piece of an imagined digital utopia, it hasn’t been always so sunny for me.

At the beginning of the year, I made a bunch of changes to my websites – that is, my personal website and Hack Education, the publication I created almost a decade ago. I changed the logo. I updated my author photo. And I got rid of the Creative Commons licensing at the footer of each article. My websites have always been CC-licensed – although admittedly, I’ve used different versions over the years, mostly going back and forth with whether or not I want that non-commercial feature. I guess, in some people’s eyes, that means my work was never really, truly “open.” I thought a lot about this change, about ditching the CC licensing – this is my work, after all, and as such, it’s deeply intertwined with my identity. It’s also my experience – my lived experience – as a woman who writes online about technology. Five years ago, I removed comments from my website. Lots of folks were not pleased. But dealing with comments was a kind of labor that I was no longer willing to do...."

Link:

http://hackeducation.com/2018/05/04/cuny-labor-open

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Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.usa oa.ethics oa.scholcomm oa.publishing oa.debates oa.sustainability oa.labor oa.principles oa.authors oa.advocacy oa.strategies oa.trends oa.licensing oa.libre oa.events oa.economics_of

Date tagged:

05/15/2018, 12:03

Date published:

05/15/2018, 08:04