Who's Cashing in on Free Labor?

Over the past few weeks we have been talking a lot about free labor and how people are constantly doing unpaid work such as blogs, social networking, and other forms of digital work that is not their occupation. This reminded me a lot of the Shirky article we read and the idea of mass-amateurization in which the journalism and publishing of printed word of the past which had fixed and expensive costs that were reserved only for large companies and professionals in their field is now open to the public. Anybody can write anything they want and distribute it to the masses at a speed that isn't even measurable. Are these people making money doing this? For the most part they aren't, but at the same time somebody has to be. The mass-amateurization of journalism and publishing has shifted the ability to be heard and the right to write (that wasn't on purpose) from a professional field to a field of amateurs who can create and disseminate materials on a massive level. It has given power and autonomy to bloggers and users of social networking, but has also created a decay in credibility as well as a form of media decadence in which people know less now then they did when they were all reading the same materials. It has been said now that nearly 50 percent of people under the age of 35 get their information from facebook posts and what is "trending" on twitter, causing news companies and professionals to shift in where they get their information, and influencing them to put importance on specific messages.

So one wonders if the people that are writing these blogs, social networking posts, and tweets aren't making money off of their free labor then who is cashing in? The answer is that media conglomerates are still the ones making the money, they just are doing it much easier by using the free labor that people are willingly producing. A good example of this was the post on the icon site about the Huffington Post. It was sold to AOL for 315 million dollars, but the people actually producing the information aren't making the money, the owners of the platforms are. As things become more digital and information continues to be freely created on internet platforms, the owners of these specific platforms and companies are the ones able to make millions of dollars. So in a sense, even though the internet makes finding and creating material and content freely available, and encouraged to everyone, it still pays to be a professional, or a media conglomerate.