I’ve had an avatar on Second Life for some time now, but I’m hardly ever there. I just joined so I could attend events there and see what the fuss was about. The financial aspect is interesting from a social perspective – it’s bizarre to have someone try to sell you a virtual condo or virtual clothes.

What has been interesting to me is the more everyday aspects of life online – tools like social bookmarking sites tend to disappear into routine browsing after a while. Maybe less flashy research topics are more for me, but I could always have second thoughts.

This Salon article uses a number of examples of people who are “turkers” (workers for mechanical turk) just as something “fun” to do in their spare time not as an actual job. I doubt that’s the full story.

Beyond what this site means/says about work in the 21st century I was also interested in the site because I could really use this kind of service. In a perfect world I’d have funding to pay undergraduates a decent wage to transcribe my research interviews, but mechanical turk is quite tempting for this kind of task in the real world. But is it the kind of thing I want to participate in?

The system obscures the origin of the work, how much of your money goes to the actual performer of the work (Amazon’s fee is 10% but there may be brokers on the other end), and all the basics of how the sausage is made. It would be easy to assume that the transcriber is just some bored commuter rather than someone who actually needs the money, perhaps working for someone who has the technical means to contract out the work.