Crowded is an montage audio program by Jeff Crouse similar to radio shows like This American Life, The Moth, or the productions of Joe Frank. What makes it unique is that all of the material is is made up of segments of audio requested from and submitted by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site in return for payment. I have made one incomplete episode as a test. You can listen to it here.
Each episode has a mechanism or a theme. For the test episode, I asked workers to listen to a collection of songs. After listening, they picked one that reminded them of an important event in their life, and then recorded themselves telling that story. You can see the HIT (Human Intelligence Task – the instructions given to the workers) at the bottom of this page. The tentative list of future themes are all listed below in the production time line. Some of them have nothing to do with labor or MT. Some are very self-conscious.
The workers are given around $5-$10 to follow the directions like the ones below, depending on the complexity of the task. The jobs usually involve recording some audio. Depending on the assignment, they will use either a custom-built recording applet or a commercial conference call service. When I receive the audio, I organize and edit the results into a professionally produced radio show. Although it would be interesting to keep these results as raw as possible and strive for objectivity, I have decided that I would rather focus on creating an intriguing show. Except where the theme specifically calls for it, I will not give up editorial privileges.
After doing several projects using crowdsourcing (Dirt Party, Invisible Threads, You’re So VIP) that essentially use workers as a faceless labor force only slightly better than a computer, I wanted to do a project that was about the actual people who are doing these tasks. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why do they do these jobs? The dynamics of “buying” a story via Mechanical Turk are interesting to me. Do I own the story? What kind of stories do you get from workers who are ultimately looking at the estimated time vs. payment bottom line? You could argue that I am still not humanizing them – that I am simply exploiting their willingness to tell personal stories for a few bucks. But this project isn’t really taking a position in terms of the ethics of online labor markets. It’s simply the MT system – which most believe is a kind of foreshadowing of a labor paradigm that will inevitably become much more common in the future – in a way that I think is more interesting and rewarding than most of what I have seen. Most of the workers who respond to my requests are very excited to have been asked to do something that requires a little more creativity and thought. The trick will be to bring out something unique about the kind of people who do this kind of work. The average person doesn’t know what crowdsourcing is, and especially doesn’t care to hear strangers talking about uninteresting topics. So the concept alone won’t make this project successful. The tentative themes below are intentionally being left somewhat vague so that, when I gain a better understanding of the workers , I will be able to craft a show scenario that will coax better material out of them.
The end result will be a CD of these shows along with a small pamphlet or booklet about the workers who contributed, and any thoughts or research that I accumulate over the course of the show. Because I don’t want people who wouldn’t normally be on MT to accept the tasks, I will release the entire collection after the project is done. I will also release the MP3s of the shows and all of the source audio on the web. With the help of Rhizome, I hope to one day hope to pitch this to WNYC as a series that they can play on air.
