reflections on surveying
http://resisttheb.org/middleman/survey
A crawler, seeded at infosthetics.com and rhizome.org, would crawl out to all sites at most two hops away. There were 435 such sites as of Friday night, a perfectly sized number. These sites were then put on Mechanical Turk, where “turkers” were asked to find contact information for a pittance. I designed a special layout that hopefully made it easy for the turkers to hit each site in a serial processing manner. Within two hours, I had a list of 300 email addresses. The efficiency of the operation, of which I was the digital orchestrator, guiding my crawler and turkers to peak efficiency, surprised me. At one point I scolded a turker for “dubious quality” and I felt like Ebenezer stomping on a newly minted boot.
I had an interactive script spit data in my face and I hit a button YES or NO –like a 90s hacker movie, I was connected to the data. While reviewing, I noticed that several of my favorite sites had emails listed that even I didn’t know about — including infostethics.com itself, which I have only known to have a contact form. Where? How? I believe the turkers used a whois lookup to obtain these addresses, raising an ethical question: was I using an illicit tool to obtain these contacts? At what point does mechanical turk become more than a time saver? I had intentioned the Turk to save me from visiting each site and writing an email, but it reality it deviated from that. It opened up the possibility that I was sending mail where no normal member of the community would not send it, using means that no normal member of the community would use.
A quick lookup in the American Survey Society ethics guide on email surveys confirmed that my entire operation of unsolicited email was unethical, and I pulled the plug. Perhaps you would take my survey?
I heard an argument for patenting an artistic process today that was … amazing … to the effect of “I have always been on the edge of commercialism. For example, one of my works pitted Jesus against Nike …” The patent in this case has become art, an interesting conceptual mutation perhaps, but with real consequences perhaps also.