- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
I find the images a little sad to look at. Mostly because the primary action contained in the task makes little sense, or does it? Is there a correlation between naivete and a willingness to undertake tasks which reveal physical identity for a pittance? It would take a lot more to get me in front of a camera. My anonymity on a platform like Mturk is very important to me, as a college educated individual with a decent career. My activities on Mturk are restricted to free time, and can not overlap with my actual life in this manner.
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I am surprised by the demographics displayed by the pictures. Until extremely recently, registration has been closed to those outside of the United States yet these pictures are almost all foreigners. Some foreigners were able to set up accounts long ago, but the percentage of them is quite small so it is surprising to see them dominating in the pictures. I am also surprised by the large groups of people shown in the pictures. Most of the Turkers I am familiar with either live alone or with a single partner. It is obviously nearly impossible to support a family via Mechanical Turk so seeing these large families participating in a HIT seems strange. Finally, I am surprised you were able to get Turkers to create multiple large signs. Materials are not free and the signs are quite large. At the very least, these signs require sacrificing a large sheet. I, for example, would not complete this task for 25 dollars since it would require me to purchase/create 2 large signs and find a huge group of people to hold it up with me. All in all, I have some serious doubts that these are actual pictures of Mechanical Turk workers and that this is not just a part of some experiment.
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Would I have done the survey? No. Because I don't own a camera or a cell phone or know how to post or send pictures. If I did, well sure I would have done that because $25 is an incredible amount to make on mturk. Mturk is not a great paying job. I work on it seven days a week from the time I get up until I go to bed. I only take breaks to eat, sleep, walk the dog, or do a little house cleaning. I make between $300-400 a month. For as many hours as I work it, it's very little money. Mturk is my only income because I don't qualify for disability. So I am very grateful for mturk because it gives me a chance to make money. It's hard. I work 7 days a week all day and never have time to do anything else. I take off an hour or two a few nights a week to watch favorite tv shows, but being so poor I feel I have to do it all the time. It seems like all I do is worry. I get sad and depressed constantly over how hard our life is, how we don't have things we need, I sneak off to the bathroom and cry sometimes when I watch my daughter and son-in-law sitting in front of the tv watching the endless food and restaurant commercials with wistful looks on their faces. When you're a parent, you want to take care of your kid, and I feel like such a failure that I can't. Christmas time is the worst time for us, there's no money for presents or a tree or special food, and the tv commercials and shows are endless showing people enjoying those things. I hate Christmas, because it's a month long of feeling sad and depressed over how deprived we are and how I can't make it any better. Mturk is the only thing I can do to make our lives better. I devote myself to scraping the pages of hits trying to find something to do, and doing it well so requestors will be happy with my work. I have done over 175,000 hits in the last four years, and my approval rating is 99.8%. So you could say Mturk has saved my life, because it has helped me try to survive in really hard times. Those of us on the other side of the screen are people trying to survive, and doing whatever we can to do it. God bless you, me, and all the mturkers out there. It's a hard life sometimes, but it's the one we've been given, and we all just try to make the best of it. I hope you have a wonderful day!
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The majority seem to be of Indian workers. It feels weird seeing their pictures when the same Hit must have been available to people all over the world. You offered a decent pay for the work. Mechanical Turk isn't always fair as far as the pay is concerned. We expect a minimum wage of a dollar for ten minutes spent attempting a task. Often, we are asked to find emails/information and, if we can't locate one after spending five to ten minutes, are required to return the Hit. This is ludicrous! Our time has no value! The effort doesn't count unless you show results and work. To end, I'm a Master Worker, with proven track record, yet am ineligible for most of the better paying jobs only because I'm a non-US worker. My language skills aren't awful; I understand English better than my native language. I hope a day dawns when people are judged on their skills, not on their color or geo-location.
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Some of the Requester's are very good. They pay us decent and some more requester's pay us more than worth, but those hits will finish like in seconds. Like hunger people wait for some good bread in the desert place.
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On a good note, the age group in these picture are quite young (except two -three pictures) and also inclusion of young female is evident and healthy as considering female participation is quite low in economic activities in the third world countries. Cheap labor has always been at the core of any industrial revolution, you can take an example of industrial revolution in Europe of 18th and 19th centuries, this was fueled by new inventions by Europeans and cheap labors from European colonies. The new age of information has similarity to the industrial revolution of Europe and cheap labor will be again at the core of inventions and progress.So far cheap labor from countries like India has fueled the economy of USA with use of doctors, engineers and skilled workers from India and India has also benefited from it. I am hopeful to see the living standard of these people will rise and mutually beneficial to all.
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These people appear generally content with their assignment. You can see some smiles and half-smiles. Maybe they don’t know the significance of the “naïve/evian” distinction; perhaps to them it means nothing. Perhaps they see only the shining monetary reward at the end of each HIT. Or perhaps they are participating in a more grand, more magnificent social experiment in which we are all taking part. All of us are gifted with the smorgasbord of options which we call “life.” Your life is laid out before you with an astonishing array of branches of interlocking options before you: one choice leads to another branch of choices, and so on, until you die. Perhaps it is after death that we will begin to see what this is all about. It is possible that the Hindus in these photos understand the grand social experiment better than the rest of us. Each moment, each second, you have a choice to do or not do something. What mind-boggling series of choices led these groups of people to hold these signs and stand for a photograph? Does the quantity of options soar toward infinity? Again, these are questions that can only be answered, if at all, upon our ascension to our greater reward….
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"Respect is earned, not given" can be read on one of the girl's shirt. So true. And yet there she is, posing for an absurd picture to earn a few dollars. No smiles seems to be the unspoken rule. The background is dirty, busy and honest. All of a sudden, the background changes and there you have an All-American family posing in their backyard. Kids contribute with the fresh perspective. They are not aligned, they smile and dare to turn their faces away from the camera. They know this is absurd and are enjoying it. And back to India. Despite the dual tone I perceive the background as green and colorful. Picturesque. The "EVIAN" side is stained by the word on the flip side. Like life itself. Why is nobody smiling yet?
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Eileen Maxson prompted workers on Mechanical Turk to review her piece evian is naive spelled backwards, a work, in turn, comprised of worker portraits from the same site. For their responses, workers were tasked with writing 200 words in response to the project. Workers were encouraged to share their thoughts on the images, overall task, fair compensation, anonymity, and their personal experiences with the site. The pay for this HIT was $2.50 per response. Workers published in this catalogue received an additional "bonus" payment of $6.50, which increased their total compensation to $9.00, New York City's current minimum wage.
"Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone." mturk.com/mturk/welcome