Asus and You: Paying for Fan Sourced Digital Labor

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RND/ Screen tech often fascinates – what happens at the surface;

A scenario, in which you suddenly decide to email Asus at 3am, suggesting possible language / marketing improvements to their site. Getting the right tone is often difficult for non-native English speakers.) In language terms, the emphasis is on enhancing clarity, immediacy and marketing succinctness – and with blindly hoping to earn a quick consumer buck in return for services rendered:

1920 x 1045 .jpg, screenshot from Asus website

Asus ProArt Display PA32UCG

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Consumer Feedback Email To Asus

Dear Asus

Here are subtle English language improvements and spelling corrections for your site. If you decide to implement them, may I humbly suggest sending me one of these excellent monitors?

https://www.asus.com/Monitors/ProArt-Display-PA32UCG/

1. Deeper Black, Brighter White

ProArt Display PA32UCG produces 1600 nits peak brightness, and an industry-leading 1000 nits of full-screen sustained brightness, delivering outstanding contrast.

2. Mini-LED

ProArt Display PA32UCG incorporates current mini-LED backlight technology, packed with three times greater density than conventional screens. This gives finer, more granular control over brightness. And with 1,152 individual backlight zones, higher levels of luminance and darkness provide excellent contrast and accuracy for HDR content.

3. Advanced HDR

Dolby Vision HDR transforms your viewing experience with ultra vivid images. [Exclamation mark removed.]

4. Game Development

ProArt Display PA32UCG features variable refresh rates from 48 to 120Hz, allowing game developers to more easily create content and perform quality checks on one display.

5. Change “Comming Soon” to “Coming Soon” on the front page.

Sincerely, Robert What

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Example Reference Links

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Update Patch One

The basic argument in this debate is that the dominant capital accumulation model of contemporary corporate Internet platforms is based on the exploitation of users’ unpaid labour, who engage in the creation of content and the use of blogs, social networking sites, wikis, microblogs, content sharing sites for fun and in these activities create value that is at the heart of profit generation (Fuchs 2010b).
– Christian Fuchs, What Is Digital Labour? What Is Digital Work? What’s their Difference? And Why Do These Questions Matter for Understanding Social Media?

Aha.. it seems Asus have clearly (and quickly!) updated their website and modified their “Comming Soon” spelling mistake:

While you weren’t exactly expecting an immediate job offer at CEO level with generous bonuses, you at least (as others do every day) coldly calculated a global technology company making roughly US$11.36 billion in 2018 could at least afford your time and help making their marketing as sharp as their monitors. You used to teach English to execs in Germany, and expect (as ASUS does) to get paid for laboring.

Nobody else in the entire company noticed the spelling mistake; consider exactly what such a (seemingly minor) marketing blunder is worth in terms of overall global customer perception and relations? At least the cost of a new ProArt PA32UCG display, no?

– Are you merely being impossibly naive, andor simply greedy – as greedy as any modern Capitalist Hyper-Corporation, say – blindly hoping for instant AAA prosumer rewards?

So far however, all they’ve sent you is an email link to a generic, boilerplate Customer Service Feedback survey – which is also amusing, considering this represents even more unpaid work; giving over one’s time and energy to a massive organization that, somewhere along the line clearly makes ‘real’ wealth from unpaid digital labor. Much like (say) Steam reviews of games for Valve corporation, or endless fan modifications.

Consider yourself a fan of Asus monitors. You have ‘modified’ their site for them. What do you both get out of it – and what is the exact (synthetic) nature of your relationship? Perhaps Asus is just busy right now, and will (honorably) send over the monitor in question next week..

#IamProArtist

More Example Reference Links

// how to play big science