This class is giving words to concepts that I already believed and understood, but remained half-baked in my mind.
Commodification is not a new thing occurring to us. I feel like every aspect of my life is commodified. My birth was an act to be encouraged, to drive the continued growth of the country, both literally and economically. My education has been a long preparation for the day when I leave home, get a job, and enter "real life". My interests serve as targets for business to commercialize my hobbies. Any aspect of my life not commodified yet by commercial interests is only so because no one has yet realized that aspects economic value.
I feel like this commodification comes from a mindset that we absorb all of our lives from the society we live in. We are expected to participate in one limited way in our society, and that is through our career. we are expected to choose an area of interest, study the hell out of it, and then participate in culture from that position. If I become a writer, that is how I am expected to produce and contribute to our culture. I am not encouraged to try anything else, like cooking, or playing sports, or filming movies. Those things should be handled by the people who specialize in those areas. But that mindset ignores the diversity within people's own interests.
Our corporate mindset informs us that we should not value what we do not gain profit from, but it is that thinking that limits us with regards to participatory cultures. Wikipedia, had it been founded as a corporation, rather than as a nonprofit, would look vastly different to the Wikipedia we know and love today. The Wikipedia we have today was not created to commodify the participation of its audience, but rather to facilitate the sharing of knowledge between its participants.
Facebook and Twitter have commodified our attention, by selling our eyes and our ears to advertisers. While social media has facilitated conversations that might otherwise have never taken place, it's important to remember that we, the users of these platforms, are the product being sold. Facebook requires that you join under your real name, and as a real person. While this might be of benefit to the users, it still represents a limiting of the options that people have when deciding to use the platform. The restriction of freedoms online can be of benefit, but the important question to ask is whether the actions being taken are for the sake of the community or for the sake of the corporation.