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Political economy of the Internet 133

The peculiar qualities of information are sources of contradiction whereby the
social character of information meets the privatised and proprietary organisation
of the market. For Fuchs (2009: 77) ‘Information networks aggravate the
capitalist contradiction between the collective production and the individual
appropriation of goods’. Gift exchanges can repudiate and challenge commodi-
fication but can also be harnessed by commodification processes. User-generated
content (UGC) is ‘expressive of the generative possibilities of the Internet but all
too easily used as “free” content by media and information companies who, in
previous years, would have expected to pay for such content’ (Freedman 2012: 87).
For Fuchs (2009) ‘the gift form is subsumed under commodity form and can
even be used directly for achieving profit’.This isevidenceof the ‘structural need
of capitalism to monetize, and incorporate within a system of market exchange,
even those practices – like blogging, commenting and reviewing – that spring
from non-commercial urges’ (Freedman 2012). Much UGC is incorporated into
a system of commodity exchange in which economic value is appropriated by
companies selling the content and engagements of consumers to marketers
(chapter six). One illustrative clash of modalities occurred when some 9,000
bloggers brought a class action to sue Huffington Post for ‘unjust enrichment’ in
an (unsuccessful) effort to seek retrospective payment for their unpaid contribu-
tions. The bloggers claimed around a third of the $315 million AOL paid to
acquire Huffington Post.
Decentralised network communications can allow ideas and information to flow
more freely. The networked public sphere (Benkler 2006) also greatly enhances
opportunities for people to participate in ‘non-market’ based communications,
and in public deliberations on a scale hitherto unknown. These affordances and
the practices that arise need full consideration (and are discussed further in later
chapters). Yet a key theme in critical Internet studies is that the opportunities to
realise such communications fully are constrained by the dominance of corporate
capitalism and by the persistence of ‘undemocratic problems of concentration,
centralization and surveillance’ (Sylvian 2008: 8). The concept of network is used
in part to capture the integration of what might be regarded as the ‘vertical’ flow
of top-down mass media content and the ‘horizontal’ flow of communications
between individuals and groups. Interactivity and co-mingling within network
communications is of huge significance for communications and democracy. Yet,
the concerns about ‘vertical’ content supply remain vitally important as long as these
remain the main sources on which people rely. We must also not treat ‘horizontal’
communications as entirely autonomous of the corporate–governmental systems on
which their connectivity and expression depend. This invites consideration of the
resource-base to sustain the three modalities outlined by Murdock. Gift exchanges
and ‘free labour’ certainly demonstrate the power of altruism, as well as other
incentives for (self) promotion, but they also rely on the transfer of resources of
money, time and network access which are unequally distributed, with con-
sequences for the communications produced. There has been a huge expansion
of intergroup communications but beyond free labour, and crucially, too, free or