Page 162 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Marketing communications and media 141

Digital media and ‘free’ labour
Smythe’s audience commodity concept has renewed relevance in contemporary
studies of digital labour. The activities of users in building social media profiles,
uploading pictures, creating content and communicating can be regarded as
work to create an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. Yet, as Fuchs
(2012: 711) highlights:

The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media
and on the Internet is that in the latter case the users are also content produ-
cers, there is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative
activity, communication, community building and content-production.
[ … ]
Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as prosumers,
we can say that in the case of corporate social media the audience commodity
is an Internet prosumer commodity …

Drawing on autonomist Marxist conceptions of immaterial labour, Terranova
(2000: 33) analyses the ‘free labour’ involved in Internet activities from content
creation, reading and online communication as ‘simultaneously voluntarily given
and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited’. Fuchs draws on Marxian concepts of
labour, value and exploitation in his analysis of the Internet prosumer commodity.
Social media time is ‘work time’ (Fuchs 2012: 722), a form of exploited labour
where the surplus value is created by labour but accrued by capital (corporations
such as Facebook). Fuchs acknowledges that users benefit from services, but
argues that this does not equate to wages for work. Rather social media users
have a simultaneous dual character ‘as consumers of technological services and
producers of data, commodities, value and profit’.
The audience commodity concept fuses two propositions, one of which is largely
accepted and the other hugely contentious. The accepted proposition is that audi-
ences are ‘sold’ to advertisers. Traditionally, transactions occur between media and
marketers based on estimates of audience value as measured by ratings agencies
or other research; increasingly they take the form of real-time micro-payments
between marketers and digital service providers tracking users. It remains vital to
resist naturalising the audience commodity – audience profiles remain partial
assemblages of information (McStay 2011) – yet the ability to track and monetise
users’ activity makes possible the measurement of actual online behaviour
(though still functioning as proxies for measuring attention and influence).
The contentious proposition concerns audience labour, both in Smythe’soriginal
thesis and in contemporary studies. Scholars object to the presumptions of
passivity, acquiescence, co-optation and incorporation of audiences advanced by
Smythe. The notion that we are unknowingly exploited offers an unpalatably
passive, fatalistic account of working class agency and subjectivity, argues