Page 223 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

202 Interventions and change

approach can provide, analysis of how corporate capitalism has shaped and
continues to shape how the Internet develops.
Other CPE scholars have addressed the specific claims for participation and
co-creation. Celebrant accounts of digital capitalism often adopt terms asso-
ciated with political democracy and apply these to communication activities in
general but also to specific claims that user-generated content platforms facilitate
a participatory culture and economy (Tapscott and Williams 2006). Fuchs (2011)
advocates returning terms such as participation to their roots in theories of
‘strong’ participatory democratic so that participation claims are assessed in
regard to such criteria as control over decision-making, ownership and demo-
cratic empowerment, Fuchs critiques the shallow and restricted conception of
participation on offer and the way this misrepresents the dominance of corporate
ownership and commercial provision.

Statistics such as the ownership structures of web 2.0 companies, the most
viewed videos on YouTube, the most popular Facebook groups, the most
popular topics on Google and Twitter, the Twitter users with the highest
number of followers show that the corporate web 2.0 is not a democratic space
of equal participants, but a space, in which large companies, celebrities and
entertainment dominate. They achieve a much higher number of followers,
readers, viewers, listeners, re-tweets, likes, etc. than the everyday users.
(Fuchs 2012: 728)

Fuchs concludes that Web 2.0 and such like are ideological categories that serve
the interests of capital and ignore the power structures that shape the Internet.
The smooth harmonising of commercial and consumer interests underpinning
a benign vision of the market require the expansion of such critique. However,
as Fuchs (2011: 324) also emphasises, a dialectic analysis of media and society
will ‘try to identify the positive and negative potentials and effects … and how
they come to contradict each other’. Highlighting contradiction as a key tool for
contemporary Marxist analysis, Fuchs (2011: 325) proposes four main themes;
how and to what extent:

1 media play a role in capital accumulation and commodification
2 they advance ideologies or are surrounded by ideologies about their own
(positive and negative) effects
3 they advance one-dimensional instrumental and/or complex critical modes of
thinking and practices
4 there are potentials that media act as alternative media in social struggles that
want to bring about a better world that benefits all and not only certain
groups or individuals.

Accordingly, researchers should examine how these are present in concrete
situations and systems, and how they interact and contradict each other.