The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media

Description

This edited collection comprises foundational texts and new contributions that revisit the theory of the «audience commodity» as first articulated by Dallas Smythe. Contributors focus on the historical and theoretical importance of this theory to critical studies of media/communication, culture, society, economics, and technology – a theory that has underpinned critical media studies for more than three decades, but has yet to be compiled in a single edited collection. The primary objective is to appraise its relevance in relation to changes in media and communication since the time of Smythe’s writing, principally addressing the rise of digital, online, and mobile media. In addition to updating this perspective, contributors confront the topic critically in order to test its limits. Contextualizing theories of the audience commodity within an intellectual history, they consider their enduring relationship to the field of media/communication studies as well as the important legacy of Dallas Smythe. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Foreword Chapter One: After Broadcast, What? An Introduction to the Legacy of Dallas Smythe (Lee McGuigan) On the Audience Commodity: Media, Consciousness, and Alienation The Digital Labor Debate Marxist and Institutional Approaches Data and Digital Surveillance: A Factory in the Marketplace Monopoly and Dependency Beyond the Capitalist Core Advertising, Branding and Commodification of Human Experience Critique of “Technology” Critical Research on Communication Policy and Cultural Policy Conclusion as Introduction Notes Part One: Foundational Texts Chapter Two: Audiences, Commodities and Market Relations: An Introduction to the Audience Commodity Thesis (William H. Melody) Washington Connections Audiences: Commodification During Consumption Audience Commodities in Information Societies Chapter Three: Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism (Dallas W. Smythe) Notes Chapter Four: Introduction to The Blindspot Revisited (Graham Murdock) Chapter Five: Blindspots About Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe (Graham Murdock) Notes Chapter Six: Introduction to “Ratings and the Institutional Approach” (Eileen R. Meehan) Notes Chaper Seven: Ratings and the Institutional Approach: A Third Answer to the Commodity Question (Eileen R. Meehan) Cultural Production and the Commodity Message Blindspot in Western Marxism? Commodity Ratings Towards an Integration of Commodities Notes Chapter Eight: Introduction to “Watching as Working” (Sut Jhally) Notes Chapter Nine: Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness (Sut Jhally) Metaphor and Reality: The Production of Watching Extra From Use-Value to Exchange-Value: Breaking with Message-Based Analysis What Is the Commodity-Form Sold by the Commercial Media? Who Produces This Media Commodity and under What Conditions? What Is the Source of Value and Surplus Value in This Process? From Absolute to Relative Surplus Value Watching and Labor From the Formal to the Real Subsumption of Watching Alienated Watching Narrowcasting and Blurring Conclusion Notes Part Two: Social Media, Audience Manufacture, and the Work of Self-Marketing Chapter Ten: The Institutionally Effective Audience in Flux: Social Media and the Reassessment of the Audience Commodity (Philip M. Napoli) Institutionally Effective Audiences and their Evolution Methodology Social TV Analytics in Context: The Evolving Television Audience Marketplace Rehabilitating the Status Quo: Efforts to Preserve the Measurement and Valuation of Exposure New Media, New Sources of Audience Value: The Rise of Social Media Analytics Beyond Exposure: Exploring Social Media-Based Constructions of the Television Audience Old and New Methods of Audience Representation (and Misrepresentation) The Many Social TV Audiences: Differentiation Across Competing Audience Representations Social TV Analytics Usage and Resistance Resistance Embracing Conclusion Notes Chapter Eleven: Extending the Audience: Social Media Marketing, Technologies and the Construction of Markets (Jason Pridmore) Social Media and Surveillance Commoditizing the Audience, Engaging the Consumer Watching and Listening to Users Conversations with Users Technologies of Collaboration—Audience Building and Clicks of Visibility API Enrollment Materialities and Audience Labor Acknowledgments Chapter Twelve: Capital’s New Commons: Consumer Communities, Marketing and the Work of the Audience in Communicative Capitalism (Detlev Zwick; Alan Bradshaw) The Real of Virtual Consumer Community The Ideological Function of Consumer Online Communities 1) The function to dispel the belief that marketers actually do the marketing 2) The function to establish the belief that marketers no longer control consumers 3) The function to dispel with the belief that marketers create value Conclusion Note Part Three: The Political Economy of Media Technologies: The Internet, Mobile Devices, and Institutions in Informational Capitalism Chapter Thirteen: From Googol to Guge: The Political Economy of a Search Engine (Micky Lee) Google’s AdWords Critical Studies of Google Since 2009 Political Economy as a Dialectical, Historical Materialist Approach Are the New Media Really that “New”? After Guge, What? Notes Chapter Fourteen: “Free Lunch” in the Digital Era: Organization Is the New Content (Mark Andrejevic) Chapter Fifteen: Technologies of Immediacy / Economies of Attention: Notes on the Commercial Development of Mobile Media and Wireless Connectivity (Vincent Manzerolle) The Era of Ubiquitous Connectivity Materiality, Mediation, and the Infrastructure of Being Mobile Media, Personal Data, and Digital Prosumption Audience, Abstraction, Capacity Technologies of Immediacy / Economies of Attention Personalization, Democracy, and “Present-Mindedness” Notes Part Four: Toward a Materialist Theory of Commercial Media in a Digital Age Chapter Sixteen: Commodities and Commons (Graham Murdock) Chapter Seventeen: Value, the Audience Commodity, and Digital Prosumption: A Plea for Precision (Edward Comor) The Audience Commodity and the Exploitation of Labor The Influence of Autonomist Marxism Marx on Value Toward a Precise Analysis of Digital Prosumption Conclusions Notes Chapter Eighteen: Dallas Smythe Reloaded: Critical Media and Communication Studies Today (Christian Fuchs) Introduction The Disappearance and Return of Marx Dallas Smythe and Marxist Media and Communication Studies Today Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory of Media and Communication Conclusion Notes Bibliography Contributors Index