Audience labor in the new media environment: A Marxian revisiting of the audience commodity

Abstract

The contemporary dynamics of mass communication necessitate a reassessment of the received notions of audience labor. To that end this article revisits Dallas Smythe’s seminal audience commodity theory through the lens of a two-sided class analysis. A number of his key conceptualizations are critiqued including audience power, audience measurement, media content as a free lunch, audiences as a non-durable producer’s good, the disappearance of labor power, and the revisionist history of capitalist development . At each point in the critique the contributions of various political economists who have revised and extended Smythe’s work are highlighted. The critique serves to underscore the contributions and limitations of the theory as its extension into the new media landscape is reconsidered.

Understanding Social Media Use as Alienation: A Review and Critique

“…Yet because the whole Smythian audience commodity idea is inherently problematical (Caraway, 2011), it cannot be straightforwardly transplanted from mass media to social media. Rather, I take two different insights from Smythe's work.…”

Dallas Smythe Today - The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory.

“…Brett Caraway (2011) claims that the audience is no commodity because "the activities of the audience are not under the direct control of the capitalist. Nor is it clear that the product of the labor of the audience (whatever that may be) is alienated from the audience" (Caraway 2011, 697).…”

“…Similarly, in a contemporary critique of Smythe's audience commodity theory and its application to digital media, Caraway (2011) argues that "Smythe's theory represents a one-sided class analysis which devalues working-class subjectivity" (696), gives "no discussion of wage struggles, product boycotts, or consumer safety" (700), and thereby conducts "audience commodity fetishism", in which "we are all now merely cogs in the capitalist machine" (700). Caraway's criticism of Critical Political Economy coincides with his celebration of the "creative energy residing in the new media environment" (706), which sets his analysis on par with social media determinists like Henry Jenkins, who argue that "the Web has become a site of consumer participation" (Jenkins 2008, 137) and that media are today a locus of "participatory culture" (Jenkins 2008).…”

Dialectical Method and the Critical Political Economy of Culture

“…The audience commodity (audience members as labourers) is a widely used concept in the critical political economy of culture: Since the initial debate sparked by Smythe (Smythe 1977(Smythe , 1978/1981Livant 1979;Murdock 1978), the concept has been re-examined (Jhally and Livant 1986;Meehan 1993) and has more recently been both critiqued (Caraway 2011;Hesmondhalgh 2010) and employed by a number of scholars to critically theorize human activity in relation to the CC: Creative Commons License, 2012.…”

“…One sign of the potential reification of the concept is the failure to distinguish audience labour from "user-generated content". A number of scholars have used the concept of the audience commodity to examine commodification in relation to online activity but failed to fully see the difference between the labour processes of audience members and Internet users (Caraway 2011;Cohen 2008;Fuchs 2009;2011a;Hesmondhalgh 2010;Napoli 2010): Audience members are labourers in the production of consciousness, while Internet users producing user-generated content are labourers in the production of culture. Clearly, Internet users also produce their own consciousness while "consuming" online content (including advertising).…”