These 11 tendencies have resulted in a public sphere that is characterised and divided by economic, political, and cultural power asymmetries
Targeted online advertising is the capital accumulation model that dominates the Internet and social media platforms. Adorno stresses the importance of advertising in the culture industry: “Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged. […] it merges with the advertisement” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 131). He argues that advertising is the culture industry’s “elixir of life” (131). In the digital culture industry, advertising has taken on a new form.
Smythe (1977) analysed advertising’s political economy. He stresses that in advertising-funded media, it is not the content that is the commodity. It is the “time of the audiences, which is sold to advertisers” (3). He argues that audiences of advertising-funded media conduct audience labour that produces the audience commodity. The larger the number of viewers, listeners, readers of such media, the higher ad rates can be set.
On social media, the audience commodity takes on a peculiar form. It is a big data commodity created by digital labour: users of produce online attention, big data, and online social relations that are the foundations of targeted ads. Whereas audiences produce meanings of content, users of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. also produce big data, content, and social relations. They are prosumers (producing consumers). There is constant real-time surveillance of online behaviour that is used for targeting ads. Ads are personalised. Predictive algorithms predict users’ interests in commodities. Ad prices are often set based on algorithmic auctions that use the pay per view- or the pay per click-mode. Facebook and Google are not communications companies, but the world’s largest advertising agencies.
Marx pointed out that commodity fetishism means that the commodity form and the money form conceal the “social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly” (Marx 1867, 168–169). The commodity hides the social relations that produce it. It thereby empties out the meaning of commodities. Advertising uses this void and fills it with commodity ideology. The social media commodity inverts commodity fetishism. The commodity character of Facebook data is hidden behind the social use-value of Facebook, that is the social relations and functions enabled by platform use. The object status of users, that is the fact that they serve the profit interests of Facebook, is hidden behind the social networking enabled by Facebook. Social activity veils digital labour and its digital commodity. What some call the sharing economy is in fact platform capitalism. A true “sharing society” has to “begin by really sharing what it has, or all its talk of sharing is false or at best marginal” (Williams 1983, 101).
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Theorists