The immediate theoretical and political consequences Lebowitz’s logic of argumentation are the following ones:
- Commercial media are subsumed to industrial capital.
- Slaves, house workers and other unpaid workers are not exploited.
- The wage and non-wage work performed under the command of media capital is unproductive work. Media companies cannot exploit workers because they create products and services that are part of the circulation sphere of capitalism.
Graham Murdock (1978) pointed out in the Blindspot Debate that the audience commodity is just one of several political economies of the media besides the sale of content and a strong public service tradition in Europe. He also stressed that corporate media have an ideological role in capitalism. In his 2014 reflection on his debate with Dallas Smythe, Murdock (2014) argued that the notion of the audience commodity would be of crucial relevance for understanding exploitation in the digital age. The digital media landscape would however not just be shaped by commodification, but have huge potentials for the emergence of digital commons. Graham Murdock points out the importance of re-considering the notions of the audience commodity and audience labour in the context of digital media, which points towards the necessity of the category of digital labour for understanding the political economy of advertisingfinanced digital media.
6.2.1 Digital Labour
The digital labour debate has in its first phase focused on understanding the value creation mechanisms on corporate social media such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Authors have, for example, discussed the usefulness of Karl Marx’s labour theory of value (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, Fuchs 2010, Fuchs 2012c), how the notion of alienation shall be used in the context of digital labour (Andrejevic 2012), or if and how Dallas Smythe’s notion of audience labour can be used for understanding digital labour (for an overview discussion see Fuchs 2012b, 2014c). The general task has been how to best understand and conceptualise that users under real-time farreaching conditions of commercial surveillance create a data commodity that is sold to advertising clients and who exactly creates the value that manifests itself in social media corporations’ profits. Studying digital labour is now in a second stage, where it gives attention to theorising digital labour in all its forms.
Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour
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Audience Labour