Figure 6.1 visualises the economic relationships of Facebook (and other corporate social media platforms using targeted advertising) and its advertising clients.
A commodity has a use-value, value, and symbolic value. A company’s production workers create the basic use-value that satisfies human needs. These activities take an average combined number of labour hours. Labour is the substance of value, labour time its measure and magnitude. In order to sell its commodity, a company tries to give positive meanings to it and to communicate these meanings to the public’s members whom it tries to convince that this goods or service can enhance their lives and that they should therefore buy this commodity and not a comparable one offered by another company. Most commodities have, independent from their physical or informational nature, a cultural component that is created by cultural labour. The cultural dimension of a commodity is necessary ideological: it appeals to consumers’ imagination and wants to make them connote positive images and feelings with the idea of consuming this commodity.
The creation of a commodity’s symbolic ideology is a value-creating activity but not a use-value-generating activity. The use-value of a commodity can be physical and/or informational: we have cars for satisfying the need of driving from A to B, we listen to music for satisfying our aesthetic desires, and so forth. The exchange-value of a commodity is the relationship in which it is exchanged with another commodity, normally money: x commodity A = y commodity B (money). Symbolic value establishes a link and mediates between use-value and exchange-value, it helps accomplishing the exchange in which consumers obtain use-values and capitalists money. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (1986) speaks in this context of the commodity’s use-value promise: The sales and advertising ideology associated with a commodity promises specific positive life enhancement functions that the commodity brings with it and thereby conceals the commodity’s exchange-value behind promises. The symbolic commodity ideology promises a use-value beyond actual consumption, an imaginary surplus and surplus enjoyment. These promises are detached from the actual use-value and are therefore a fictitious form of value.
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Theorists