Saying that the cultural labour of branding, public relations, and creating commodity advertisements creates symbolic value is not detached from the notion of economic value. Rather value here precisely means that for the creation of this symbolic dimension of the commodity labour time is invested. It is therefore no wonder that almost all larger companies have their own public relations departments or outsource public relations and advertising to other companies. Paying the circulation workers employed in such departments or companies needs to be planned and calculated into the price of commodities.
Consumers give specific meanings to the commodities they buy and consume. They thereby construct consumption meaning and in doing so can react to use-value promises in different ways:
- They can share these ideologies and buy the commodities because they hope the promise is an actual use-value;
- they can deconstruct the use-value promise as ideology and refuse buying the commodity;
- they can deconstruct the use-value but nonetheless buy the commodity for other reasons.
For communicating commodity ideologies to consumers, companies need to buy advertisement spaces in commercial media. Commercial media link commodity ideologies to consumers, they “transport” ideologies to consumers, although it is unclear and not determined how the latter react and if the confrontation with commodity ideologies results in actual purchases. Facebook and other corporate social media are advertising companies that sell advertising space and user data as commodities to clients who want to present commodity ideologies to users and hope that the latter buy their commodities. Facebook has paid employees that organise the development, maintenance, and provision of its software platform. On December 31, 2012, Facebook had 4619 paid employees.<sup>4</sup> But Facebook cannot sell advertising space without its users. Without them, it would be a dead platform that would immediately cease to exist. Between March and June 2013, more than a billion people, roughly 43% of all internet users, had accessed Facebook.<sup>5,6</sup>
Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour
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Digital Labour and Productive Labour