So Facebook usage is labour. But is it productive labour? Marx sees transportation labour that moves a commodity in space-time from location A to location B, which takes a certain labour time x, as productive labour: What
the transport industry sells is the actual change of place itself….The productive capital invested in this industry thus adds value to the products transported, partly through the value carried over from the means of transport, partly through the value added by the work of transport. (Marx 1885, 226–227)
The value generated by transporting a commodity from A to B is therefore x hours. The symbolic ideology of a commodity first needs to be produced by special ad and public relations employees and is in a second step communicated to potential buyers. Advertising therefore involves production and transportation labour. Advertising production does not create a physical commodity but an ideological dimension of a commodity – a use-value promise that is attached to a commodity as meaning. Advertising transport workers do not transport a commodity in physical space from A to B, they rather organise a communication space that allows advertisers to communicate their use-value promises to potential customers. Facebook’s paid employees and users are therefore 21st-century equivalents of what Marx considered as transport workers in classical industry. They are productive workers whose activities are necessary for “transporting” use-value promises from companies to potential customers. Marx associated transport with communication as comparable forms of work. On Facebook and other social media platforms, transportation labour is communication labour.
Dallas W. Smythe (1981, 4) argued that it is a specific feature of audience labour that audiences “work to market […] things to themselves”. Facebook users constantly work and constantly market things to themselves. Their usage behaviour constantly generates data that are used for targeting ads. All Facebook usage is productive labour, with the exception of those cases, where users block advertising with the help of ad block software, which probably only a minority does. Facebook usage labour adds value to the commodity that is sold by Facebook’s ad clients. Practically this means that a lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media advertising costs into their commodity prices. Nielsen (2013) conducted a survey among advertisers and advertising agencies. Seventy-five percent of the advertisers and 81% of the agencies that participated in the survey indicated that they buy targeted ads on social media. This shows the importance of social media for advertising today.
Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour
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Digital Labour and Productive Labour