3.7 billion. One should not be mistaken: Google and Facebook are not communications companies. They do not sell the ability to communicate. Rather, they are the world’s largest advertising agencies. Their profits almost exclusively derive from targeted advertising. Understanding social media and big data therefore requires that we contextualise these phenomena through the critical study of marketing and advertising.
Critical marketing studies are based on the insight that “marketing has devoted too much attention to refining itself as an instrumental science, with the corollary emphasis on the production of knowledge for the ‘marketing organisation’, not for wider stakeholders” (Tadajewski 2010, 776). Further, it is a “systematic critique of marketing theory and practice” that uses “some form of critical social theory […] whether this is drawn from the neo-Marxist critical theory tradition, some variant of humanism, feminism”, or other approaches (Tadajewski 2010, 774). As a consequence, critical marketing does not mean conducting marketing critically or studying how to make marketing critical. Rather, critique and marketing are polar, dialectical opposites, just like socialism and capitalism. Critical marketing is a critique of marketing that aims at creating knowledge that helps us overcome both capitalism and marketing. Critical marketing studies as a discipline understands itself as being part of an emancipatory social science (Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008). Taking a critical marketing perspective on social media means to apply critical social theory for understanding social media’s power structures.
The task of this chapter is to critically understand social media and big data’s political economy. It outlines key classical texts (section 8.2), contemporary texts (section 8.3), and future research directions (section 8.4) that can help us achieve this goal.
8.2 Key Theoretical Approaches
There are many critical approaches that matter for critically understanding the Internet and social media. In a text like this chapter, one is necessarily limited to the number of key texts and thinkers one can introduce. I will here focus on four classical thinkers and one text by each of them: Dallas Smythe, Karl Marx, Raymond Williams, and Sut Jhally.
8.2.1 Dallas Smythe: Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism
Dallas Smythe’s (1977) article Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism has become a key text in the political economy of communication and when it comes to understanding advertising’s political economy. Smythe’s starting point is a critique of many Marxists’ understanding of communications as transmitters of ideology and of advertising as belonging to an unproductive sphere of capital circulation. “The mass media of communications and related institutions concerned with advertising, market research, public relations and product and package design represent a blindspot in Marxist theory in the European and Atlantic basin cultures” (Smythe 1977, 1). Smythe criticised that a lot of critical and administration scholars analyse commercial media in terms of messages, information, images, meaning, entertainment, orientation, education, manipulation, and ideology. He argues for a perspective that gives a stronger role to the category of labour in the critical study of communication and culture.
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Themes