• What problems does labour face in the context of crowdfunding? What power asymmetries and ideologies can we find in the world of crowdfunding? What have been experiences of actual project co-ordinators on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter? How does crowdfunding relate to neoliberalism and the ideology of entrepreneurship?
• What controversies develop when digital advertising gurus meet digital labour activists in focus groups to debate digital capitalism?
8.5 Conclusion
Social media and big data are relatively new phenomena. At the same time, they reflect old power structures, but in new ways. This chapter focused on the analysis of social media’s political economy based on various critical theory approaches. It used classical concepts such as the audience commodity, audience labour, and commodity fetishism to show that critical analysis of advertising and targeted advertising needs to look at both economic and ideological dimensions. Facebook and Google are not communications corporations but the world’s largest advertising agencies. Current research in critical social media studies focuses on issues such as digital labour and digital alienation. Given that social media and big data will not disappear overnight, the critical study of these phenomena remains an important task.
References
Chapter Eight | Big Data and Critical Marketing
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References