{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","uuid":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"digitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","isbns":["2021022153","9781032119182","9781032119205","9781003222149","2405518376"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":343,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":158,"pdf_page":172,"physical_index":172,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dd2437b5164fd28dea09d6681e85ed2139d935a27b868b051e0ae5667b3a684f"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"Smythe criticised critical and administrative scholars for focusing narrowly on commercial media in terms of messages, information, images, meaning, entertainment, orientation, education, manipulation, and ideology (Smythe 1977, 1).\n\nSmythe asked the question who produces the commodity of the commercial, advertising-financed media. He said that “audiences and readerships” (Smythe 1977, 3) are the workers of the commercial media. They create the “demand for advertised goods” and by consuming media reproduce “their own labor power” (Smythe 1977, 3).\n\nDallas Smythe’s notion of audience labour challenged the idea that one can only be exploited if one earns a wage in a factory. He opened up the notion of exploitation for the age of consumer culture. His notion also challenges the idea that the home and the private sphere are insulated against exploitation, an insight that he shares with Marxist feminism that since the 1970s has stressed the importance of considering reproductive labour as value-generating and therefore exploited by capital. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James challenged the orthodox-Marxist assumption that reproductive work is “outside social productivity”. (Dalla Costa and James 1972, 30; see also Eisenstein 1979, Mies 1986)”.\n\nOrthodox-Marxist criticisms of Marxist feminism echo the polemical criticism that Michael Lebowitz and others marshalled against Smythe. Michael Lebowitz argues that Smythe’s approach is only a “Marxist-sounding communications theory” (Lebowitz 1986, 165). Marxism would assume that\n\nsurplus value in capitalism is generated in the direct process of production, the process where workers (having surrendered the property rights over the disposition of their labour-power) are compelled to work longer than is necessary to produce the equivalent of their wage. Perhaps it is for this reason that there is hesitation in accepting the conception that audiences work, are exploited, and produce surplus value – in that it is a paradigm quite different to the Marxist paradigm. (Lebowitz 1986, 167)\n\nMedia capitalists would compete “for the expenditures of competing industrial capitalists”, help to “increase the commodity sales of industrial capitalists” and their profits would be “a share of the surplus value of industrial capital” (Lebowitz 1986, 169). Smythe’s audience commodity approach would advance an “entirely un-Marxian argument with un-Marxian conclusions” (Lebowitz 1986, 170). In relation to Sut Jhally and Bill Livant’s approach that is building on the one of Smythe, Richard Maxwell (1991, 40) argues that “Jhally and Livant misapplied certain propositions in the theory of value to a realm which may be relatively autonomous from the discipline of wagelabor” and that “wage-labor” is “the necessary element of labour control and exploitation in the trans-valuation of televiewing”. Related approaches have argued that not the audiences of commercial media are exploited, but the statisticians working for audience rating companies (Bolin 2011, Meehan 1984).\n\n158\n\nTheorists","previous_page":null,"next_page":159}