{"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":196,"pdf_page":210,"physical_index":210,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"bb3b48d809f7c3a73148a7e2dc2f61e2a0ea19d1587ad84bf5832670c74df142"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"In the age of digital media, there has been a resurgence of interest in Smythe’s works. My contribution has in this respect been the linking of the notions of audience labour and the audience commodity to targeted online advertising (Fuchs 2012). How does Smythe’s work matter for understanding social media? On social media, we are partly audiences watching, reading, and listening and partly producing consumers (prosumers) creating content ourselves. So for example on YouTube, most of us tend to predominantly watch videos. Many of these videos have in-video advertisements. So we not just consume the free content, but also provide attention to advertisements. And Google sells this attention to advertisers as a commodity. One difference to television is that on YouTube, users can produce and publish videos. So some users upload their own videos from time to time. And a smaller group of professional YouTubers tries to earn a living from creating YouTube content. By browsing videos on YouTube, searching on Google, and visiting websites, we produce a lot of meta-data that reveals a lot about our personal interests and tastes.\n\nGoogle stores all of this data on its servers and identifies it with the IP address with which we access the Internet. Google also gains access to various other online data sources and thereby builds personal profiles of interests. Therefore, we do not simply find an audience commodity on social media, but also a big data commodity. In order to find out more about consumers’ tastes and interests, advertisers and media organisations no longer need to conduct consumer surveys. The constant real-time surveillance of online behaviour and long-time storage of personal data allow for targeting advertisements based on individual profiles. The big data commodity allows an advertiser to, for example, target an ad for a soft drink to all users in London in the age group 16–30 years who have, at some point in time, googled the soft drink’s name. The creation of big data commodity is a sophisticated form of surveillance and exploitation of user labour.\n\n8.2.2 Karl Marx: The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret\n\nThe Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret forms the fourth section of the first chapter in Karl Marx’s main work Capital Volume I (Marx 1867, 163–177). In Capital Volume I’s first chapter, Marx shows that in capitalism both economic and ideological dimensions play an important role: a commodity has an economic dimension because it is produced by labour within class relations. The section on the commodity fetishism adds to the analysis that a commodity also has an ideological and aesthetic dimension that tries to deceive and manipulate humans. Marx here returns to the analysis of ideology that he advanced in an earlier work, The German Ideology, where he defined ideology as a camera obscura that makes humans and their social relations “appear upside-down” (Marx and Engels 1845, 42).\n\n196\n\nThemes","previous_page":195,"next_page":197}