Digital Capitalism

Chapter Six Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Audience Labour

6.3 Digital Labour and Productive Labour

6.4 Conclusion

References

6.1 Introduction

Dallas Smythe (1977) established the notions of the audience commodity and audience labour in 1977 for understanding the political economy of commercial media using advertising as their capital accumulation model. His article has resulted in a foundational debate of Media and Communication Studies that involved Smythe (1977, 1978), Graham Murdock (1978) and Bill Livant (1979). In recent years there has been a very significant rise of references to Smythe’s concepts of audience labour/commodification in academic works (see also Fuchs 2012b). This increasing interest has on the one hand to do with a return of a stronger interest in Marx’s works and Marxist political economy as well as the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo, Pinterest, Instagram, Blogspot, VKontakte, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and so forth that use targeted advertising as their capital accumulation model (Fuchs 2012b, 2014a, 2014c). Explaining how this form of capital accumulation model rises has resulted in the development of the category of digital labour¹.

6.2 Audience Labour

The analysis and critique of advertising played a special role in Dallas Smythe’s works. He conducted studies of advertising time on commercial television and found that advertising “occupies about one of every five minutes of big city television program time and about of every four minutes of smaller-city program time” (Smythe 1994, 66).

1 For an overview see the contributions in Scholz (2013).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222149-6

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).

Smythe 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).

Dallas 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)”.

Orthodox-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

surplus 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)

Media 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).

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The immediate theoretical and political consequences Lebowitz’s logic of argumentation are the following ones:

1. Commercial media are subsumed to industrial capital.

1. Slaves, house workers and other unpaid workers are not exploited.

1. The wage and non-wage work performed under the command of media capital is unproductive work. Media companies cannot exploit workers because they create products and services that are part of the circulation sphere of capitalism.

Graham Murdock (1978) pointed out in the Blindspot Debate that the audience commodity is just one of several political economies of the media besides the sale of content and a strong public service tradition in Europe. He also stressed that corporate media have an ideological role in capitalism. In his 2014 reflection on his debate with Dallas Smythe, Murdock (2014) argued that the notion of the audience commodity would be of crucial relevance for understanding exploitation in the digital age. The digital media landscape would however not just be shaped by commodification, but have huge potentials for the emergence of digital commons. Graham Murdock points out the importance of re-considering the notions of the audience commodity and audience labour in the context of digital media, which points towards the necessity of the category of digital labour for understanding the political economy of advertisingfinanced digital media.

6.2.1 Digital Labour

The digital labour debate has in its first phase focused on understanding the value creation mechanisms on corporate social media such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Authors have, for example, discussed the usefulness of Karl Marx’s labour theory of value (Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012, Fuchs 2010, Fuchs 2012c), how the notion of alienation shall be used in the context of digital labour (Andrejevic 2012), or if and how Dallas Smythe’s notion of audience labour can be used for understanding digital labour (for an overview discussion see Fuchs 2012b, 2014c). The general task has been how to best understand and conceptualise that users under real-time farreaching conditions of commercial surveillance create a data commodity that is sold to advertising clients and who exactly creates the value that manifests itself in social media corporations’ profits. Studying digital labour is now in a second stage, where it gives attention to theorising digital labour in all its forms.

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An important question that has arisen within the digital labour debate is if it suffices to focus on the social media world and to limit the notion of digital labour to paid or unpaid work in the online realm (or even narrower to limit the term to users’ unpaid labour on social media). We access social media on laptops and mobile phones that tend to be assembled in China. Hon Hai Precision (also known as Foxconn) is a Taiwanese company that was the 139th largest company in the world in 2014². According to the CNN Global 500 2012 list³, Foxconn was the fifth largest corporate employer in the world in 2012. In 2011, Foxconn had enlarged its Chinese workforce to a million, with a majority being young migrant workers who come from the countryside (SACOM 2011). Foxconn assembles, e.g. the iPad, iMac, iPhone, Kindle, various consoles (by Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft). When 17 Foxconn workers attempted to commit suicide between January and August 2010 (most of them “successfully”), the topic of bad working conditions in the ICT assemblage industry became widely known. This circumstance was followed up with a number of academic works that show that workers’ everyday reality at Foxconn includes low wages, working long hours, frequent work shift changes, regular working time of over 10 hours per day, lack of breaks, monotonous work, physical harm caused by chemicals such as benzene or solder paste, lack of protective gear and equipment, forced use of students from vocational schools as interns (in agreement with the school boards) that conduct regular assembly work that does not help their studies, prison-like accommodations with 6–22 workers per room, yellow unions that are managed by company officials and whom the workers do not trust, harsh management methods, a lack of breaks, prohibitions that workers move, talk or stretch their bodies, workers that had to stand during production, punishments, beatings and harassments by security guards, disgusting food (Chan 2013; Chan, Pun and Selden 2013, Pun and Chan 2012, Qiu 2012; Sandoval 2013, 2014). The Foxconn example shows that the existence and usage of digital media not just depends on the labour of software engineers and content producers. Digital labour covers a broad range of labour working under different conditions, including slave miners working in African conflict mines, smelters, hardware assemblers, software engineers, digital media content producers, eWaste workers, or users of commercial digital media.

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2 Forbes 2000, 2014 list: http://www.forbes.com/global2000/, accessed on August 18, 2014.

3 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2012/full\_list/, accessed on October 29, 2013.

Given the complex, networked, and transnational reality of labour required for the existence and usage of digital media, a concept of digital labour is needed that can reflect these realities. One needs to go beyond cultural-idealist approaches that only focus on user-generated content and see how content production is grounded in industrial and agricultural labour and how the appropriation of nature in this respect interacts with culture. For adequately studying digital labour and digital media in general, a cultural-materialist approach is needed (Fuchs 2013, 2013a; Fuchs and Sandoval 2014; Maxwell and Miller 2012). Given these preliminary assumptions, one can provide a definition of digital work and digital labour (see Fuchs 2014a, 2015; Fuchs and Sandoval 2014; Fuchs and Sevignani 2013):

• Digital work is all activity that creates digital media or uses them for creating use-values that satisfy human needs.

• Digital labour is alienated digital work: it is alienated from itself, from the instruments and objects of labour and from the products of labour. Alienation is alienation of the subject from itself (labour-power is put to use for and is controlled by capital), alienation from the object (the objects of labour and the instruments of labour) and the subject-object (the products of labour).

The digital labour debate has been accompanied a resurgent interest in Dallas Smythe’s concept of audience labour and audience commodification for explaining the role of targeted advertising on social media (see Fuchs 2012b). In this context notions such as prosumer labour (Fuchs 2010, 2014c, 2015) have been used.

Prosumer labour on social media differs in a number of respects from audience labour in broadcasting:

• Creativity and social relations: Broadcasting audiences produce meanings of programmes, whereas social media prosumers not just produce meanings but also content, communications with other users, and social relations.

• Surveillance: Broadcasting requires audience measurements, which are approximations, in order to sell audiences as commodities. Social media corporations monitor, store, and assess all online activities of users on their platforms and also on other platforms. They have very detailed profiles of users’ activities, interests, communications, and social relations. Constant real-time surveillance of users is an inherent feature of prosumers labour on capitalist social media. Personal data are sold as a commodity. Measuring audiences has in broadcasting and print traditionally been based on studies with small samples of audience members. Measuring and monitoring user behaviour on social media is constant, total, and algorithmic (Allmer 2014; Allmer, Fuchs, Kreilinger and Sevignani 2014; Fuchs 2012a; Fuchs and Sevignani 2013).

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• Targeted and personalised advertising: Advertising on capitalist social media can therefore more easily target user interests and personalise ads, whereas this is more difficult in commercial broadcasting.

• Algorithmic auctions: Algorithms organise the pricing of the user data commodity in the form of auctions for online advertising spaces on the screens of a specific number of users. The ad prices on social media vary depending on the number of auctioneers, whereas the ad prices in newspapers and on radio and TV are set in a relatively fixed manner and are publicly advertised. User measurement uses predictive algorithms (if you like A, you may also like B because 100,000 people who like A also like B)

6.3 Digital Labour and Productive Labour

The digital labour debate has been accompanied by the question how feasible Karl Marx’s labour theory of value is for understanding digital labour. And often-overlooked aspect is that this theory is a theory of time in capitalism and that digital labour needs therefore to be situated in the temporalities of capitalism (see Fuchs 2014b). One criticism brought forward against those who argue that users of corporate social media platforms that use targeted advertising are exploited has been that advertising as part of the sphere of circulation that only realises but does not create value, and that users’ activities are one or several of the following (see, e.g. Bolaño and Vieira, 2015; Comor 2014, Huws 2014, Reveley 2013, Rigi and Prey 2015; for a reply to these not always original arguments that tend to simply over and over repeat and re-iterate Michael Lebowitz’ view, see: Fuchs 2015): unproductive, no labour at all, less productive, a consumption of value generated by paid employees in sectors and companies that advertise on social media, or an expression of a system where what appears as profits are rents derived from the profits of advertisers. These opinions are not new but just a reformulation of Lebowitz’s criticism of Smythe.

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The crucial category used in such discussions is Marx’s notion of productive labour. There are passages, where Marx argues that only wageworkers who produce surplusvalue and capital that is accumulated is productive labour. For example:

Every productive worker is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is purchased to be consumed as a usevalue, as a service and not to replace the value of variable capital with its own vitality and be incorporated into the capitalist process of production - whenever that happens, labour is not productive and the wage-labourer is no productive worker. (Marx 1867, 1041)

Or:

Productive labour, therefore, can be so described when it is directly exchanged for money as capital, or, which is only a more concise way of putting it, is exchanged directly for capital, that is, for money which in its essence is capital, which is destined to function as capital, or confronts labour-power as capital. The phrase: labour which is directly exchanged for capital, implies that labour is exchanged for money as capital and actually transforms it into capital. (Marx 1862/1863, 396–397)

Marx’s thoughts on this topic are, however, inconsistent, so there cannot be one “true” interpretation of what productive and unproductive labour is. The interpretation of productive labour that I follow is one that stresses the notion of the Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker).

Marx stresses that work is not an individual process. The more co-operative and networked work becomes, which is the consequence of the technification of capitalism and the rise of knowledge in production, the more relevant becomes Marx’s third understanding of productive labour: productive labour as labour of the collective worker. The notion of the collective worker becomes ever more important with the development of fixed constant capital and productivity (Marx 1857/1858, 707). Marx has set out this concept both in Capital, Volume 1, and the Results of the Immediate Production Process. He argues that all work is productive that is “an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions” (Marx 1867, 644) and that with the development of co-operation an “ever increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of productive labour” so that “the aggregate worker” creates “an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods” (Marx 1867, 1040).

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Figure 6.1 visualises the economic relationships of Facebook (and other corporate social media platforms using targeted advertising) and its advertising clients.

A commodity has a use-value, value, and symbolic value. A company’s production workers create the basic use-value that satisfies human needs. These activities take an average combined number of labour hours. Labour is the substance of value, labour time its measure and magnitude. In order to sell its commodity, a company tries to give positive meanings to it and to communicate these meanings to the public’s members whom it tries to convince that this goods or service can enhance their lives and that they should therefore buy this commodity and not a comparable one offered by another company. Most commodities have, independent from their physical or informational nature, a cultural component that is created by cultural labour. The cultural dimension of a commodity is necessary ideological: it appeals to consumers’ imagination and wants to make them connote positive images and feelings with the idea of consuming this commodity.

The creation of a commodity’s symbolic ideology is a value-creating activity but not a use-value-generating activity. The use-value of a commodity can be physical and/or informational: we have cars for satisfying the need of driving from A to B, we listen to music for satisfying our aesthetic desires, and so forth. The exchange-value of a commodity is the relationship in which it is exchanged with another commodity, normally money: x commodity A = y commodity B (money). Symbolic value establishes a link and mediates between use-value and exchange-value, it helps accomplishing the exchange in which consumers obtain use-values and capitalists money. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (1986) speaks in this context of the commodity’s use-value promise: The sales and advertising ideology associated with a commodity promises specific positive life enhancement functions that the commodity brings with it and thereby conceals the commodity’s exchange-value behind promises. The symbolic commodity ideology promises a use-value beyond actual consumption, an imaginary surplus and surplus enjoyment. These promises are detached from the actual use-value and are therefore a fictitious form of value.

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Saying that the cultural labour of branding, public relations, and creating commodity advertisements creates symbolic value is not detached from the notion of economic value. Rather value here precisely means that for the creation of this symbolic dimension of the commodity labour time is invested. It is therefore no wonder that almost all larger companies have their own public relations departments or outsource public relations and advertising to other companies. Paying the circulation workers employed in such departments or companies needs to be planned and calculated into the price of commodities.

Consumers give specific meanings to the commodities they buy and consume. They thereby construct consumption meaning and in doing so can react to use-value promises in different ways:

1. They can share these ideologies and buy the commodities because they hope the promise is an actual use-value;

1. they can deconstruct the use-value promise as ideology and refuse buying the commodity;

1. they can deconstruct the use-value but nonetheless buy the commodity for other reasons.

For communicating commodity ideologies to consumers, companies need to buy advertisement spaces in commercial media. Commercial media link commodity ideologies to consumers, they “transport” ideologies to consumers, although it is unclear and not determined how the latter react and if the confrontation with commodity ideologies results in actual purchases. Facebook and other corporate social media are advertising companies that sell advertising space and user data as commodities to clients who want to present commodity ideologies to users and hope that the latter buy their commodities. Facebook has paid employees that organise the development, maintenance, and provision of its software platform. On December 31, 2012, Facebook had 4619 paid employees.⁴ But Facebook cannot sell advertising space without its users. Without them, it would be a dead platform that would immediately cease to exist. Between March and June 2013, more than a billion people, roughly 43% of all internet users, had accessed Facebook.^5,6

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