Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

2.3.4. Online Targeted Advertising as Capital Accumulation Model: The Engaging/Connection/Sharing-Ideology

If we look at today’s media landscape, we can see that advertising plays a very important role in it (McKinsey, 2014). Lukács’ analysis that in the twentieth century advertising has become one of the dominant forms of ideology in capitalism is even more poignant in the twenty-first century. On the Internet, targeted advertising is the dominant business model (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Its introduction in the first decade of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by new ideologies that try to justify and legitimate capitalist Internet platforms.

Internet companies are a first kind of actor that spread Internet ideologies. Here are some examples:

• Facebook says it provides ‘the power to share and to make the world more open and connected’.17

• YouTube conceives the essence of freedom as the possibility ‘to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small’.18

• For Twitter, the freedom of social media is ‘to connect with people, express yourself and discover what’s happening’ and ‘give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly’.19

• Instagram says it is a ‘fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends and family’.20

• tumblr says it enables you to ‘share the things you love’.21

• Sina Weibo’s self-understanding22 is that it is a platform designed to ‘allow users to connect and share information anywhere, anytime and with anyone on our platform’ and provides ‘an array of online media and social networking services to our users to create a rich canvas for businesses and brand advertisers to connect and engage with their targeted audiences’.

Not only do social media platforms’ marketing and PR departments advance the idea that social media is great because it allows engaging, connecting and sharing, but also some journalists and many consultants communicate such ideologies. They have business opportunities and capital accumulation in mind whenever they think of the Internet and are a second type of actor producing social media ideologies. Kevin Kelly (2009) for example, argued in Wired magazine that social media enables sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. He celebrates ‘the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency’. Marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk (2011) argues that social media enables the emergence of a thank you economy, in which entrepreneurs create ‘a culture of caring’ (233), empower ‘people to be forthright, creative, and generous’, and allow ‘customers to help you shape your brand or business’ (233). Also celebratory cultural studies scholars have used similar language for the analysis of social media. Such scholars are a third type of ideologues producing social media ideologies. Henry Jenkins writes for example that ‘the Web has become a site of consumer participation’ (Jenkins, 2008, 137).

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2.3.5. The Commodity Fetishism and Social Media Corporations

Lukács has based his theory of ideology as reification on Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in which an object or something concrete (such as the commodity or money) masks the subject, the abstract, and social relations. The engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology is a special form of a reifying ideology, a form of inverted commodity fetishism: the users do not immediately experience the commodity as it is not immediately visible and experienced when logging into platforms without payment. This is diferent from buying a cinema, concert or circus ticket, where money directly mediates cultural experience. The commodification of data happens behind the users’ back. The social use-value of social media is immediately experienced and masks the commodity form. On targeted-advertising funded ‘free’ use platforms, the subject and the social mask the object and the commodity form. Inverted commodity fetishism conditions the emergence of the engaging/connecting/ sharing ideology that in a populist manner appeals to users’ direct social experience and fetishises the social in order to mask the reality of commodification. The engaging/connecting/sharing ideology foregrounds and constantly stresses categories of non-instrumental, social, communicative reason such as caring, sharing, emotions, empowering, creativity, connecting, or making. This social dimension of online media in the contemporary capitalist Internet, however, serves instrumental reason, namely the accumulation of capital. The universe of use-value and sociality has in the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology become subsumed under the logic of instrumental and technological reason that fosters capital accumulation in the interest of a particularistic capitalist class interest.

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2.3.6. Users’ Consciousness

How do users react to the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology? There are diferent possible responses of audiences, users, consumers, and citizens to ideologies. They can accept, resist, or partly accept and resist ideologies. This was the point of Stuart Hall’s (1973) encoding/decoding model. The problem of this model is that in a relativist manner, it conveys the impression that all three options have the same likelihood. The likelihood of specific audience responses is complex, having to do with factors such as time, education, skills, personal experiences, political worldviews, etc. In a capitalist society, audience responses therefore tend to be asymmetrically distributed.

Empirical studies indicate that users do not simply reproduce the engaging/ connecting/sharing ideology, but rather seem to be at the same time supportive of corporate social media’s social use-value dimension and sceptical of its exchange-value dimension and the commodification of personal data (Allmer, Fuchs, Kreilinger and Sevignani 2014). They tend to have little knowledge about how the political economy of social media works and providing them with such information seems to empower them in being able to feel competent to make political and moral assessments of social media (ibid.). Internet users’ opinions towards social media are quite ambivalent and not automatically ideological.

One important implication of Lukács’ Ontology is that ideologies are not free-floating, independent structures, but are produced under specific working conditions by an ideological labour force. Concrete human beings and organisations create and reproduce the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology.

2.3.7. Social Media is Bullshit

B.J. Mendelson argues in his book Social Media is Bullshit that myths about the Internet that are based on what Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) calls ‘bullshit spread through an ‘asshole-based economy’ (Mendelson 2012, 54) that cyber hipster, tech media and marketers, analysts, corporations, mainstream media and users advance (74). Mendelson draws on his own long experience as an Internet consultant and concludes that you can only attain a lot of attention and visibility on social media if you are a powerful organisation investing a lot of money. He argues that advertising consultants tend to create the impression that social media is a great business opportunity for everyone in order to foster their own profit interests by selling the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology. Social media’s ideological workers include tech companies’ strategists, marketing gurus and consultants, neoliberal journalists, and users who reproduce this ideology as hegemony.

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2.4. Conclusion

For Lukács, work understood as the active, conscious teleological positing of changes so that use-values are created in order to achieve goals is the foundation of humans and society. He opposes the dualist separation of the realms of work and ideas. Teleological positing – the conscious and active production of changes by realising subjective intentions in the objective world – is the common feature of the economy and culture. Teleological positing means that ideas are a guiding and goal-setting dimension of work so that culture is immanent in work itself. Lukács argues that mental work creates and communicates ideas as social use-values and is therefore a specific form of teleological positing.

Lukács’ dialectical ontology of society can inspire us to think about the relationship between culture and economy. It provides an ontological foundation for conceiving cultural work as consisting of physical and informational cultural work that form a dialectic. Digital work is then a specific form of cultural work that creates digital media technologies, digital content, or digital data. It consists of physical and informational digital works that are interconnected and organised in the form of various social relations. In contemporary global capitalism, digital work takes on the form of an international division of digital labour.

For Lukács, a specific form of cultural work – ideological labour – creates ideologies. In ideology, an object masks a subject. Ideologies are produced and communicated by concrete humans and groups in specific labour processes and under particular working conditions. With the rise of advertisingfinanced social media platforms, a new form of ideology has emerged that justifies the capitalist Internet by foregrounding the social-use value these media enable in order to mask the commodification of data and the logic of capital accumulation.

For Lukács, class struggle is an essential implication of Marxist theory that aims at overcoming alienation and reification. He argues with Marx that alienation can only be abolished through social struggles, which includes ideological struggles (1986b, 653). Alienation can ‘only be sublated by a fundamental economic-political-social revolution of the whole system as general and objective mass phenomenon’23 (698). The bottom line of the political economy of the contemporary landscape of cultural and digital labour is that we need political struggles for an alternative Internet and alternative media that are redesigned within an alternative political and societal framework.

Lukács’ Ontology allows us to understand the broader totality of capitalism and how its moments are related. Teleological positing is an ontological concept that shows how the economy and culture are connected. All culture is posited with specific purposes, which shows that it always has an economic dimension, although it is not only economic, but has as meaning efects all over society. Lukács also integrates the notion of reification that he introduced in History and Class Consciousness into the Ontology. Teleological positing in class-based society reverses means and ends so that exploitation, domination and ideological control emerge as attempts to instrumentalise humans. The tasks that remain are social struggles that aim to overcome class and domination.

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Notes

1 Translation from German: ‘geistige[n] Arbeit’.

2 Translation from German: ‘ontologischen Gleichartigkeit von Basis und Überbau, daß sie nämlich beide auf teleologischen Setzungen und deren kausalen Folgen beruhen’.

3 Translation from German: ‘Spielraum gewünschter (oder unerwünschter) Reaktionen auf gesellschaftliche Tatbestände, Situationen, Aufgaben etc.

4 Translation from German: ‘daß auf je einer konkreten Produktionsstufe der Wert des Produkts der Arbeit sich scharf danach scheidet, ob es unmittelbar brauchbar oder unbrauchbar ist, während im künstlerischen Schaffen das Feld, die Möglichkeit von Wert oder Unwert außerordentlich weit gestreckt, im voraus kaum bestimmbar ist’.

5 Translation from German: ‘geistige Arbeit ist, auch als Moment der gesellschaftlichen Arbeitsteilung, keineswegs mit Ideologie identisch. Ihre Verknüpftheit ist aber eben deshalb sehr innig: das Ergebnis jeder geistigen Arbeit kann in bestimmten sozialen Situationen in Ideologie umschlagen, ja die gesellschaftliche Arbeitsteilung bringt ununterbrochen Situationen hervor, in denen dieses Umschlagen notwendig und permanent wird’.

6 Translation from German: ‘Ihre bloße Existenz, wenn auch auf noch so niedrigem Niveau, läßt eine weitere entscheidende Bestimmung des gesellschaftlichen Seins aus der Arbeit herauswachsen, die präzise Kommunikation zwischen den zu einer Arbeit vereinten Menschen: die Sprache’.

7 Translation from German: ‘die Intention haben, andere Menschen dazu zu veranlassen, eine vom Subjekt der Aussage gewünschte teleologische Setzung ihrerseits zu vollziehen’.

8 Translation from German: ‘ein antwortendes Wesen’.

9 Translation from German: ‘wechselseitigen dialektischen Polarität des ideellen und des Reellen’.

10 Translation from German: ‘realen Möglichkeiten im Ansichseienden’.

11 Translation from German: ‘Je allgemeiner sich der Tauschwert verbreitet, desto deutlicher und bestimmter tritt als die ökonomische Fundierung seiner jeweiligen Größe die gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitszeit in den Mittelpunkt’.

12 Translation from German: ‘theoretisches oder praktisches Vehikel zum Ausfechten gesellschaftlicher Konflikte’.

13 Translation from German: ‘Die Hauptfrage ist demnach, daß das Entstehen solcher Ideologien Gesellschaftsstrukturen voraussetzt, in denen verschiedene Gruppen und entgegengesetzte Interessen wirken und bestrebt sind, diese der Gesamtgesellschaft als deren allgemeines Interesse aufzudrängen. Kurz gefaßt: Entstehen und Verbreitung von Ideologien erscheint als das allgemeine Kennzeichen der Klassengesellschaften

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14 Translation from German: ‘allseitige Medium der Unmittelbarkeit’

15 Translation from German: ‘Im Alltagsleben des Arbeiters zeigt sich die Macht des Habens nicht mehr als ein einfaches Entbehren, als Einfluß des Nichthabens der wichtigsten Mittel zur alltäglich notwendigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung auf das normale Leben, sondern im Gegenteil als die des direkten Habens, als der Wettlauf mit anderen Menschen und Gruppen im Versuch, die persönliche Geltung durch Quantität und Qualität des Habens zu erhöhen’.

16 Translation from German: ‘Die Wirkung auf den Menschen richtet sich also primär darauf, daß er des Glaubens sei, durch Erwerb der betrefenden Haarwässer, Krawatten, Zigaretten, Autos etc., durch Besuch bestimmter Badeorte etc. als echte, von seiner Umgebung anerkannte Persönlichkeit zu gelten. Nicht das Anpreisen der Waren ist also hier das Primäre, wie ursprünglich im annoncierenden Anpreisen, sondern das persönliche Prestige, das durch ihre Erwerbung für den Käufer erreicht werden soll. Dem liegt sozial gesehen eine Doppeltendenz zugrunde: einerseits die Absicht, die Menschen in bestimmter Richtung zu beeinflussen, zu formen (wieder sei an Hitlers These über den femininen Charakter der Massen erinnert), andererseits die, die Partikularität der Menschen hochzuzüchten, in ihnen die Einbildung zu verstärken, gerade diese auf dem Warenmarkt erworbene oberflächliche Differenzierung der Partikularität sei der alleinige Weg des Menschen, Persönlichkeit zu werden, d. h. persönliches Ansehen zu erringen’.

17 https://www.facebook.com/FacebookUK/info, accessed on April 10, 2014.

18 http://www.youtube.com/yt/about/en-GB/, accessed on 10 April 2014.

19 https://about.twitter.com/company, accessed on 10 April 2014.

20 http://instagram.com, accessed on 10 April 2014.

21 https://www.tumblr.com/, accessed on 10 April 2014.

22 http://corp.sina.com.cn/eng/sina\_intr\_eng.htm, accessed on 9 April 2014.

23 Translation from German: ‘kann diese Entfremdung nur durch eine fundamentale ökonomisch-politisch-soziale Umwälzung des ganzen Systems als allgemeine und objektive Massenerscheinung aufgehoben werden’.

References

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Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge

3.1. Introduction

This chapter asks: what insights of Adorno’s philosophy can be used for grounding a critical theory of knowledge?

It is a common prejudice that Adorno was a pessimist, saw humans as passively manipulated, considered instrumental society to be without alternative, and thought political change was hopeless. What many want to make us believe is that Adorno’s theory of knowledge is a theory of ideological manipulation that creates and reproduces false consciousness. Such prejudice and its repetition can keep theoretically interested readers from exploring the wealth and richness of Adorno’s works beyond the Culture Industry chapter in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 94–136).

This chapter analyses Adorno’s contribution to a critical theory of knowledge by revisiting the assumption that he is a media pessimist (section 2), reconsidering the debate about aesthetics between Lukács and Adorno and generalising the conclusions from art to the theory of knowledge (section 3), and by discussing and further developing Adorno’s dialectical concept of knowledge (section 4).

The first task is to show that Adorno was not simply a media pessimist, but that his work is much richer. For doing so, section 2 draws especially on Adorno’s articles Education after Auschwitz (Adorno 1967), Chaplin Times Two (Adorno 1996), and Prologue to Television (Adorno 1998, 49–57). For the second task, the discussion of Adorno’s critique of Lukács’ aesthetics and the generalisation of this criticism to the theory of knowledge, section 3 provides a reading of Adorno’s (1997) Aesthetic Theory and his essay Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in our Time (Adorno 1958). It also makes cross-references to

CHAPTER 3

How to cite this book chapter: Fuchs, Christian. 2016. Critical Theory of Communication. Pp. 75–109. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16997/book1.c. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0