The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media

Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Chapter One: After Broadcast, What? An Introduction to the Legacy of Dallas Smythe (Lee McGuigan)
	On the Audience Commodity: Media, Consciousness, and Alienation
	The Digital Labor Debate
	Marxist and Institutional Approaches
	Data and Digital Surveillance: A Factory in the Marketplace
	Monopoly and Dependency Beyond the Capitalist Core
	Advertising, Branding and Commodification of Human Experience
	Critique of “Technology”
	Critical Research on Communication Policy and Cultural Policy
	Conclusion as Introduction
	Notes
Part One: Foundational Texts
	Chapter Two: Audiences, Commodities and Market Relations: An Introduction to the Audience Commodity Thesis (William H. Melody)
		Washington Connections
		Audiences: Commodification During Consumption
		Audience Commodities in Information Societies
	Chapter Three: Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism (Dallas W. Smythe)
		Notes
	Chapter Four: Introduction to The Blindspot Revisited (Graham Murdock)
	Chapter Five: Blindspots About Western Marxism: A Reply to Dallas Smythe (Graham Murdock)
		Notes
	Chapter Six: Introduction to “Ratings and the Institutional Approach” (Eileen R. Meehan)
		Notes
	Chaper Seven: Ratings and the Institutional Approach: A Third Answer to the Commodity Question (Eileen R. Meehan)
		Cultural Production and the Commodity Message
		Blindspot in Western Marxism?
		Commodity Ratings
		Towards an Integration of Commodities
		Notes
	Chapter Eight: Introduction to “Watching as Working” (Sut Jhally)
		Notes
	Chapter Nine: Watching as Working: The Valorization of Audience Consciousness (Sut Jhally)
		Metaphor and Reality: The Production of Watching Extra
		From Use-Value to Exchange-Value: Breaking with Message-Based Analysis
		What Is the Commodity-Form Sold by the Commercial Media?
		Who Produces This Media Commodity and under What Conditions?
		What Is the Source of Value and Surplus Value in This Process?
		From Absolute to Relative Surplus Value
		Watching and Labor
		From the Formal to the Real Subsumption of Watching
		Alienated Watching
		Narrowcasting and Blurring
		Conclusion
		Notes
Part Two: Social Media, Audience Manufacture, and the Work of Self-Marketing
	Chapter Ten: The Institutionally Effective Audience in Flux: Social Media and the Reassessment of the Audience Commodity (Philip M. Napoli)
		Institutionally Effective Audiences and their Evolution
		Methodology
		Social TV Analytics in Context: The Evolving Television Audience Marketplace
		Rehabilitating the Status Quo: Efforts to Preserve the Measurement and Valuation of Exposure
		New Media, New Sources of Audience Value: The Rise of Social Media Analytics
		Beyond Exposure: Exploring Social Media-Based Constructions of the Television Audience
		Old and New Methods of Audience Representation (and Misrepresentation)
		The Many Social TV Audiences: Differentiation Across Competing Audience Representations
		Social TV Analytics Usage and Resistance
			Resistance
			Embracing
		Conclusion
		Notes
	Chapter Eleven: Extending the Audience: Social Media Marketing, Technologies and the Construction of Markets (Jason Pridmore)
		Social Media and Surveillance
		Commoditizing the Audience, Engaging the Consumer
		Watching and Listening to Users
		Conversations with Users
		Technologies of Collaboration—Audience Building and Clicks of Visibility
		API Enrollment
		Materialities and Audience Labor
		Acknowledgments
	Chapter Twelve: Capital’s New Commons: Consumer Communities, Marketing and the Work of the Audience in Communicative Capitalism (Detlev Zwick; Alan Bradshaw)
		The Real of Virtual Consumer Community
		The Ideological Function of Consumer Online Communities
			1) The function to dispel the belief that marketers actually do the marketing
			2) The function to establish the belief that marketers no longer control consumers
			3) The function to dispel with the belief that marketers create value
		Conclusion
		Note
Part Three: The Political Economy of Media Technologies: The Internet, Mobile Devices, and Institutions in Informational Capitalism
	Chapter Thirteen: From Googol to Guge: The Political Economy of a Search Engine (Micky Lee)
		Google’s AdWords
		Critical Studies of Google Since 2009
		Political Economy as a Dialectical, Historical Materialist Approach
		Are the New Media Really that “New”?
		After Guge, What?
		Notes
	Chapter Fourteen: “Free Lunch” in the Digital Era: Organization Is the New Content (Mark Andrejevic)
	Chapter Fifteen: Technologies of Immediacy / Economies of Attention: Notes on the Commercial Development of Mobile Media and Wireless Connectivity (Vincent Manzerolle)
		The Era of Ubiquitous Connectivity
		Materiality, Mediation, and the Infrastructure of Being
		Mobile Media, Personal Data, and Digital Prosumption
		Audience, Abstraction, Capacity
		Technologies of Immediacy / Economies of Attention
		Personalization, Democracy, and “Present-Mindedness”
		Notes
Part Four: Toward a Materialist Theory of Commercial Media in a Digital Age
	Chapter Sixteen: Commodities and Commons (Graham Murdock)
	Chapter Seventeen: Value, the Audience Commodity, and Digital Prosumption: A Plea for Precision (Edward Comor)
		The Audience Commodity and the Exploitation of Labor
		The Influence of Autonomist Marxism
		Marx on Value
		Toward a Precise Analysis of Digital Prosumption
		Conclusions
		Notes
	Chapter Eighteen: Dallas Smythe Reloaded: Critical Media and Communication Studies Today (Christian Fuchs)
		Introduction
		The Disappearance and Return of Marx
		Dallas Smythe and Marxist Media and Communication Studies Today
		Critical Political Economy and Critical Theory of Media and Communication
		Conclusion
		Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index