4 The Audience Commodity

“At its core, political economy focuses broadly on social theory by connecting the systems of the economy—the organization of corporations, the structures of a marketplace, and the behavior of market players—with notions of resource availability and power.” Beyond media, it “is critical in nature, centering on problems of inequality and social justice by exploring the economic, social, and institutional forces that support the status quo.” When it comes to media, “political economic analyses place particular emphasis on the social and economic transformations that have occurred as a result of industrialization and rise of corporations within a capitalist system.” This system creates a divide between ‘spaces of production’ such as the workplace in which “workers expect to be closely monitored by their employers—and spaces of leisure—where the home and domestic sphere are separated from the public realm and individuals are granted autonomy and privacy.” And more than just producing products for people to consume in their homes (like TV series, music, podcasts, sporting events, etc.), “media corporations must find some way to break into this private realm to measure and catalog consumers’ behaviors for commercial purposes.” When it comes to audiences in particular, taking the example of a TV production, “at the same time that the television program is being “sold” to the audience, the attention of the audience is being ‘sold’ to advertisers.”^[5] Smythe suggested that a lack of attention to the 

issue of audience labour was the “blindspot” of communication research. So much attention being spent on media content (that we can see) and debate over representations and media effects allowed the real importance (and real danger) of media to go unnoticed. We ought to be aware, instead, of how audiences function within the economic system of capitalism, generating value for advertisers.

If we are to take this metaphor of the blindspot literally, we ought to ask what is being missed when we focus on audiences consuming content rather than audiences existing as content. What is the danger that lies beyond our (myopic)  view? If we shift our focus, instead of producing content for audiences, we see producers in capitalist media systems producing audiences that can then be sold to advertisers (or really, exchanged for advertiser dollars). Media industries are akin to a “cat burglar” distracting a guard dog with a juicy steak. The content is the steak.^[6] Distracted by the “juicy piece of meat” (and often engorged on it), we lose sight of what’s really happening, too happy with what we’ve already received. But what’s really happening is something of value is being taken from you, not given to you. Your time is valuable. But we so often give it away for free (as the following image depicts):

In capitalism, making meanings is secondary to making products (because we make profit off of products, not meanings). Most of us aren’t used to thinking about all of our time being profitable, much less valuable, but some, like lawyers, are. Their value, to the law firm, is in the billable hours they can bring in. All time spent on an account is billable.

As Smythe argued, under capitalism, when you’re not sleeping, you’re working.^[7] All time in capitalism = worktime (not just when you’re working). We are labouring all the time, except most of the time, we aren’t paid for our labour. And since when we’re working at our jobs, we get paid for our labour, we tend to devalue all the labour we put into our other activities. Hence, even though we spend an awful lot of time with our media, we think of it as a leisure activity rather than a productive one. Yet when we are consuming, media platforms extract value from us and our attention (really the time we spend on their platforms) in the form of user data that is then sold to advertisers who, knowing more about us, can better target us and our wallet knowing about our demographics, habits and propensities. What the audience does or what it thinks is secondary to the media business that is the production and sale of the commodity audience. Here, all content of commercial media, in essence, is offered as a “free lunch” to get you – the audience to come and pay attention. Then, the audience can be measured and categorized and you as an audience member can be then offered for sale to advertisers.

Far from a cultural studies view of audiences that located their productivity in the meanings they generate from media texts, a critical political economy view sees audiences’ productivity in terms of their economic activity. While both cultural studies and political economic studies of audiences rejected earlier traditions of viewing the audience in technical, administrative terms, they tend to approach the need for research into public interests, communication rights, and consumption practices in different ways. “Cultural studies scholars challenge the presumption that audiences are easily manipulated by mass media”^[8] while a political economic view tends to take a more critical and industrial view of cultural participation, public engagement, and the dispersal of power. Whereas a cultural studies point of view tends to discuss audiences as citizens, fans, and players, a political economic point of view tends to debate audiences’ role as victims, consumers, and commodities.

Of course, “claims about ‘the audience’ shift as political economy and cultural climates shift, enabling different constituencies to argue their case and so advance their interests.”^[9] Produsers are clearly a different kind of commodity audience than the person sitting at home merely enjoying the content of mass media as a viewer-bystander. Smythe’s writing related to a pre-internet era. It was arguably a more radical idea, then, to consider the act of watching TV (and therefore the consumption of commercials) as a “form of productive labor that generates economic value (and surplus value) for broadcasters, for which the audience receives “payment” in the form of the programming itself.” Today, with the platforms that people depend upon for their daily lives (much less entertainment) themselves depending on advertising^[10], we can almost take for granted that, as audiences, we are being bought and sold as commodities. The more productive we are as consumers and users of online content, the more valuable our data is to someone else. We are our eyeballs. Commercial media, whether it be traditional mass broadcasting or niche streaming of digital content, depends upon the sale of audiences’ attention to advertisers.^[11]

Participatory culture, in fact, while it has a long history of seeming laudatory when it comes to audience practices, has always had a connection to economics with Jenkins’ early conceptualization of affective economics: “According to the logic of affective economics, the ideal consumer is active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked.”^[12] For instance, it has been argued that YouTube operates within an “affective economy” in which success is determined by participation, interaction, and the sharing of seemingly ‘authentic’ emotion.^[13] When he first used the term, Jenkins classified affective economics as “a new discourse in marketing and brand research that emphasizes the emotional commitments consumers make in brands as a central motivation for their purchasing decisions.”^[14] This leveraged the blending of producer and consumer power via interactive media, “allowing advertisers to tap the power of collective intelligence [of consumers and] … allowing consumers to form their own kind of collective bargaining structure that they can use to challenge corporate decisions.”^[15]. Clearly, this concept invokes producers with the power to exploit audiences’ emotional connections with their products, even as it suggests that audiences’ have the relative power to either bestow or withdraw their emotional capital in the media marketplace. Fans who bestow their capital (both emotional and monetary) “feel the love,” and the most participatory of fans engage in “labours of love” for their fellow fans, creating new texts and new meanings within their communities.

This discussion of love, either to be manipulated by corporations’ gain or operationalized for consumers’ benefit, reminds me of the idea of a ‘lovemark,’ used “to illustrate how brands often try to make their consumers fall in love with them.”^[16] Lovemarks are seen quite often in “brandom,”^[17] a term used to describe controlled and uber-commodified brand-focused fandom, “the pseudo-fan culture engineered by brand managers eager to cultivate consumer labour and loyalty while preempting the possibility of resistance that participatory fan culture promises.”^[18] Lovemarks, or positive affective impressions left upon the consumer, transcend mere products or brands. Products are base commodities, purchased out of necessity or habit, but with a low investment of love and respect. Brands tend to be respected more (i.e., a trusted brand), but still not loved by consumers whereas the lovemark is the brand with which one has a high emotional connection. “In short, affective economics mobilises a concept of emotional engagement between consumers and branded goods in order to position itself as beyond mere ‘commodification.’”^[19] The “lovemark” is like a trademark, but suffused with affective intensity and, thus, it is no longer the exclusive purview of owner-producers. Instead, “lovemarks are not owned by the manufacturers, the producers, the businesses. They are owned by the people who love them.”^[20] In participatory culture, affective economics is more than just a marketing strategy designed to cultivate and embrace fans; more than just ‘exploiting’ fan engagement, it acknowledges the (market) power of audiences’ emotional involvement with the stuff that they love. The lovemark is not possible without the affective labour of audiences:

Just as the commodification of the audience was a blindspot of communication research, but no longer operates in the background of more manifest concerns about the media, a focus on affect suggests that “the function of media as a socialising/ideological mechanism has become secondary to its continuous modulation, variation and intensification of affective response in real time.”^[22] It is important to note that, just like fandom is never individual, “affect is not the property or creation of the labourer, but is found in the capacity of the labourer to channel and modulate social connections, ideas and feelings.”^[23] Fans are the most organic of affective labourers, producing affects “such as feelings of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion”^[24] within themselves and within fan communities (even as marketing professionals seek to exploit those feelings also). Affective labor, then, can be considered as “any commodified activity that is not, in a conventional sense, considered ‘work.’”^[25] In participatory culture, all produsers (fans or otherwise) are labouring.

It would be erroneous, however, not to acknowledge that even with participatory audiences expressing more power, “a shifting logic of media engagement is accompanied by revamped strategies for managing and manipulating audiences.”^[26] Clearly, not all media engagement is of a utopian nature. To address this, one way of speaking critically of participatory culture is by invoking the concept of communicative capitalism. This is “the common-place idea that the market, today, is the site of democratic aspirations.”^[27] Far from seeing twenty-first-century media prosumers expressing their agency and deploying convergence culture to participate in ‘knowledge communities’, communicative capitalism “tricks citizens into believing that the volume of information surfacing in new communication venues generates real institutional transformation, political resistance, and democratic outcomes.”^[28] Digital interconnection does not mean digital empowerment. According to this view, “the trumpeting of convergence culture … underestimates the political-economic vulnerability of the populace. They can use digital networks to amplify their voices, but they are rarely heard by political or corporate elites who still dictate the distribution of societal resources, including capital and the information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure.”^[29]

“Under communicative capitalism … everyone not only has a right to express an opinion, but each is positively enjoined to—vote, text, comment, share, blog. Constant communication is an obligation” (p. 92) and all the communication is tracked, quantified, and ultimately sold as “big data.” Our contemporary communication takes place not only via affective networks, but capitalistic ones. And while the fun and the promise of participatory culture motivates audiences to participate more, we can also understand this as a disciplinary practice:

Indeed, communicative platforms feed on the affective behaviour of audiences, both positive (liking and sharing posts) and negative affect such as, “flame wars, spam, and strategic friending (friending not as a sign of affiliation but in order to track one’s enemy)”^[31] The link between a critical political economic view of media audiences and the circulation of affect (goading those same audiences to immerse themselves ever more with participatory culture) is real: 

Communicative capitalism relies on networks that generate and amplify enjoyment. People enjoy the circulation of affect that presents itself as contemporary communication. The system is intense; it draws us in. Even when we think we aren’t enjoying, we enjoy (all this email, I am so busy, so important; my time is too precious to waste on another Facebook game … but my score is going up; it’s such a burden having so many, many friends—oh, and I should tweet it so they know how busy I am).^[32]

The appeal of communicative capitalism seems relatively obvious. In addition to an inherent democratizing aura, “capital not only “extracts” affect, but magnifies its impacts and unleashes its productive capacities through processes of circulation.”^[33] So even though many feel a sense of community in participatory culture, we must recognize that “both community interaction and affect exist on a continuum (changing between different people and even within a person over time).”^[34] And within capitalism, one has to wonder how legitimate the feelings of community are in a scene that so often privileges neoliberal tactics of self-improvement and market-based empowerment with the goal of the monetization of everything. One could go so far as to suggest that rather than producing community, “affective networks produce feelings of community, or what we might call ‘community without community.'”^[35] Perhaps even community is branded in the era of the commodity audience, a promise (much like a free lunch) that keeps people coming back for more.