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The audience commodity is not a material thing, but an abstraction that gains a reality in the commercial organization of media systems. It is an abstraction produced by the logic of acceleration inherent in capitalism's sphere of circulation. Following economic historian Karl Polanyi (2001), the a…

[...] the personal data economy, as a site for capital investment and accumulation, amplifies myths about the emancipatory and/or empowering nature of digital prosumption (e.g., Google, Facebook, and Apple).

[...] Borrowing John Durham Peters' (2009) formulation, we might describe the success of new media companies like Twitter, Google and Amazon.com in terms of the rise of "logistical media." In historical terms, such media include those seemingly content-free media that organize time and space [...] …

The fetishization of content underwrites the fantasy that it is somehow detachable from the infrastructure that supports it. The thrust of Smythe's argument is to dismantle this fantasy, a task which remains a pressing one on the digital era in which, we are told, everyone (or at least a lot more p…

It is precisely because these companies are not content providers themselves that they can be portrayed as post-ideological. Smythe's critique remains germane because it enjoins us to consider the production regimes that structure the relations between the affordances of the platform or application…