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[...] This is not to blame the university, which had to make the best use of its scarce resources, but rather to point out the structural pressures that make such a decision seem optimal. It is also to anticipate the hazards of the failure to consider the relationship between the "free lunch" offer…

The question then posed for a critical analysis of the political economy of new media is somewhat different than that outlined by Smythe. If the new "free lunch" is information organization, search, and retrieval (in addition to content), how are these influenced by the commercial imperatives that …

[...] The work that audiences do, according to Smythe, "is to learn to buy particular 'brands' of consumer demands, and to spend their income accordingly. In short, they work to create demand for advertised goods" (1977, 6). The fact that not all viewers see the ads or respond in anticipated fashio…

Recent work updating the notion of the audience commodity and of audience labor for the digital era has focused on the changing character of what is sold to advertisers: no longer time or space, but user activity or key words or searches [...] These analyses are useful insofar as they highlight the…

Recall the "cute" story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin being handed a $100,000 USD check by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist (who is a German native emigrated to the U.S. after Stanford). This story would not happen just anywhere in the world. This story represents an outcome of the academic-mili…