Activity

[...] The work which audience members perform for the advertisers to whom they have been sold is to learn to buy particular "brands" of consumer goods, and to spend their income accordingly. In short, they work to create the demand for advertised goods which is the purpose of the monopoly capitalis…

Dan Schiller (1999a) historicises the corporate seizure of computing networks that form the infrastructure for a global market sytem. "At stake in this unprecedented transition to neoliberal or market-driven telecommunications," Schiller argues, "are nothing less than the production base and contro…

[...] The work of the audience for advertisers and media organizations is more concrete now than in Smythe's day (Napoli 2010), and the production of commodity audiences further precedes the free lunch in the sphere of digital publishing, as automated advertising exchanges and programmatic buying p…

[...] audiences, commodified as ratings, do not exist objectively in media use, but rather emerge from a tension between ways of defining valuable audiences and the formal procedures for manufacturing them as standardized commodities [...] the commodity audience is not naturally occurring, like a…

Having the manufacture of commodity audiences as an organizing principle for a system of communication presupposes and reproduces institutional arrangements that empower industrial capitalists, advertisers, market researchers, and audience surveillance firms and impose constraints over the range of…