[...] Institutions are habituated ways of thinking and acting, structured within formal organizations or informal culture patterns (Berger and Luckann 1966). As mediators of social interaction, institutions are biased or coercive toward certain processes and outcomes. They tune consciousness--what we attend to or ignore--toward certain emphases, and they afford certain interests access to levers of power [...]

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 values and ideas conveyed, lionized, or dismissed [...]

[...] 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 tree; it is a construction, like a toothpick, shaped by business exigencies and an unequal political economy. Indeed, the very concept of the audience "was hatched largely out of the marketing departments of companies with a stake in selling products through the media (Mosco and Kaye 2000, 32). [...]

[...] 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 practices divert subsidies from journalism and function almost exclusively to satisfy advertiser demand for particular demographics [...]

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 control structure of an emerging digital capitalism" [...]

[...] 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 capitalist advertisers. While doing this, audience members are simultaneously reproducing their own labour power. [...] As the Chinese emphasized during the Cultural Revolution, if people are spending their time catering to their individual interests and sensitivities, they cannot be using the same time to also overthrow capitalist influence and to build socialism.

[...] labour-power was "home-made" in the absence of dominant brand-name commodities, mass advertising, and the mass media [...] the principal aspect of capitalist production was the alienation of workers from the means of producing commodities-in-general. Now the principal aspect of capitalist production has become the alienation of workers from the means of producing and reproducing themselves. The prevailing western Marxist view today still holds the incorrect assumption that the labourer is an independent commodity producer of labour power which is his to sell.

But is the production and consumption of the audience commodity for advertisers a "productive" activity in Marxian terms? Baran and Sweezy are contradictory in answering this question. They tell us that advertising expenses "...since they are manifestly unrelated to necessary costs of production--however broadly defined--(they) can only be counted as part of aggregate surplus." [...]

Just as advertising [...] do promote and increase sales, and thus act as indispensable props to the level of income and employment [...] The prodigious volume of resources absorbed in all these activities does in fact constitute necessary cost of capitalist production. What should be crystal clear is that an economic system in which such costs are socially necessary has long ceased to be a socially necessry system.

[...] the workplace where people got paid was transformed ideologically. People learned there that work under monopoly capitalism involves competition between individuals whose possessive needs necessarily set them in conflict with each other rather than with the owners of the means of their (concealed) cooperative production. The carrot which systematically motivated them was the pursuit of commodities [...]

[...] Because the consciousness industry produces consumable, saleable spectacles, its product treats both past and future like the present--as blended in the eternal present of a system which was never created and will never end. The society of the spectacle, however, cannot be abstractly contrasted with the "real" world of actual people and things. The two interact. The spectacle inverts the real and is itself produced and is real. Hence, as de Bord says, objective reality is present on both sides. But because of the society of the spectacle is a system which stands the world really on its head, the truth in it is a moment of the false. Because the spectacle monopolizes the power to make mass appearance, it demands and gets passive acceptance by the "real" world. [...]