by
Lee McGuigan
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The political economic approach to communication conceptualizes technology as a commodity produced by corporations. The goal of corporations is to maximize profit. Political economist study the process of capital accumulation and examine the evolution and renewal of capitalism. [...]
aw man this is fire
[...] By rewarding advertisers who can successfully predict the keywords that users type in and by punishing those who cannot, Google hopes that AdWords can be relevant and useful to online search.
Nevertheless, AdWords is only profitable because it is a vertically integrated system in which Google controls every step of the process by providing search results to users, by selling "keywords" to advertisers, and by providing statistics to marketers. [...]
Despite Google's claims, a vertically integrated advertising system may not be that objective because it is difficult to determine what the exchange value of keywords is. [...] Internet search creates unlimited time because millions of searches take place at any given moment even though only a small number of users see the same ads. In addition, keywords are not exclusive; a number of advertisers can bid for the same keywords. Because of the non-exclusivity and non-scarcity of keywords, their exchange value should be very low, if not close to zero. This is clearly not the case for Google ads [...]
The concept of the audience commodity is crucial to understanding why Google is able to charge advertisers for keywords even though they are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. [...] the exchange value of the audience commodity is imaginary.
Since 2009, a number of critical studies of Google have been published. The focus tends to be more on prosumers and on the free labor performed by Google users rather than on the advertising system and the audience commodity. Here I argue that the key to the political economy of Google as a search engine is not the free labor performed by the prosumers, but how the advertising system works. [...]
[...]
Other studies that also discuss the political economy of Google include Kang and McAllister (2011) and Pasquinelli (2009b) [...] suggests that the political economy of Google is the political economy of PageRank. Value accumulation comes from the economies of attetion--which depends on the attention capital of the whole network--and of cognition--which depends on Google being a "rentier" of the Internet. To Caraway (2011), "the media owner rents the use of the medium to the industrial capitalist who is interested in gaining access to an audience" (701). Pasquinelli (2009b) has overlooked that technology only increases productivity, but it does not create surplus value. Fuchs (2012b) has effectively shown that it is erroneous to assume that PageRank produces profits. [...]
useful to cite on the whole audience labour debate
he describes Fuchs' 2011 pub "A contribution to the political economy of Google
as "a significant contribution to the understanding of Google's capital accumulation process", but (like me) finds his "notion of prosumers providing free labor is problematic"
Scholars are often so blinded by the "newness" of technology-enabled media that even critical scholars have lost sight in situating the apparently new phenomenon in the continuity and transformation of capitalism. A Marxist approach is necessarily historical materialist. Therefore political economists aim to "[examine] the dynamic forces in capitalism responsible for its growth and change. The object is to identify both cyclical patterns of short-term expansion and contraction as well as long-term transformation patterns that signal fundamental change in the system" (Mosco 2009, 26). Political economists ought to examine the inherent contradictions in capitalism and how capitalism evolves and renews even though--or especially because--it is not a sustainable political economic system. It is thus imperative to examine how corporations seek new capital once they encounter an over-accumulation of capital.
[...] what is new is the relation between productive and finance capital. The financial performance of Google (or any public company) is closely watched by institutional investors. Google, once a darling of a stock market, is now seen as an underperforming company [...] whom Google should please--it is not the users, not the content producers, not even the advertisers, but the investors. [...] The excessive power that investment banks have over public companies may be something new to the trajectory of capitalism, something that occurred since the 1990s in the centuries-long history of capitalism. [...]
not sure how much the specific assessments of Wall Street's behaviour hold up now, but the relationship between SV & finance is important and worth drawing out more
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-military-industrial complex, which reinforces U.S. domination and political economic advantage. Smythe (1973/1994, 238) said that "there is no socialist road to western capitalist technological development." [...]
literally fire
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 shifting logics of advertising in an era in which "flow" (Williams 1974) is displaced by search, and space is virtually unlimited. Clearly traces of earlier logics of advertising remain: inserting ads in front of YouTube videos recapitulates the logic of the sale of time [...] However, the digital medium is a much more malleable and thus customizable medium--which means that spaces and times can be more narrowly framed and targeted (that is, a particular space can show one ad to one user and a different ad to another user on the same page). Moreover, online ads generate their own feedback--creating additional data that can be folded back into the process of customization. The upshot is that emerging advertising regimes are becoming ever more data-intensive [...]
[...] 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 fashion is taken into consideration by Smythe's argument, which considers the overall transformations associated with the rise of consumer society at the aggregate rather than the individual level. Whether or not a particular user responds in a particular way is largely immaterial with respect to the substance of his claims--not last because this diversity is also factored into marketing calculations. What matters is that the rise of a consumer society would have been impossible without a pervasive and powerful advertising industry. As Smythe's analysis in Dependency Road suggests, viewers of advertising "work" at becoming trained consumers--at embracing a consumer-oriented lifestyle, the values that go along with it, and the vocabulary of images and associations upon which it builds. The media industries are not the sole participants in the creation of the audience commodity and its productivity from the perspective of capitalism; they are assisted in this endeavour by the range of social institutions that produce and reproduce consumption-driven lifestyles, including the school system, family, and peer groups.
about aggregate rather than individuals - FB/Goog publisher stats are reported that way anyway, reinforcing this narrative
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 structure for-profit media industries? If the "free lunch" is always subordinated to the characteristics of the formal advertisements, what happens when the character of this free lunch shifts from content to information organization? The outlines of such a contemporary critique would include an interrogation of the ways i which the organizational schemes themselves reflect the overwhelming tendency of the "free lunch" to "reaffirm the status quo and retard change" (Smythe 1981, 39). This line of critique strikes me as a crucial one--the extension of the concerns of the critical political economy of the mass media into the digital realm. The role of organization is, in a sense, to impose a new form of scarcity upon the information glut of the Internet age. If, once upon a time, mass mediation imposed scarcity through the limitations of content and distribution, in the digital era, it imposes scarcity through the activity of organizing access to information--that is, determining which content will be prioritized for which users. [...]
[...] 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" offered by Google (in terms of both organization and content--albeit content provided by someone else) and the commercial imperatives of a company that is, for all intents and purposes, an advertising company. [...]
on a uni relying on google to digitise the archive. this framing offers a useful way of thinking about comparable situations