Activity

[...] Watching is a real extension of the logic of industrial labor, even if it is not the same as industrial labor. However, as metaphor, it illuminates the obscure workings of the economy in general. As Ricoeur writes, "metaphor is the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power tha…

[...] there is much wasted watching by irrelevant viewers. Specification and fractionation of the audience leads to a form of concentrated viewing by the audience in which there is (from the point of view of advertisers) little wasted watching. Because that advertising time can be sold at a higher …

Let's begin with the advertising-supported commercial media as part of the whole economy. How do they make a profit? A short answer would be that the media speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption. Hence, they speed the realization of value (the conversi…

[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a me…