Fuchs (2014) Dallas Smythe Reloaded

267 – Smythe reminds us the importance of Marx in analyzing capitalism critically

267 – Critical theory and political economy are complimentary and should be combined

271 – “Cultural Studies has to turn into or at least take up aspects of Critical Political Economy in order to adequately understand contemporary capitalism and the role of media and communication.”

271 – Mosco, 2009 – PE has given attention to the commodification of content and audiences, labour spatialization, class, gender, race, social movements, hegemony, and ideology

272 – economy has always been relevant to the study of culture, communication, the media, and information…but CS has increasingly ignored the economy because of CS’ turn away from Marxism

273 – Smythe’s approach can be characterized as Marxist Communication Studies, which means “a unity of theoretical/philosophical, empirical, and ethical studies of media and communication.” – focusing on contradictions, structures of domination, exploitation, struggles, ideologies, alternatives to capitalism in media.

273 – Like Marx, Smythe wasn’t content with simply analyzing political economy of media, but trying to change the structures of media. (transformative practice through critique)

276 – “in recent years, there has been a revival of interest in Dallas Smythe’s works, especially in relation to the question: are users of commercial social media workers and are they exploited?” (emphasis in original)

276- discusses the eroding walls of the factory to 24/7

276 – Facebook is an indicative phase of capitalism and exploitation of labor – all-ubiquitous factory – mobile media has lifted the factory confines of the living room

276 – factory and workplace surveillance is omnipresent

277 – smythe more concerned with surplus value generated by media than the ideological effects of message content.

277 – Garnham shares Smythe’s opinion – shift away from media as ideological apparatuses and focus more on generating surplus value and advertising.

277 – however, ideology and PE are not mutually exclusive and require one another

278 – Murdock and Golding (1974) – media organizations distribute commodities that disseminate ideology and sell “explanations of social order and structured inequality (Murdock, 1978, 469).  Also see Artz, 2008, 64.

278 – Smythe understands ideology as “a system of beliefs, attitudes, and ideas.” (Smythe, 1981, 171).

278 – For Smythe (1994, 250) – consciousness industry is to make people buy commodities and pay taxes… it also promotes values that favor capitalism (251-3)

279 – Critical theory and PE should be complementary to each other

279 – media in capitalism are two forms of cultural commodities: cultural commodity that is purchased by consumers (dvds, mobile devices, etc). and audience/users as cultural  commodities where users/consumers are sold to media companies (Twitter, Facebook)

280 – advertising makes “humans instruments for economic accumulation” and ideology “aims at instilling the belief in the system of capital and commodities into human’s subjectivity”

280 – (capitialistic media) ideology “encompasses strategies and attempts to make human subjects instrumental in the reproduction of domination and exploitation”

281 – accumulation and ideology go hand in hand – case and point: social media

Social media was accompanied by a “techno-optimistic ideology” that Web 2.0 would lead to better democracy and new forms of political struggle (new forms of participation)

281 – ideology was necessary for users to support the social media capital accumulation model

281 – Smythe had a more balanced view of audience as compared to that of PE and the Frankfurt school which focused on false consciousness and passive audience manipulation – Smythe recognized that capital would attempt to control audiences, but they also had the power to resist (Smythe, 1981, 270)

            ****But what about direct marketing and T-Commerce?  Harder to resist?****

282 – Hesmondhalgh (2010, 280): Smythe too reductionist…& Caraway (2011, 296): Smythe one sided, audience commodity fetishism, and then Caraway agrees with Jenkins on page 706 – creative energy in new media environment – Jenkins, 2006, 133…Jenkins’ “participatory culture”

283 – Fuchs: Smythe instead calls for the overthrow of capitalist media system to humanize media

Jhally & Livant (1986) Working as Watching

Watching as Working – Jhally & Livant – 1986

125 – media companies get paid “rent’ to deliver audiences to advertisers.  The money left over from paying for the programming constitutes the comapanies’ profits

126 – “watching time” is sold by the media to advertisers

126 – watching extra – seeing hidden surfaces in what we watch (like decoding advertisements) (connotative meanings)

126 – media to get the audiences not just to watch but to “watch extra” and maximize the production of this commodity at minimal costs

127 – necessary watching time – produced to offset costs of content

127 – surplus watching time – extracted to produce revenues (profits) – above the cost of programming

127 – watching time is measurable and the mode of expression of value

127 – authors explore the struggle over the valorization of the activity of watching TV

129 – believe that Smythe’s approach must be more firmly situated within media structures – where exchange value is privileged before understanding use-value of commercial messages (meanings and their relation to consumption)

130 – commodity audience time is produced by both the networks and audience

132 – networks buy watching power through the purchase of shows/programming

132 – networks then sell this watching power to advertisers for more than they paid

133 – “If the networks cannot make people watch advertising longer in absolute terms, they can make the time of watching advertising more intense – they can make the audience watch harder” (emphasis in original)

133 – targeting niche audiences limits “‘wasted’ watching by ‘irrelevant’ viewers”… concentrated audiences = little wasted watching

134 – concentrated audiences watch harder with more efficiency – value of the time goes up, thus, necessary time decreases and surplus watching time increases as a result – greater revenue (networks can charge more for a niche audience b/c there is little wasted audience for the advertiser)

135 – This is all Marxian economics – human labor, not capital or technology, is the basis for productivity in society.  Watching is a form of labor, because audience watching is integral to the entire process.

135 – Marxism – “productivity of capitalism is based upon the purchase of one key commodity – labor power” (businesses have to pay people to work)

135 – labor power produces more value than it takes to reproduce itself – the laborer gets a salary so they can live and be fit for work the next day; company profits:

Value of labor-power is fixed at a socially determined level of means of subsistence (subsistence means minimum level to maintain life; food, water, shelter, etc)

Marx – socially necessary labor: amount of time it takes to produce value equivalent to this minimum cost (produces value equivalent to salary) before the company starts profiting (it is necessary because the laborer needs to be able to reproduce labor power for the next day)

Any remaining labor time in the day is surplus labor time because surplus value is generated (profits) for the company

During non-work time, workers reproduce their labor power by spending wages on food, shelter, clothing, etc.

135 – In terms of TV Viewing:

Audiences sell watching-power to media owners/companies

The use-value of watching power is watching (capacity to watch)

Value of watching power is the cost of its reproduction, aka the cost of programming content (TV Shows)

This puts the viewers in position to watch extra (time of advertising); Only advertising comprises the work day

Thus, programming is the value of watching-power, programming is the salary of the audience.  It is also non-work time – time of reproduction of watching-power

Thus, the work day in TV is split: socially necessary watching time vs. surplus watching time

138 – time shifting fears of the advertising agencies

139 – there is no formal contract for the exchange of watching-power; no enforcement – thus, people can leave the room, time-shift, avoid commercials altogether

140 – narrowcasting & targeting niche audiences intensifies both , relative and absolute surplus value (because there is a smaller amount of wasted watching)

142 – main argument – activity of watching is subject to the same process of valorization as labor-time in the general economy.

Morely (1993) Active Audience Theory

Abstract

Morely (1993) begins by stating passive audiences are a thing of the past, and that the audience theory pendulum has swung within media studies to show that audiences are commonly in an active state (p. 13).  Additionally, media texts are often polysemic and can be interpreted numerous ways by an active viewer (p. 13).  

Based on this recent pendulum swing, Morely argues that Hall’s (encoding/decoding) notion of a preferred reading, where the encoder of a media text tries to direct the viewer to a certain ideology, has been dropped from view of researchers (p. 13).  Much of active audience theory and the theoretical frameworks guiding this research need to be reread (pp. 13-14).

As a field, we should not discredit the way audiences negotiate media texts, either accepting the dominant hegemonic messages or resisting them entirely (p. 14). Morely fears this area of research is being obscured because researchers seemed settled on accepting the unfounded notion that audiences always resist dominant meanings (p. 14).  He argues that the concept of new revisionism – a concept that has attempted to challenge previously accepted paradigms of critical research - has allowed researchers to now better trace the history of audience studies and focus on parts of the field that have been ignored or under utilized (p. 14; also see Curran, 1990).  Morely believes the encoding aspect of Hall’s model, should not be ignored by the social sciences because not all audiences read texts the same way.  To demonstrate this, he offers Fiske’s (1986) example of semiotic democracy.  This framework centers on audiences decoding texts through the lens of their own cultural understanding (Morely, 1993, p. 15).  The issue here is that the creators of the text are not all equal and differences in the capitalist power relations of production companies afford certain entities more production power (television channel, time slot, actors, etc.), which in turn, can affect semiotic readings by audiences.  Therefore, Morely argues that the encoding process is just as important as the decoding process, given its economic, political, and ideological implications (p. 15).  

Me; This sounds as though he is invoking critical political economy into audience studies and also textual analysis, so researchers known what the preferred reading would be in the encoding process.

Research cannot assume that all active audiences interpret texts against the grain.  Morely draws upon de Certeau’s (1984) work that makes a distinction between audiences having power over a text and power over a text’s agenda (as cited in Morely, 1993, p. 16).  In other words, an active audience does not necessarily equate to a powerful audience with the ability to come away with resistive, polysemous readings of texts.

Finally, Morely brings up the distinction between macro and microanalyses of audience research and fears swinging the pendulum back to macro would be a mistake (pp. 16-17).  This is because microanalyses utilize ethnographies, which collectively produce macro concepts.  He doesn’t want to abandon either of these two types of analyses, but rather use them in tandem to better articulate audience studies.  However, he agrees with Fiske (1990), that ethnography must be used as a means to interpret audience activities in a broader context than simply individuation (p. 18). 

Morely’s (1993) central argument surrounds the notion that audience research is doing itself a disservice by ignoring the encoding process and assuming viewers’ decodings to always be resistant to the dominant cultural ideologies embedded within texts:

"Much recent work in this field is marred by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and by an undocumented presumption that forms of interpretive resistance are more widespread than subordination, or the reproduction of dominant meanings." (p. 14)