Consumers

Smythe’s Thesis

To understand how commercial media reproduce capitalist relations of production, Smythe (1977) begins by asking, “What economic function for capital do [mass communications systems] serve?” (p. 1). Mass media and “related institutions” involved in advertising, market research, public relations, and product design “are intimately connected with consumer consciousness, needs, leisure time use, commodity fetishism, work and alienation” (p. 1). From this general position Smythe argues that “the commodity form of mass-produced, advertiser-supported communications” (p. 2) is the audience. Advertisers buy audiences and put viewers to work at two jobs: performing “essential marketing functions for the producers of consumers’ goods,” and working at “the production and reproduction of labour-power” (p. 3). Smythe describes the audience in economic terms as a “non-durable producers’ good,” which is bought and used in the marketing of the advertiser’s product (p. 6). “The primary purpose of the mass media complex,” writes Smythe, “is to produce people in audiences who work at learning the theory and practice of consumership” (p. 20; emphasis added).

Smythe (1981) elaborates on this thesis throughout his book Dependency Road. He identifies the principal commodity as audience power—“the concrete product which is used to accomplish the economic and political tasks which are the reason for the existence of the commercial mass media” (p. 26). For Smythe, these tasks include managing demand for branded goods and engendering support for the military-industrial agendas of sanctioned political candidates. Audience power is a commodity because it commands a price, is produced and sold, and involves “work” (p. 26). Advertisers buy the services of audiences with predictable qualities, who pay attention in predictable numbers to the means of communication in particular markets (p. 27). Smythe describes programming as a “free lunch” that compensates audiences for their work, like a wage. The “free lunch” is designed to “whet the appetite” in two ways: to compel people to assemble themselves into audiences, and to induce a disposition favorable to commercial solicitations (pp. 37-38). Program quality is thoughtful only to the extent that it does not offend viewers; advertisements, by contrast, must be more arousing and aesthetically pleasing (p. 39). ¹ Smythe (1954) did, however, consider advertising and programming to be complementary parts of an overall commercial enterprise; thus, he warned against treating them separately (Smythe, 1981, p. 37).

Exposure to explicit and implicit commercial messages is thought to cultivate viewers-as-consumers in a three-stage process: Viewers determine that they have the “problem” identified in an advertisement; they recognize the existence of a product category to solve the problem, and they decide to put brand X on their “mental shopping list” (Smythe, 1981, p. 40). While this proposition is rational from the perspective of advertisers adhering to the normative view that sovereign consumers exercise discerning choice based on complete knowledge of a marketplace, Smythe contends that consumers are in fact bewildered by variety and biased information. Rather than making calculated decisions, consumers are compelled toward impulse purchasing, which reduces the intellectual stress of navigating commodity markets. Consciousness is habituated toward naturalizing the belief that social problems may be solved through consumership. Indeed, Smythe describes commodities themselves as “teaching machines” promulgating values of either individualism or collectivism, depending on the purposes and processes of production (p. 228; see also Babe, 2000, pp. 137-138).

In sum, commercial media produce audiences whose attentive capacity is sold to advertisers; advertisers put audiences to work learning to buy particular branded products and to reproduce themselves in accordance with the social relations of production in capitalism. Smythe (1981) conveys the broader significance of this thesis in the first chapter of Dependency Road: “Audience power work for [the] Consciousness Industry produces a particular kind of human nature or consciousness, focusing its energies on the consumption of commodities, which Erich Fromm called homo consumens—people who live and work to perpetuate the capitalist system built on the commoditization of life” (p. 9). Smythe concedes that the audience is an “intermediate” product consumed in selling the “end” products, which are the goods and services of transnational corporations (p. 13). He goes on, however, to make a more provocative assertion:

But at the larger, systemic level, people, working via audiences to market goods and services to themselves, and their consciousness ultimately are the systemic end products: they are produced by the system ready to buy consumer goods and to pay taxes and to work in their alienating jobs in order to continue buying tomorrow. (p. 13)

Essentially, Smythe argues that commercial media produce consumers as both economic and social products, manufactured and socialized within commercial institutions. While the sale of audiences to advertisers is a matter of fact for many observers of commercial media, Smythe’s linkage of the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of communication and consumption is often overlooked. ²

The Work of Watching

Responding to Smythe, Sut Jhally and Bill Livant (1986) argue that audiences work for television networks, rather than for advertisers or industrial capital. They suggest that a Marxist analysis of the audience commodity needs to focus within media industries, whereas Smythe’s “stress on audience labour for the manufacturers of branded commodities has tended to deflect the specificity of the analysis away from communications to the ensuing consumption behaviour of the audience” (p. 129). Smythe’s theory, they argue, focuses on the use value of messages—“meanings and their relationship to consumption” (p. 130)—not exchange value. Assuming that the “audience receives consumerist ideology,” Smythe ironically falls victim to his own idealist blindspot (Jhally, 1990, p. 73).

Jhally and Livant (1986) propose that “watching-time” (not time spent “self-marketing and consuming advertisers’ commodities”) is the central commodity of advertiser-supported television (pp. 130-131). Networks buy program content to “entice the audience to watch” (p. 132). Program content is a producers’ good, like factory machinery. Having purchased the watching power of the audience as the “raw material” of this production, networks “process it and sell it to advertisers for more than they paid for it” (p. 132). “Necessary watching-time” is the amount of advertising time that must be sold to recoup the cost of programming, that is, the necessary cost of producing an audience. The remaining time, over and above the cost of programming, is surplus time (p. 132). Just as industrial capitalists try to control production processes to maximize surplus value, “Networks wish to make necessary watching-time as short as possible and surplus watching-time as long as possible. The struggle to increase surplus time and decrease necessary time animates the mass media” (p. 132).

Jhally and Livant establish a useful theory of value in relation to audience labor. ³ However, their analysis should be revised to account for the “ensuing consumption behavior” of the audience. It is true that Smythe’s thesis could not be verified empirically at the time he was writing because it depends, in part, on evaluating the impact of media messages in generating sales and socializing consumers (Jhally, 1990). Smythe misrepresents his theory as relentlessly materialist; in fact it hinges on the power of commercial media systems to influence consciousness (Babe, 2000). Smythe also misunderstands some economic processes of audience manufacture. He accepts audience ratings as valid results of disinterested social science research, and he mistakes the audience commodity for the actual viewers watching television (Meehan, 1984, 1993). Indeed, a theory of audience labor was difficult to apprehend concretely when the “work” was seemingly isolated to media consumption (Napoli, 2010).

Today, however, as the television environment is being transformed into a digitally mediated marketplace, the production of consumers becomes quite real. T-commerce situates consumers in a marketplace where they are confronted with purchase opportunities and the commercial infrastructure to support transactions. Consumption is rationalized in the same ways as labor, through surveillance and scientific management (Andrejevic, 2004). Precise monitoring of information transactions allows companies to package customers in units that reflect actual purchases (Mosco, 2009). Consumers are constructed as profiles of data about buying behaviors (Andrejevic, 2009; Elmer, 2004; Manzerolle & Smeltzer, 2011; Turow, 2006) just as audience commodities have been produced as information about media consumption. Smythe (1981) maintains that the role of advertising is to manage demand in the economy by “creating a profitable market for each specific commodity” (p. 264). The interactive storefront allows viewers access to the means of consumption (both the buyable objects and the institutions to mediate exchange) and, by capturing transaction records, it expands markets for consumption-related information. Smythe’s “mental shopping list” seems almost quaint when, as some boast, “the store becomes omnipresent” (Watson et al., 2002, p. 340).

The Audience Commodity in a Digital Era

Scholars continue to theorize the audience commodity in the context of digital media. Christian Fuchs (2010a) acknowledges Smythe’s theory as a pioneering account of labor in information industries. Fuchs (2010b) uses the concept of audience labor to critique the online prosumer commodity. Fernando Bermejo (2007, 2009) reviews theories of the audience commodity in relation to the Internet. He demonstrates historically how the business of audience manufacturing mediates the development of communication technologies. Vincent Manzerolle applies Smythe’s theory to the social emergence of smartphones. As mobile devices and data networks approach ubiquity, they are used to erode distinctions between labor time and leisure time and to amplify opportunities for targeted advertising and surveillance. Conflict over resources such as wireless spectrum—a topic that interested Smythe throughout his career—will escalate in relation to broadband networks and mobile bandwidth (Manzerolle, 2010). Such issues are especially poignant to multiple systems operators (MSOs), which control cable infrastructure while occupying markets for audiences, program content, and consumer data. MSOs in the United States have committed significant capital investment toward an interactive television storefront (Arango, 2008; Spangler, 2010). ⁴

For the present study, the respective works of Philip Napoli and Mark Andrejevic represent the most germane elaborations of the audience commodity in relation to television. Following the contributions of Eileen Meehan (1984), and particularly her prescription that studies of audience production should be appropriately “economistic” (Meehan, 1993), Napoli (2003) considers the imperative to construct audiences as economic goods to be the engine of commercial media industries. The process of producing audiences shapes not only the types of content available but also the development and deployment of communication technologies. Napoli (2010) supports the argument that Smythe’s theory is increasingly relevant today. He writes:

The notion of the work of the audience, which may have been a bit more tenuous when the work being monetized was isolated to media consumption, becomes more concrete in an environment in which the creative work of the audience is an increasingly important source of economic value for media organizations. (p. 511)

He concludes that the gulf between the theory that audiences work for advertisers and the theory that audiences work for media organizations “seems to have been bridged in the new media environment, in which audiences seem to be working for both” (p. 512).

Mark Andrejevic (2004) analyzes the “work of being watched” as complementary to the work of watching. He uses reality TV as an entry point to probe interrelationships among surveillance, production, and consumption in various historical contexts. Like Meehan and Napoli, Andrejevic emphasizes the role of viewers in producing information commodities, but he also reinforces Smythe’s insistence on the importance of consumption activities. Andrejevic explores the ways in which interactive media draw ever more of lived experience into “the digital enclosure,” wherein “activities previously conducted beyond the scope of market-based monitoring can be subjected to techniques for the scientific management of (the labour of) consumption” (p. 18). Andrejevic (2009) demonstrates that interactive television further valorizes and rationalizes the consumption-related activities of audiences.

Finally, the probative historical work of Joseph Turow is noteworthy because he arrives at similar conclusions without direct reference to Smythe or a Marxist approach. Affinities to Smythe are evident in how Turow (1997) characterizes the “business discourse” of advertising and commercial media: “The aim is to package individuals, or groups of people, in ways that make them useful targets for the advertisers of certain products through certain types of media” (p. 1). Turow describes media convergence and the consolidation of advertising and marketing agencies as processes designed “to maximize the entire system’s potential for selling” (p. 2). Like Napoli, Turow (2006) observes that audiences work for both television networks and advertisers. Television executives increasingly recognize the need to accomplish the “twin job” of captivating attention and impelling people to buy (pp. 32, 128). The marriage between the business of valorizing audience attention and the business of selling products supports the idea that viewers/consumers, as the commercial subjects of television, work at both watching and buying.

Audience Labor in a Ubiquitous Marketplace

The notion that audiences “work” is among the most contentious of Smythe’s propositions (Caraway, 2011; Hesmondhalgh, 2010; Lebowitz, 1986; Maxwell, 1991; Shimpach, 2005). While an appropriately nuanced analysis of audience labor is beyond the scope of this study, it is useful to consider some anecdotal evidence supporting the position that watching television is tantamount to work. One indication stems from the persistent efforts of many viewers to avoid advertisements (Dix & Phau, 2010; Vollmer & Precourt, 2008). The “free lunch” is offered on the implied condition that viewers attend to commercial messages (Lotz, 2007; Turow, 2005). Executives regard any violation of this informal contract—or “value proposition”—as theft (Napoli, 2011, p. 125; Tinic, 2006, p. 312). According to a report in 2005, 69% of Americans want to avoid being exposed to advertisements (Turow, 2006). Furthermore, television networks that do not feature product advertisements charge subscription fees. Viewers either endure (or avoid) advertisements in exchange for programming, or they buy programming with wages earned elsewhere.

Remuneration is becoming formalized in the value proposition of commercial television—particularly as an inducement to work on social networking sites. Businesses have introduced incentives for social network users to publicly discuss viewing habits or promote shows to friends (Donohue, 2012; “GetGlue,” 2011). Facebook offers financial credits to some users for watching advertisements (Wasserman, 2011). Corporations, such as Pepsi, award merchandise to viewers who use mobile applications to report their exposure to designated advertisements (Learmonth, 2011). Some media devices even feature unavoidable advertisements and so they are sold at discounted prices (Metz, 2011). Consumers, in this latter case, are being paid to work as a captive audience. Finally, most television advertisements today direct viewers to branded online platforms, whether a devoted homepage or Facebook and Twitter sites. With media convergence, television advertisements become active hyperlinks to these websites. This serves the goal of corporations to consolidate market share of consumers’ time and consciousness.

Continuing in proximity to the concept of work, consider the role of consumers in self-marketing branded goods and services. Literature on new media marketing celebrates the proliferation of consumer “touchpoints” (Gambetti & Graffigna, 2010; Jaffe, 2005, pp. 60-61; Martin & Todorov, 2010; Vollmer & Precourt, 2008). As part of integrated marketing communications strategies (Spurgeon, 2008), “touchpoints” are observable venues for engaging with consumers and cultivating a consistent and comprehensive brand relationship. The intellectual support for this approach is awash with rhetoric of consumer sovereignty. Venerated marketing consultant Joseph Jaffe claims, “If the consumer is given more avenues to access, connect, research, purchase, and communicate, the result is an always-open-for-business utopia” (p. 61). Another marketing textbook expounds these strategies for use in “an era of consumer control” (Vollmer & Precourt, 2008). “Touchpoints” entail at least two chief components: opportunities to expose consumers to commercial solicitations, and opportunities to collect information from consumers. The second aspect, sometimes referred to as “registration” in typologies of mediated interactivity (Spurgeon, 2008, pp. 86-93), is exemplified in the “digital footprint” of interactive television—the idea that records of all behaviors with such applications can be captured automatically (Napoli, 2011, p. 88). Through increased presence in markets for consumer information, media organizations expand their revenue base to guard against potential declines in advertising investment (Napoli, 2001). Andrejevic (2004) puts a fine point on the labor dispute: “Whatever the debates going on in the world of orthodox materialism, the business world understands this as work that generates demographic commodities to be bought and sold” (p. 114).

Perspectives on “touchpoints” also connect with theories of how audiences work at constructing meaning (see Meehan, 1993). Smythe (1981) states explicitly that creative activity constitutes work. Astute historians have further argued that viewers are always active in receiving advertisements, as they “breathe life into [commodities]” (Leiss, Kline, & Jhally, 1990, p. 310). The social construction of meaning surpasses extant borders as increasingly consumers engage with commercial television content on various viewing platforms, in various geographical and social spaces. Referring to administrative academic research is instructive for understanding how this logic is employed deliberately by marketers. In the Journal of Interactive Advertising, Martin and Todorov (2010) admit, “In every second of every minute of every day, brands attempt to engage customers and influence purchasing decisions in infinite ways” (p. 61). “The latest digital media,” they continue, “provide advertisers with custom platforms and interaction models that acknowledge where consumers are and what they are doing at every moment” (p. 61). They claim that the “organic nature” of engagement on new media platforms “helps convert consumers into brand ambassadors” (p. 63). For these authors, brand engagement culminates in the branding of lifestyles, “when brands provide … social ecosystems that enable consumers to truly live the brand” (p. 64). For Smythe, people in advanced capitalism are alienated from reproducing themselves (p. 48); with the ascent of consumer profiling and proprietary marketing databases (see Turow, 1997), people are alienated from their own commercial identities (Manzerolle & Smeltzer, 2011).

T-Commerce as Marketplace and Institution

The integration of direct marketing techniques into the business of commercial television points to the relevance of Smythe’s thesis, insofar as it explains how commercial media are organized around reaching valuable customers and managing consumer demand. Instant feedback capabilities, inherent to interactive television, are significant to the processes under scrutiny here. Advertisers can measure the effectiveness of an advertisement in real time and then respond promptly with adjustments to product offers, aesthetic features, and marketplace structures, such as billing procedures (Neff, 2011; Vollmer & Precourt, 2008). If consumers adopt these technologies, and as firms improve their abilities to administer these services, commercial television can become a constantly evolving marketplace. This marketplace can be managed as part of a twofold process of rationalization. First, through surveillance and data management, marketers can establish statistical models of consumer behavior. Behavioral models serve as predictive indicators to mitigate the risks native to an unstable market system (Manzerolle & Smeltzer, 2011), and, in theory, these information resources improve executive decision making (Napoli, 2003). Subsequently, the marketplace itself can be managed in real time to maximize its productive capacity. As consumers use this marketplace it is adapted to exploit their known inclinations more efficiently and to harvest more feedback. This may entail offering frequent opportunities for impulse purchases or reducing purchase opportunities to sustain a long-term relationship. Targeting and customization—pillars of interactive advertising and marketing—are less about promoting products that are relevant to a consumer’s interests and more about manipulating the digital storefront to maximize the capacity of an individual to consume.

Increasingly marketers conceive of consumers as being “always on”—existing in a ubiquitous marketplace and being always able to buy (Vollmer & Precourt, 2008). This point illustrates the importance of understanding consumption as a sociological institution (Bauman, 2007; Comor, 2008; Slater, 1997). Institutions are constituted by a dialectical relationship between abstract ways of thinking about the world and the concrete structures that allow ways of thinking to be expressed in certain forms of activity. On one hand, the institution of consumption involves historically constructed ways of understanding and imagining consumption—what is considered normal, desirable, and possible. On the other hand, consumption requires a marketplace in which abstract ways of thinking can be realized in action. Ways of thinking about consumption develop from lived experiences with marketplace institutions that appear as objective components in a natural system of commercial exchange. As our experiences within the marketplace shape our understanding of consumption, our consumption shapes the marketplace. Smythe (1981) recognizes this tension, noting that when viewers encounter television content they bring with them prior experiences with commodities and that the social production of consumers continues in the marketplace after the television is turned off. “The audience/market formation of people is an aspect of a lifelong process of learning about, and coping with, commodities” (p. 267; emphasis added).

This explains, in part, why early attempts at t-commerce were unsuccessful. Initially, electronic commerce represented a significant departure from typical ways of experiencing or understanding the marketplace (Carey, 1997, p. 208; Turow, 2006). As digital media have become normalized into daily life in the United States, consumers encounter electronic commerce as a taken-for-granted aspect of reality. T-commerce situates viewers in a marketplace where certain ways of thinking about consumption—which may be depicted or endorsed on television—can be constituted in action. For Meehan (2000), the apparent “naturalness” of commodity consumption as the core of lived experience “cannot be overstated” (pp. 78-79).

Capacity to Consume: Linchpin of the Audience Commodity

Demographic information historically has been the chief variable in audience valuation, insofar as it is a proxy for the expected propensity of viewers to act as consumers (Meehan, 1993; Napoli, 2003). Hitherto with television, the propensity to buy has been divorced from the ability to buy (i.e., an immediate purchase opportunity supported by the technological and administrative infrastructure to mediate exchange). T-commerce fills this breach: It collapses the marketing designed to stimulate the propensity to buy with a marketplace that activates the ability to buy. Like other direct-response marketing formats, t-commerce moves beyond presumptions about capacity to consume based on indices of purchasing behavior, toward intimate and proprietary knowledge of an individual’s buying history (Andrejevic, 2009; Vollmer & Precourt, 2008). This illustrates what has always been true: Advertisers are less interested in watching power than in buying power.

It would be a mistake to treat propensity and ability as properties exclusive to consumers and their effective demand. By referring to the capacity to consume, the ability and propensity to consume can be more directly linked to the system of technologies and institutions mediating processes of production, exchange, and consumption. For example, a desire to consume may be impeded in a marketplace with limited capabilities for enabling transactions or coordinating logistical procedures. Such has been the case with U.S. television at least since interactivity became viable and, arguably, since its commercial foundations. To understand this underutilized capacity, consider Marx’s (1973) argument that a railway on which no trains run is a railway only in potential. Historically, television has been a marketplace in potential, like a showcase display at a closed department store. By administrating transactions—managing delivery and receipt, for example—t-commerce service providers augment the television marketplace infrastructure and its capacity to facilitate consumption. T-commerce makes television a marketplace in reality.

In addition to being an index of potential, capacity also describes the tendency toward certain outcomes in relation to the biases of particular technologies and institutions (Comor, 1994). The institutions of commercial television emerge from certain imperatives, which include monetizing audience attention and maintaining the social relationships needed to produce commodity audiences—both the shared cultural values that perpetuate television viewing as endemic to modern life in the United States and the system of formal relationships required to valorize audiences (historically concentrated in audience ratings industries). These institutions have biases that are exerted in historical conditions and in concert or in conflict with the vested interests of stakeholders. Together they are shaping interactive television into a digital marketplace, as opposed to other imaginable interactive television configurations (see Smythe, 1981). The digital marketplace, then, has biases that shepherd viewers-as-consumers through particular ways of thinking and (inter)acting while precluding others. ⁵

Consumers: The Most Valuable Commodity?

It is necessary to distinguish actual audiences (as message receivers using a communication medium) from commodity audiences (as discrete packages of information representing exaggerated pecuniary traits of aggregated viewers). A similar distinction can be drawn between “consumers” as economic products and consumers as social products. “Consumers” are assemblages of data about buying behavior, viewing habits, and other market-relevant characteristics. They are compiled in a marketplace that is technologically equipped to capture transaction records in digital formats. This information about consumption-related behaviors can be stored, collated, and circulated almost instantly with few spatial constraints. This digitized marketplace is structured to produce “consumers” as commodities. By contrast, consumers are real people in a marketplace, breathing life into the institutions and habits of consumership. “Consumers” are rationalized representations of these actual consumers (Manzerolle & Smeltzer, 2011). As commodities, consumers are both social actors and information profiles distortedly mirroring economic life. Irrespective of whether t-commerce succeeds (and the history of interactive television warrants skepticism), the purposive motion toward the interactive storefront as a prevailing commercial model exposes that advertiser-supported television is organized to produce consumers both as packaged economic data and as social beings necessary to the reproduction and acceleration of capital.

Production and consumption are dialectically interrelated, each created in the completion of the other (Marx, 1973; see also Harvey, 2006). Consumption creates the need for production, just as production creates the objective and subjective means for consumption—that is, production creates objects with social use values, as well as consumers with the needs and particular predilections to consume what is produced. For Smythe, this passage from Marx’s Grundrisse provides a foundation for an historical materialist theory of media and their interpenetration with marketing institutions. Extending this position toward further understanding of the social production of consumers, Smythe’s thesis connects meaningfully with sociological perspectives on consumption and consumerism. Smythe (1981) borrows Erich Fromm’s concept of homo consumens, which describes “people who live and work to perpetuate the capitalist system built on the commoditization of life” (p. 9). This is consistent with Zygmunt Bauman’s (2007) account of consumerism as a type of social arrangement that “[recycles] human wants, desires and longings into the principal propelling and operating force of society, a force that coordinates systemic reproduction, social integration, social stratification and the formation of human individuals” (p. 28). In consumerism, consumption assumes the “linchpin” role occupied by “work” in a society of producers (p. 27). According to Smythe, this “particular kind of human nature” is produced in people as they work for the Consciousness Industry (p. 13). Recognizing the economic and social necessity of consumption in propelling capital through its phases, we can see the value of homo consumens as both a commodity producer and a commodity product. Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity marks a pioneering effort to place media and marketing industries within the institutional dynamics of a consumer society, wherein the consumption of commodities assumes a normative foundation for networks of human relationships as well as the economic and cultural structures that mediate social life (see Slater, 1997, especially pp. 25-26). “The most prominent feature of the society of consumers,” Bauman writes, “is the transformation of consumers into commodities” (p. 12).

Conclusions

To delineate “what is television” requires critical discussion of social viewing practices and programming conventions, yet we must also define television as a fluid, but discernible, set of commercial relationships. While content migrates across viewing platforms that have escaped the living room, prevailing ways of thinking and acting within commercial television industries in the United States remain attendant to commodity markets for consumers (packaged as audiences). Furthermore, the technologies that problematize incumbent definitions of television also allow the business to move toward its historical goal of verifying the influence of advertising exposure on consumer behavior (Lotz, 2007; Napoli, 2011). Despite his ostensible economic vulgarity, Smythe actually analyzed the social product of commercial media: people who live as producers and consumers. Though he recognized that the social and economic functions of commercial media are entirely interrelated (Mosco, 2009), his specific argument about the productivity of audiences was not fully applicable at the time of his writing (Napoli, 2010). However, in the context of an interactive television storefront, which draws ever more cultural artifacts and social experiences into commodity relationships, the purchase of Smythe’s theory becomes apparent: Consumers are the products of commercial media and fundamental to the social reproduction of economic and cultural institutions in capitalism. While the commodification of consumers is hastened and expanded by interactive technologies, this does not denote a rupture in the industrial logic of television (Tinic, 2006). Capitalist consumption relationships have always defined commercial television in the United States; now this relationship is becoming more directly observable. Smythe announced “fire” even if he could have seen only “smoke.”