Abstract
Lee McGuigan, a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and Vincent Manzerolle, a lecturer in Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, have done a masterful job in combining historically important publications from the mid-1970s with reflections from scholars who were actively engaged in the debates that these “foundational texts” stimulated. They didn’t stop there, however. They acquired additional contributions from scholars who have been carrying on those debates in the context of a substantial renewal of interest in critical media theory.
From the beginning to the end of this quite substantial text, the contributions to this continuing debate about the nature of the media audience as a commodity all pay homage to the legacy of Dallas Smythe and his pursuit of a critical theory of communications. McGuigan’s introductory chapter helps to place Smythe’s contribution within a historical moment, as well as within a stream of scholarship that brought cultural studies, political economy, and the study of media institutions into conflict over the nature and role of the “audience” within capitalism. McGuigan and many of the authors who follow his introduction underscore the importance of Marxist and institutionalist approaches to making sense of the media audience as both a commodity, and as a productive force.
Smythe’s seminal contribution to what has come to be known as “the blindspot debate,” was published in 1977, and was intended as a critical engagement with what Smythe saw as limitations in the approach being taken by western Marxists to understand, and critically engage with the nature of mass media systems under capitalism. His criticism was focused on what he saw as a misguided emphasis on the media’s ideological role, an emphasis that left those theorists incapable of understanding the media as a force within an exploitative economic system. Smythe suggested that the materialist answer to the problem of the media was to be found through engagement with the nature of the “work” that media audiences were doing during what was supposed to be their time off (when they were supposed to be reproducing their labor power). As the ensuing debates would clearly show, this was no easy task, but Smythe’s initial contribution pointed out a good many of the issues that would continue to resonate throughout the literature.
Graham Murdock, an active participant in the early debates, contributes an introduction to his own response to Smythe’s article, as well as a contemporary, and highly personalized assessment of how critical media theory has come to achieve its present level of development. Because Murdock’s 1978 article was focused more specifically on Smythe’s problematic treatment of North American media systems as the only forms worthy of critical engagement, he is able to call attention to both the economic and ideological role of the governments in Europe that managed the public broadcasting networks of that time. He emphasizes the importance of the media’s ideological role then, and now, although his more recent contribution was designed to bring our attention to bear on the role of the cultural environment in shaping our behavior in the political realm as citizens as well as consumers.
Murdock’s assessments of the commodity audience mesh well with the reflections of Sut Jhally, and the classic contribution of Jhally and Bill Livant. Perhaps more than many, these two scholars engaged more directly with Smythe’s challenge regarding the process through which the audiences who are engaged in “watching as working” actually produce something with an identifiable economic value. Special attention is paid to narrowcasting, and an increased emphasis on audience demographics as a way of understanding how specific segments of the audience might be “watching extra” as a contribution to increased efficiency in their production of surplus value for the broadcaster.
Eileen Meehan’s special contribution to the continuing debate was what she termed a “third answer” to the questions being asked about the commodity audience (or the audience commodity). As she and later critics would suggest, the audience is actually a fiction, approximated at best by the “ratings” being produced by companies such as A.C. Nielsen. In her view, it was those ratings that were the commodities, rather than the imagined audiences that they represent.
Meehan’s contribution to the commodity debate is extended considerably by Philip Napoli’s empirical assessment of commodity audiences in the social media environment. Napoli credits Meehan for making the point that “the pursuit of audiences is really the pursuit of ratings,” but he then goes on to describe an impressive multi-method research strategy designed to determine the extent to which three of the “leading social TV analytics providers” were actually describing the same commodities. Given the fact that the approaches being used to describe the social media audiences and the nature and extent of their “engagement” with the content they were both producing and consuming were still in development, it was not surprising that both audience segments and audience experiences varied among the providers of evaluative and comparative analysis. In Napoli’s view, the “technological environment may simply be proving too complex for advertisers, media buyers, and content providers to continue to hold measurement firms” to a standard such as “generalizability” to the “actual” audience population.
Similar insights regarding the emerging media environment are provided by Jason Pridmore and Daniel Trottier. They explore the role of social media applications software and the production of “brand audiences,” while Detlev Zwick and Alan Bradshaw explore the development of yet another form of audience commodity—the community. Fortunately, Zwick and Bradshaw conclude that some of these commodities, especially the “brand or product-related communities . . . exist more in the minds of marketers and marketing scholars than in actual reality,” and therefore need to be understood more clearly for what they actually are.
Three additional chapters by Micky Lee, Mark Andrejevic, and Vincent Manzerolle focus on new technologies and partnerships within the media environment; the first explores Google and the political economy of search, the second reopens the debate regarding the so-called “free lunch” used to attract and reward the laboring audience, while the third introduces the challenge of characterizing the role of mobile media in the production of “audience attention”—a currently constrained, but vitally important economic resource.
The last three chapters return us to some of the issues around which Smythe developed his initial critique. After Murdock’s chapter on efforts to reclaim the commons in the face of widespread commercialization of the information environment, Edward Comer and Christian Fuchs devote themselves more directly to the challenge of evaluating how well Smythe’s contribution meshes with Marx’s own insights with regard to labor and its exploitation. Fuchs, well known for his celebrations of the return of Marxist theory to the academic stage, lays out a fairly comprehensive assessment of the advances, and the remaining challenges that will have to be faced by those interested in firmly establishing a central space within which Marxist and critical social theory can enrich the study of communications and media.
For those who share his goals, and who are willing to face the challenges they represent, I believe McGuigan and Manzerolle have provided an excellent platform upon which to develop a strategy for moving forward.