Abstract
This collection offers a richly theorized examination of social media and the information society—concepts the editors problematize in an introduction that also offers an overview of Marxist understandings of the recent economic crisis and the related crisis in the media, and previews how the fourteen chapters address Marx’s contemporary relevance for understanding and transforming society, politics, and the media.
The book opens by critiquing the concept of information society. Coeditor Christian Fuchs argues that despite contemporary understandings of an “information society,” we are actually in an age of informational capitalism. While information plays an increasingly central role in the forces of production, the relations of production remain thoroughly capitalist. Fuchs argues that several forms of capitalism (financial, imperialist, industrial, informational) coexist and reinforce each other. Several more empirical chapters return to this theme, pointing to the central role played by factories, global supply chains, increasingly precarious labor, and immiseration in supporting information industries that are “clean” or transcend the drudgery of wage slavery only in fantasies concocted by those who assiduously avoid the actual sphere of production. Critical analysis of the Internet and social media begins with analysis of exploitation, class, and commodification—factors that shape the possibilities for their use in social struggles.
Marx weighs a bit heavily in the opening chapters. A discussion of competing Marxist theories of the 2008 economic crisis spends several paragraphs presenting an analysis it then thoroughly debunks on empirical and theoretical grounds. The point that neoliberalism has undermined living and working conditions and exacerbated economic inequality could have been made more succinctly, allowing for more expansive treatment of the impact on the media and its economic underpinning: advertising.
The book’s strongest chapters offer a materialist analysis of the information society. Coeditor Marisol Sandoval’s rich analysis of social media persuasively argues that these are in fact unsocial. Sandoval reviews Apple’s super-exploitation of factory labor, Google’s reliance on users’ unpaid labor to transform them into commodities that it sells to advertisers, the continuing dominance of corporate media in the information sphere, the fetters imposed by copyrights and patents on truly social communication, and environmental devastation. Sandoval contrasts this privatized, unsocial media to the concept of an information commons, accountable to society and organized to serve the common good. This conception of a genuinely social media is intriguing, even if developed primarily through critique rather than through engagement with alternative or oppositional social forces.
Fuchs suggests that Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity has particular relevance in an era of privatized “social” media, where consumers not only produce themselves as commodities to be sold to advertisers, but increasingly self-generate much of the content. “Users work without pay and produce content, communications, social relations, and transactional data that become part of data commodities . . . ” Users and their data become commodities, characterized by alienation (users do not own the platform, the content, or the profits), expropriation, and coercion, obliged to use commercial platforms to participate in social relations (and often to surrender rights over their data and creations through the very act of participation). The bounds of the social factory have expanded beyond the workplace to encompass what Nick Dyer-Witheford characterizes as a “factory planet.” In the process, the ranks of industrial workers have exploded numerically while being fragmented into “shards subject to savage labour arbitrage.”
“If the dirty secret of the digital revolution is the supply chain, its happy face is a vast expansion of communication.” Dyer-Witheford stresses the contradictory role played by these new technologies, which simultaneously disperse access to communications while strengthening centralized control and value-extraction. The technology has the capacity to support different, more horizontal and social forms of communication, but the “panoptic potential” overwhelms such visions. “If the revolts of 2011 hinted that a planetary working class might be reaching for forms of political recomposition in which the networks were an important ingredient, on every front including the digital, this remained a global-worker-in-process.”
Part III offers two case studies, examining the political economy of freelance journalism and journalists’ efforts to create conditions in which they can pursue their work, often by fleeing corporate newsrooms. The book concludes with reflections by Vincent Mosco, who looks to Marx’s Grundisse and his journalism to sketch a Marxist theory of communication. The emergence of alternative forms of labor organizing among information workers suggests that knowledge workers are seeking channels to defend their interests and to build alliances with social media consumers that could transform society.
The authors persuasively argue that commercial social media do not constitute a bona fide public sphere. Corporate media dominate search results, those who can pay have priority access to Internet bandwidth, and profit rules. While the possibilities for an alternative communication sphere are real, they exist within a social context that limits access and participation. This is a provocative and useful book. It could have benefited, however, by closer engagement with the social struggles that tantalized so many, yet ultimately were unable to transcend the economic and social forces they contested.