Audience Commodity Theory

Cheryl Anne Lim

Introduction to Digital Media Midterm Exam

24 October 2017

1. Explain Dallas Smythe’s Audience Commodity theory and discuss the relevance or irrelevance of Smythe’s theory to digital media market today. Why do you think the theory is relevant or irrelevant?

Dallas Smythe’s Audience Commodity theory states that the audience is sold as a commodity by commercial networks to advertisers as “audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it commands a price and is a commodity” (1977). Smythe recognized the economic relationship between the advertiser and the corporate product sponsor and his theory while still relevant in the digital media market today, requires some fine tuning to keep up with current developments.

Recent developments in digital media technology have shifted to a growing interactivity in audience practices. The original monolithic audience as a labour theoretical perspective is not representative of the current activity that is occurring on social media sites like South Korea’s Cyworld because it has commodified its site in multiple ways like direct funding and users as advertising-medium labour. This is unlike the original economic models of YouTube or early Facebook emphasizing the role of user as labour or free labour which leaves the focus on the malleability of commodification and how new digital media platforms such as Cyworld have complicated this concept more than the early Web 2.0 digital technologies.

In addition, the term audience commodity has also evolved due to the importance of the changing nature of Web 2.0 participants. With rapid technological changes and digitalization, many scholars have proposed different expressions to replace the notion of audience such as users who are increasingly required to participate audibly and physically. The new term of users is more functional than audience because users are clicking on hypertext links to create a sequential flow of images on the Web, typing messages in the chat room and externalizing their concepts of interface design when producing their own websites.  

Furthermore, while Smythe located the audience broadly within the media production process, the work of the audience came after content was produced. In the case of television programmes, they are first produced and then broadcast. During this time, the audience’s work would begin therefore, the concept of audience commodity broadly could not understand the interactive nature of consumption and production in Web 2.0 technologies.

Caraway (2011) argues that Smythe’s theory represents a one-sided class analysis which devalues working-class subjectivity and gives “no discussion of wage struggles, product boycotts, or consumer safety”. Caraway’s criticism of Critical Political Economy postulates that creative energy resides in the new media environment which sets his analysis on par with social media determinists like Henry Jenkins, who argue that “the Web has become a site of consumer participation” (Jenkins, 2008) and that media today is a locus of participatory culture. These criticisms are based on Smythe ignoring his focus on alternative media as counterpart to audience commodification. Smythe does not recognise that the audience will rebel and argues for a form of social democratic reformism that tolerates exploitation and misery. His theory rather implies the need for the overthrow of capitalism to humanize society and the overthrow of the capitalist media system to humanize the media.

Despite the numerous criticisms, Smythe’s Audience Commodity theory has been accepted by many political economists as well as other communication theorists. In recent years, this tendency has grown and there has been a revival of the interest in Smythe’s works especially in relation to the question if the users of commercial “social media” are workers and are exploited. Smythe’s concept of the audience commodity is very suited for describing the exploitation of user activities by corporate platforms on the contemporary Internet and have in this context coined the notion of the Internet prosumer commodity (Fuchs, 2012). Hence, it is still a relevant theory in the digital media market today.

References

Fuchs, C. (2012). Dallas Smythe Today - The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory. Prolegomena to a Digital Labour Theory of Value. Triplec (Cognition, Communication, Co-Operation): Open Access Journal For A Global Sustainable Information Society, 10(2), 692-740.

Jin, D. Y. (2015). Critical analysis of user commodities as free labour in social networking   sites: A case study of Cyworld. Continuum: Journal Of Media & Cultural Studies, 29(6), 938-950. doi:10.1080/10304312.2012.664115