The Power and Political Economy of Social Media | Think Piece on Fuchs Chapter 5

It’s interesting how demanding the journalist’s profession is when it comes to social media interaction.

When I graduate, I know that my Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts will be dug through by my potential employers. This isn’t just to make sure I’m not some radical internet militant, rather media outlets whom I will be applying to want to be confident in my ability to implement social media storytelling into my reporting tool bag.

This conundrum is something I am trying to grapple with, but Fuchs’ chapter on the power and political economy of social media made that more challenging.

The Limits of the Participatory Social Media Hypothesis

In a capitalist world, Fuchs argues, social media do not equate to a public sphere or participatory democratic space.

Based on the evidence he’s presented in the chapter, it’s evident that the internet and social media are very stratified and are not participatory in nature. Fuchs believes that a non-corporate internet is needed to amend that because right now large corporations are using the internet to colonize social media and dominate its attention economy.

Take politics and celebrity gossip for example. Celebrities dominate coverage and visibility compared to political coverage. When a public space like social media celebrates consumption and entertainment and disregards politics, “a sense of happy consumption in a false world is created.” And when large companies work to marginalize politics by centralizing their focus on celebrity coverage, any sense of a participatory social media is eroded.

A good example of this would be looking at YouTube’s political attention economy. Looking at the most-viewed videos of all time, which are all music videos that were corporately produced, one can see that the mega media companies that own the copyright to those videos have total control over what is being watched and how much money they bring YouTube through the exploitation of digital labor.

Exploitation of Unpaid Labor

When a Facebook user logs on to check their timeline, they are acting as laborers in the sense that their brief interactions are being monitored and stored in a database to later be used to generate a profit. That seemingly innocent interaction online has now become a commodity.

The prosumer , which is the product of the blurred line between between producer and consumer, is the media company’s commodity. Prosumers are essentially passive audience members whose time is sold by media companies to advertisers as a commodity. This is referred to as the audience commodity.

The audience commodity has different implications depending on where it is being exploited — either traditional mass media or on the internet. The users who make up the audience commodity on the internet also act as producers of content, whereas the audience for traditional mass media like television are more passive and receptive in their nature. Because the internet allows for many-to-many communication, users are more active on the internet than traditional mass media. Therefore, their labor can be exploited for more profit.

The Rate of Exploitation and Social Media

The rate of exploitation measures the relationship between the time that a worker is paid for and is unpaid for. In regards to social media, it refers to the relationship between the prosumer’s paid and unpaid labor. Because the prosumer does not have wages from their internet use, the rate of surplus labor heads towards infinity. This allows the media to capitalize on 100 percent of the labor the prosumer contributed.

Karl Marx distinguishes between necessary labor time (the time a person needs to work to produce the equivalent wage that is required for buying goods and survival) and surplus labor time (all additional labor time) to paint a picture of what this exploitation of labor might look like.

In terms of its social media implications, every hour spent on a corporate social media site is considered labor time by the media company. What this means is that any time spent on any of these sites like Facebook and Google is surplus labor that is being exploited and capitalized on by those very websites. And what is terrifying is that the more time a user spends interacting with a particular site, the more readily available data about them becomes online.

Free Labor and Slave Labor

In the chapter, Fuchs argues, “The existence of digital media is based on various forms of digital labour and different degrees of the exploited.” What he means by this is that there is a digital labor hierarchy that allows for the exploitation of surplus labor across all boards of production.

Within the political economy of social media is the exploitation of not just user labor, but any and all labor that goes into producing a commodity.

Take the iPhone for example. Apple CEO’s and executives could fill swimming pools with all of the billions of dollars that they have raked in from selling the iPhone. The slave-like laborers who extracted the minerals to make the phones, the workers who were paid mere wages to assemble the phones, and then the unpaid internet users who promoted the phones don’t have it the same.

Inherent in this, Fuchs says, is “a class conflict between capital labour that is constituted through exploitation.”

Thinking about my soon-to-be role as a journalist working for a media company has me concerned about my contributions to the exploitation of social media labor. Using social media to report on a story makes me a laborer for the site. I make no money at all on the clicks that it brings or the advertising dollars it draws. But, I am getting paid by the media organization that assigned me to report the story because a tweet sent here and there is part of my reporting process.

But this isn’t the case for the internet user who regularly checks Facebook or frequently conducts Google searches. That user is not benefiting at all from their internet use, and their behaviors are actually being exploited for profit.

Where does this leave us? The answer lies within the question, how much do we value social media? If everyone stopped using it because they feared their labor is being exploited, then a new economy crisis would emerge. Advertisers would stop investing in media companies because there would be no objects for the advertisers to target. The media companies would then go bankrupt. What this demonstrates is how important users are for generating a profit and maintaining the social media business model.

Obviously social media is not going away anytime soon, so it’s going to take some compromise between the media conglomerates who profit off of their user’s information, and the users themselves.

What do you think? Should users be compensated for their interactions on social media?

Source: Fuchs, C. (2017). Social media: a critical introduction. London: Sage Publications.