Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media

Christian Fuchs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138839298
• eBook ISBN: 9781317558194
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding social media requires us to engage with the individual and collective meanings that diverse stakeholders and participants give to platforms. It also requires us to analyse how social media companies try to make profits, how and which labour creates this profit, who creates social media ideologies, and the conditions under which such ideologies emerge. In short, understanding social media means coming to grips with the relationship between culture and the economy. In this thorough study, Christian Fuchs, one of the leading analysts of the Internet and social media, delves deeply into the subject by applying the approach of cultural materialism to social media, offering readers theoretical concepts, contemporary examples, and proposed opportunities for political intervention.

Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media is the ultimate resource for anyone who wants to understand culture and the economy in an era populated by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google in the West and Weibo, Renren, and Baidu in the East. Updating the analysis of thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Karl Marx, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, and Dallas W. Smythe for the 21st century, Fuchs presents a version of Marxist cultural theory and cultural materialism that allows us to critically understand social media's influence on culture and the economy.

1

INTRODUCTION

Social media has become a common term for signifying the usage of social ­networking sites, microblogs, blogs, (user-generated) content sharing sites, or wikis. The question of which media are social and which are not is often asked when people discuss social media. And how to answer it depends on how one defines what it means to be social—engaging with thoughts of others, communicating, engaging in communities, co-operative work, etc. (Fuchs 2014b, chapter 2). Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Baidu, Renren, Weibo, WeChat, or WhatsApp are some of the most well-known social media. Large, transnational corporations operate them: Facebook Inc. (Facebook, WhatsApp), Twitter Inc., Google Inc. (YouTube), Sina Corp (Weibo), Tencent (WeChat), Baidu Inc. (Baidu), and Renren Inc (Renren). Targeted advertising finances many of these online platforms. The companies that run them are the largest advertising agencies in the world that have access to millions or billions of users’ personal data.

Understanding social media requires us to engage with the individual and collective meanings that users, platform owners/CEOs/shareholders, companies, advertisers, politicians, and other observers give to these platforms. It also requires us to analyse how the companies operating social media try to make profits; how and which labour creates this profit; the development, contradictions, and crisis tendencies of the social media market; who creates social media ideologies; the conditions under which such ideologies emerge, etc. Understanding social media means coming to grips with the relationship of culture and the economy.

This book takes a fresh look at how we can best think about the connection of culture and the economy. It provides theoretical concepts, application examples, and political interventions for understanding culture and the economy in times of social media.

When observers such as consultants, managers, journalists, analysts, scholars, and intellectuals talk about “the economy”, they often focus on discussing the growth/stagnation/shrinkage of the gross domestic product, market developments, innovations, international competition, profits, revenues, prices, etc. and tend to care less about working conditions. This is partly because they assume that people are doing well if the economy is doing well. This can, however, not be taken for granted. The approach taken in this book and by critical political economists is different because they assume that all the just-mentioned phenomena are created by labour and that it therefore matters a lot to look at how people work and the conditions under which they do so. This book therefore has a special focus on the relationship of labour and culture. But talking about labour means in contemporary society that one also has to talk about non-labour—capital—and the relationship between the two—class. So we have to focus on culture and capitalism for understanding contemporary social media.

Part I focuses on theoretical foundations. Part II is about specific questions that concern social media’s temporalities. It focuses on social media’s cultural political economy of time. Part III takes a global view on the world of social and digital media. Its focus is on social media’s cultural political economy of global space. Part IV talks about alternatives to social media controlled by private companies and state institutions.

Each part consists of two chapters that each discuss a specific question:

Part I: Theoretical Foundations
Chapter 2:	How are culture and labour connected?
Chapter 3:	How are ideology and labour connected?
Part II:	Social Media’s Cultural Political Economy of Time
Chapter 4:	What is the role of labour time in the value creation on social media?
Chapter 5:	How is value created on social media?
Part III:	Social Media’s Cultural Political Economy of Global Space
Chapter 6:	Which forms of digital labour are there and how are they connected on a global level?
Chapter 7:	What does the political economy of social media platforms (e.g. Baidu, Weibo, Renren) look like in China?
Part IV:	Alternatives
Chapter 8:	What are alternatives to the existing problems of social media and can the notion of the public sphere help us to better understand social media alternatives and their requirements?
Chapter 9:	What conclusions can we draw from the presented chapters for understanding social media’s culture and economy?

In his book Culture & Society: 1780–1950, Raymond Williams studies British literature in the context of the rise of capitalism, which is framed by the fact that “the concept of culture, in its modern senses, came through at the time of the Industrial Revolution” (Williams 1958, ix). Whereas Williams focused on an analysis of the works of authors such as George Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, or George Orwell, this book is about contemporary social media such as Google, Baidu, Twitter, Weibo, Facebook, and Renren. Literature is as alive today as it was in the nineteenth century and written expression has taken on additional forms such as the blog. What has not changed, however, is that just like in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Williams studied, in the twenty-first century, which is the temporal context of this book, we still live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is the major context for twenty-first-century social media just like it was for eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and communication that Raymond Williams studied. We therefore require a critical political economy of media and culture for understanding historical and contemporary modes of communicative expression.

PART I

Theoretical Foundations

2

CULTURE AND WORK

Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval

2.1. Introduction

This chapter discusses the relationship between culture and work. It applies a ­materialist perspective that is especially inspired by Raymond Williams’s works that he characterized as cultural materialism. Williams has been described by observers as “the greatest cultural theorist of modern Britain” (McGuigan 2014, xv) and “the first to see the essential interconnectedness of economic, political, social and cultural developments” (Scannell 2007, 111). “Williams’s importance lies precisely in his at times highly critical but nonetheless lifelong allegiance to socialism as a political movement and to historical materialism as an intellectual project” (Garnham 1988, 130).

Section 2.2. introduces a cultural-materialist perspective on theorising culture. Section 2.3. discusses a materialist concept of cultural work based on this approach. Section 2.4. draws a distinction between cultural work and cultural labour. Section 2.5. introduces a typology of the dimensions of working conditions. Section 2.6 discusses the anti-work philosophy and argues against it to revive William Morris and Herbert Marcuse’s understandings of work. We draw some conclusions in section 2.7.

There is a latent debate between Vincent Mosco and David Hesmondhalgh about how to define cultural and communication work and where to draw the boundaries. According to Hesmondhalgh cultural industries “deal primarily with the industrial production and circulation of texts” (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 16). Thus cultural industries include for him broadcasting, film, music, print and electronic publishing, video and computer games, advertising, marketing and public relations, web design. Cultural labour is therefore according to this understanding all labour conducted in these industries. Cultural labour deals “primarily with the industrial production and circulation of texts” (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 17). Following this definition Hesmondhalgh describes cultural work as “the work of symbol creators” (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 20).

Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher argue for a much broader definition of communication work, including “anyone in the chain of producing and distributing knowledge products” (Mosco and McKercher 2009, 25). In the case of the book industry, this definition includes not only writers but equally librarians and also printers.

Hesmondhalgh’s definition of cultural industries and cultural work focuses on content production. Such a definition tends to exclude digital media, information and communications technology hardware, software, and Internet phenomena such as social media and search engines. It thereby makes the judgment that content industries are more important than digital media industries. It is idealistic in that it focuses on the production of ideas and excludes the fact that these ideas can only be communicated based on the use of physical devices, computers, software, and the Internet. For Hesmondhalgh (2013, 19) software engineers for example are not cultural workers because he considers their work activity as “functional” and its outcomes not as text with social meaning. Software engineering is highly creative: it is not just about creating a piece of code that serves specific purposes, but also about writing the code by devising algorithms, which poses logical challenges for the engineers. Robert L. Glass (2006) argues that software engineering is a complex form of problem solving that requires a high level of creativity that he terms “software creativity”. Software is semantic in multiple ways: (a) when its code is executed, each line of the code is interpreted by the computer which results in specific operations; (b) when using a software application online or offline our brains constantly interpret the presented information; (c) software supports not only cognition but also communication and collaboration and therefore helps humans create and reproduce social meaning. Software engineers are not just digital workers. They are also cultural workers. Considering software engineers as functional dupes, as Hesmondhalgh does, is a form of Arnoldian elitism that separates the realm of digital work from the activities performed by the creators of popular culture who are considered as higher beings performing higher forms of work.

Hesmondhalgh opposes Mosco’s and McKercher’s broad definition of cultural work because “such a broad conception risks eliminating the specific importance of culture, of mediated communication, and of the content of communication products” (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011, 60). Our view is that there are many advantages of a broad definition as

• It avoids “cultural idealism” (Williams 1977, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1 Theoretical Foundations
• PART 2 Social Media's Cultural Political Economy of Time
• PART 3 Social Media's Cultural Political Economy of Global Space
• PART 4 Alternatives
• reference
• Index