From Corporate to Social Media

Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries

Marisol Sandoval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317936046
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The corporate and the social are crucial themes of our times. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, both individual lives and society were shaped by capitalist crisis and the rise of social media. But what marks the distinctively social character of "social media"? And how does it relate to the wider social and economic context of contemporary capitalism? The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is based on the idea that a socially responsible capitalism is possible; this suggests that capitalist media corporations can not only enable social interaction and cooperation but also be socially responsible.

This book provides a critical and provocative perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in media and communication industries. It examines both the academic discourse on CSR and actual corporate practices in the media sector, offering a double critique that reveals contradictions between corporate interests and social responsibilities. Marisol Sandoval's political economic analysis of Apple, AT&T, Google, HP, Microsoft, News Corp, The Walt Disney Company and Vivendi shows that media and communication in the twenty-first century are confronted with fundamental social responsibility challenges.

From software patents and intellectual property rights to privacy on the Internet, from working conditions in electronics manufacturing to hidden flows of eWaste – this book encourages the reader to explore the multifaceted social (ir)responsibilities that shape commercial media landscapes today. It makes a compelling argument for thinking beyond the corporate in order to envision and bring about truly social media. It will interest students and scholars of media studies, cultural industry studies, sociology, information society studies, organization studies, political economy, business and management.

1 Introduction

The corporate as well as the social are guiding themes of our times. Capitalist crisis and the rise of so-called social media both shaped society and individual lives in the first decade of the twenty-first century: while corporations struggled with decreasing profits, thousands of people lost their homes, their jobs and experienced the brute force of crisis-prone capitalism. At the same time, the online world became a symbol for unprecedented levels of sociality, enabling interaction, communication and cooperation. From user participation in the production of media content, to the rise of online communities and social networks, to so-called “Twitter rebellions and revolutions”, online media promised to restore the social in times of increasing individualisation and crisis. But what is the social? What marks the distinctively social character of “social media”? And how does it relate to the wider social and economic context of contemporary capitalism?

Definitions of social media generally focus on sharing, participation and cooperation. Shirky argues that social media “increase our ability to share, to cooperate, with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutional institutions and organizations” (Shirky 2008, 20f). Van Dijk stresses that

The very word “social” associated with media implies that platforms are user centered and that they facilitate communal activities, just as the term “participatory” emphasizes human collaboration. Indeed, social media can be seen as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks – webs of people that promote connectedness as a social value.

(van Dijck 2013, 11)

According to boyd the term social media “is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in some cases collaborate or play” (boyd 2009). Often used synonymous with the notion web 2.0, most understandings of the term social media highlight the active involvement of users in the production of content, that is user-generated content (O’Reilly 2005; Harrison and Barthel 2009, 157; boyd 2009, 16; van Dijck 2009, 41; Gauntlett 2011, 18; Terranova and Donvan 2013, 297).

The question of how to define social media focuses on qualities such as collaboration, communication, participation and sharing. Following this rhetoric new technologies increase the degree of social interaction and thus make certain media social. Definitions of social media tend to imply that only online media can be social, while other media such as the telephone, newspapers, TV or radio are not. By regarding the sociality of the media as a question of technology, such analyses furthermore remain limited to the level of the technological productive forces. Karl Marx argued that productive forces include labour power, raw materials, and means of production such as technologies and machines (Marx 1867/1990). Productive forces are, however, always embedded within certain relations of production, understood as the social relations that determine how production, distribution and consumption are organized (Marx 1859/1994, 211).

Understandings of social media that neglect the wider social and economic context that encompasses them overlook the level of the relations of production. They therefore are unable to capture the entirety of the social and/or unsocial character of the media today. This book attempts to overcome the narrow focus of the dominant concept of social media by (a) looking at all media industries rather than only online media and by (b) focusing on the specific relations of production within which the media are embedded: in order to determine the degree of sociality in the media system as a whole, it is necessary to look beyond the technological level and to take capitalist relations of production into account. As media in capitalism are primarily provided by private corporations, this requires looking at the corporate organization of the media and at the social impact of a commercial media system.

Truly social media are media that are social both at the level of the productive forces and the relations of production. They thus are not only social in the sense that they enable social interaction, exchange and cooperation (productive forces) but also in the sense that their production, distribution and consumption are compatible with general social well-being (relations of production).

Investigating how exactly such genuinely social media can look like and how to promote their realization requires expanding the debate about social media and to focus on the (un)social character of corporate media. The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) seems to be a promising point of departure for such an endeavour: while debates around social media look at the social character of online media as productive forces, the concept of CSR is based on the idea that a socially responsible capitalism is possible and thus suggests that capitalist media corporations can also become socially responsible at the level of relations of production. This book attempts to integrate these two strands of analysis by looking at the potential of CSR to turn corporate media into truly social media.

The idea of socially responsible corporations challenges some of the basic criticisms of capitalism. Critical scholars have characterized capitalism as monstrous, unethical and predatory, rather than good, ethical and social. The monster has been used as a metaphor for unsocial behaviour that undermines and destroys the foundations of society and therefore causes social problems. It is regarded as the antidote and negation of the social and society. In the following I will refer to the metaphor of the monster for pointing at some of the objections against capitalism and contrast it with the idea of CSR, which promises the emergence of ethical corporations and a responsible capitalism. Based on this discussion I highlight the need for and describe the foundations of a critical study of CSR in media and communication industries. Finally I outline important research questions and explain the structure of this book.

Corporate media as monster media?

Throughout the history of capitalism the metaphor of the monster has been used for describing its unethical and destructive tendencies. Annalee Newitz argues that “Capitalist monsters are found in literature and art film as well as commercial fiction and movies. […] the stories fundamental message remains the same: capitalism creates monsters who want to kill you” (Newitz 2006, 3). She stresses that “[T]he history of capitalism can be told as monster story from beginning to end” (Newitz 2006, 12). Not only in popular culture, but also in economic theory the monster appears as a description of and warning against the destructive powers of capital and capitalist social relations. McNally describes “capitalism as a monstrous system, one that systematically threatens the integrity of human personhood” (McNally 2011, 3). He highlights that the economic crisis of 2008 triggered the use of metaphors of monsters, zombies and vampires to describe banks, financial markets or global corporations (McNally 2011, 2). However, as McNally points out, accounts that attribute monstrous features only to times of crises, specific corporations, or industries fail to recognize the full extent of the capitalist monstrosity:

For modernity’s monstrosities do not begin and end with shocking crises of financial markets, however wrenching and dramatic these may be. Instead, the very insidiousness of the capitalist grotesque has to do with its invisibility with, in other words, the ways in which monstrosity becomes normalized and naturalized via its colonialization of the essential fabric of everyday-life, beginning with the very texture of corporeal experience in the modern world.

(McNally 2011, 2)

Similarly Chris Harman argues that “capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around” (Harman 2011, 12).

Two of the archetypical monsters of modern Western literature – Frankenstein’s monster (1818) and Count Dracula (1879) – were invented in the midst of the rise of industrial capitalism. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) tells the story of a scientist, who is driven by the ardent desire to create a living being, but as soon as he succeeds, turns away from his creation with fear and abandons it. Warren Montag argues that Mary Shelley’s story “is incontestably interwoven” in the history of the rise of a desperate English working class: “it bears witness to the birth of that monster, simultaneously the object of pity and fear, the industrial working class” (Montag 2000, 387). Moretti (1982) interprets the ambivalent relationship between Frankenstein and his monster as the relationship between capital and wage labour: “On the one hand, the scientist cannot but create the monster”, like capital cannot but create the proletariat. The proletariat at the same time poses a threat to capital, like the monster threatens Frankenstein: “On the other hand, he is immediately afraid of it and wants to kill it, because he realizes he has given life to a creature stronger than himself and of which he cannot henceforth be free” (Moretti 1982, 69).

While Frankenstein’s monster represents the proletariat that capitalism creates, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, according to Moretti, represents capital itself. These two monsters embody “two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor” (Moretti 1982, 67). Mark Neocleous argues: “[T]he vampire as monster both demonstrates the capabilities of capital and acts as a warning about it” (Neocleous 2003, 684).

What is essential to the figure of the vampire is the transgression of boundaries between life and death. The vampire is an un-dead creature, dead and alive at the same time (Neocleous 2003, 683f). Melton describes the vampire as “a reanimated corpse that rises from the grave to suck the blood of the living people and thus retain some semblance of life” (Melton 2011, xxx). The vampire in order to keep itself alive needs to suck the life-force out of the living and thus “the vampire’s gain is automatically the victim’s loss” (Dundes 2002, 27).

The metaphor of the vampire has not only been used in literature. It also repeatedly appears in Karl Marx’s descriptions of capital. Marx argued that capital came into the word “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx 1867/1990, 926). He described capital as dead labour: in order to accumulate, capital depends on the labour power of workers, which Marx described as the only source of value (Marx 1867/1990, 270). According to Marx, the capitalist thus exploits the living labour of the worker and turns it into dead labour that is capital.

Marx used the figure of the vampire for illustrating the monstrosity of this process: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (Marx 1867/1990, 342). This characterisation of capital resembles Bram Stoker’s description of the vampire that “can flourish and fatten on the blood of the living. Even more […] his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty” (Stoker 1897, 211).

Marx argued that British industry “vampirelike, could but live by sucking blood” (Marx 1864/2001, 95). Like the vampire depends on human blood, capital depends on human labour power. Marx spoke of capital’s “werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour” (Marx 1867/1990, 353), “its insatiable appetite for surplus labour” (Marx 1867/1990, 375), its “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour” (Marx 1867/1990, 367).

Capital resembles the vampire not only because both feed upon the life-force of the living, but also because both continuously expand. In Stoker’s novel vampires

cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world. For all that die from the preying of the Undead become themselves Undead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown into the water.

(Stoker 1879, 189)

Like the vampire extends its reach in circles, capital through the cycle of accumulation, continuously turns living labour into capital, which then again exploits living labour to create even more capital:

By turning his money into commodities that serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms values, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, values which can perform its own valorisation process, an animated monster which begins to “work”, as if its body were by love possessed.

(Marx 1867/1990, 302)

Like the kiss of the vampire turns a human being into another vampire, capital works as an “animated monster” that turns ever more living labour power into ever more capital. Both capital and the vampire know only one purpose: while capital’s single purpose is its constant accumulation, that is, to turn living labour into dead capital (Marx 1867/1990, 253), the only purpose of the vampire is to suck the blood of the living: “as his [count Dracula’s] intellect is small and his action based on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose. That purpose is remorseless” (Stoker 1897, 302). Moretti in this context argues: “Like capital, Dracula is impelled towards a continuous growth, an unli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Corporate social responsibility – critical perspectives
• 3 Social responsibility and the media
• 4 Towards a critical empirical case study of CSR in media and communication industries
• 5 Apple – dirty computers?
• 6 AT&T – Internet censor?
• 7 Google – evil spy?
• 8 HP – hazardous products?
• 9 Microsoft – knowledge monopoly?
• 10 News Corporation – consciousness industry?
• 11 The Walt Disney Company – nightmare factory?
• 12 Vivendi – corporate pirates?
• 13 Social (ir)responsibility in the media and communication system
• 14 The logic of property and the logic of the common in the media system
• 15 Conclusion – social media as commons based media
• References
• Index