4
So far, we have placed the focus on the activity of audiences, exploring how audiences participate in the media circuit of culture and communication. This chapter shifts the focus to highlight how media industries understand, control, and commodify audiences (especially in a participatory culture). To put it simply and to contextualize earlier material, “the more people occupy fandom as an identity, the more media industries will capitalize on turning that identity into a site of commodification.”[1] We have, to this point, emphasized the explosion of (and the implications for) opportunities for user generated content, charting the ways in which audiences have been viewed as passive receivers, and then active consumers, and finally productive users. But it is useful to also clarify that audiences are not simply players in an information society, but players in an information economy. And as much as we can celebrate the resistant practices of fandoms revelling in their exploits, we must also recognize that these same fans are being exploited by the media industries in which they operate.
For “media still depend on human participation, but now users are also supplying content. And they are doing so free of charge to media owners who profit from their labor in blogs, vlogs, social-networking sites, citizen journalism, and even advertising.”[2]
We exist in a situation where we can profit as individuals from our active engagement in participatory culture, but at the same time, others profit from our activity. Audiences don’t just consume media commodities; in the act of consumption, audiences become commodities. Before we examine how this happens with produsers, we need to widen our aperture a bit and examine how this happens with everyone. And to do so, we ought to clarify what this perspective on audiences is all about (hint: it’s about power, but it doesn’t presume that audiences have it or are simply taking it back).
The concept of the “audience commodity” comes from the Canadian Political Economist Dallas Smythe who “stressed the importance of studying media and communication in a critical and non-administrative way”[3] He argued that too much marxist critique of the media focused on their ideological manipulation of audiences. Instead of emphasizing the degree to which the media operated as part of the “superstructure” of society, influencing the way people think and shaping their consciousness, Smythe emphasized the economic base of the media, focusing on the economic functions they serve in capitalism. While media obviously still function ideologically, encouraging beliefs, attitudes and ideas, the construction of “false consciousness” wasn’t as important as its material function, both encouraging audiences to buy commodities and delivering those audiences to advertisers as commodities. Smythe “wanted to open up the debate for also giving attention to the media’s capital accumulation strategies that are coupled to its role as mind manager.”[