Audience exploitation arises from users becoming commodities, not from literal work

Evidence

Words such as exploitation and labor have very specific meanings in Marxist theory, so it is worth discussing how they might be employed in the context of datafication. Strictly speaking, as Nick Srnicek observes, internet users do not receive wages, and their work is not used to lower production costs, increase productivity, and so on, so “it is hard to make the case that what they do is labor, properly speaking.” Thus, from a Marxist perspective, internet users cannot be said to form part of a working class, and we can’t say they are exploited in the traditional sense. But theorists argue that media consumers are exploited not because they literally work for media companies but because as an audience they become a commodity sold to advertisers without themselves benefiting at all (for researcher and activist Dallas Smythe, for instance, watching advertisements was a form of labor and exploitation). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Smythe’s audience-commodity thesis is the classic rival to strict Marxist reading of data work; directly relevant to whether attention/surveillance frames can absorb data colonialism. — connects to: Networked audiences force users into unpaid labor to keep their brand image pure — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 492; Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43; Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 219 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Exploiting attention is experienced as exploitation of the person themselves #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 73
• Ad-supported media sell audiences’ attention, not content, to advertisers #corroborates (0.82) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 219
• Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24