CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 76Political Economy and MarxismDigital Economy and Work TransformationMedia and Digital Communication

How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites.

Open access
Fisher, Eran·2012·tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
DOI 10.31269/triplec.v10i2.392
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Abstract: The notion of audience labour has been an important contribution to Marxist political economy of the media. It revised the traditional political economy analysis, which focused on media ownership, by suggesting that media was also a site of production, constituting particular relations of production. Such analysis highlighted the active role of audience in the creation of media value as both commodities and workers, thus pointing to audience exploitation. Recently, in light of paradigmatic transformations in the media environment – particularly the emergence of Web 2.0 and social network sites – there has been a renewed interest in such analysis, and a reexamination of audience exploitation. Focusing on Facebook as a case-study, this article examines audience labour on social network sites along two Marxist themes – exploitation and alienation. It argues for a historical shift in the link between exploitation and alienation of audience labour, concurrent with the shift from mass media to social media. In the mass media, the capacity for exploitation of audience labour was quite limited while the alienation that such work created was high. In contrast, social media allows for the expansion and intensification of exploitation. Simultaneously, audience labour on social media – because it involves communication and sociability – also ameliorates alienation by allowing self-expression, authenticity, and relations with others. Moreover, the article argues that the political economy of social network sites is founded on a dialectical link between exploitation and alienation: in order to be de-alienated, Facebook users must communicate and socialize, thus exacerbating their exploitation. And vice-versa, in order for Facebook to exploit the work of its users, it must contribute to their de-alienation.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.31269/triplec.v10i2.392

Cites

45 of 45 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

2 of the 47 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Fisher, E.
Affiliations
The Open University (GB)
Corresponding author
Fisher, Eran
ORCID
Fisher, Eran
Venue
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
Publisher
Information Society Research
Published
2012-05-25
Volume
10
Issue
2
Pages
171-183
ISSN
1726-670X (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.31269/triplec.v10i2.392
OpenAlex
W4255444434
Cited by
75
References
47
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 3 · 2013: 4
FWCI
15.82
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by-nc-nd
Locations
  • tripleC Communication Capitalism & Critique Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Economy and Marxism
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
Keywords
alienation, social network sites, Facebook, Web 2.0, social media, mass media, relations of production, media values, self-expression, sociability

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review