MCJ 401: Communication and
Information Technologies
Seventh Semester 2022
Mass Communication and Journalism
University of Dhaka
Political Economy of New Media
Political economy of communication
• One of the major perspectives in communication research.
• It has become popular since 1940s.
• Political economy studies social relations, particularly power relations,
which mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of
resources.
• Communication is one of many resources. For example, a Hollywood
movie moves through certain producers (Time Warner, Walt Disney, etc.)
to distributors (Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., etc.) and, finally, to
consumers in theatres or in their living rooms.
Political Economy of Communication
• It also directs us to the ways consumer choices, such as the
websites we visit and the television shows we watch, are fed back
into decisions that companies make about new media products.
• Furthermore, it asks us to focus on how information about these
choices and even our attention to media become products for sale
in the marketplace.
Political Economy of Communication
• Three prominent figures in North America:
• Dallas Smythe – one of the founding figures of the political economy of
communication.
• Vincent Mosco (The Political Economy of Communication (1996))
• Herbert Schiller
• Their work and, through their influence, a great deal of the research in
North America has been driven more explicitly by a sense of injustice that
the communication industry has become an integral part of a wider
corporate order which is both exploitative and undemocratic.
Political Economy of Communication
• They both developed a research program that charts the growth in
power and influence of transnational media companies throughout the
world.
• North American communication scholarship has called for a renewed
critique of global capitalism, including its use of information and
communication technologies, and its media practices.
Political Economy of Communication
• Three prominent figures in Europe:
• Nicholas Garnham
• Peter Golding
• Graham Murdock
• Their works have emphasized class power and the fundamental inequalities that
continue to divide rich from poor.
• They document the vast expansion and integration of the communication industry,
its connection to government power, and its integration into the wider system of
capitalism. Media reinforce social class divisions and help to build solidarity within
a dominant class.
Political Economy of ICT
• Research literature on ICT exists in abundance.
• Hardly any research on political economy of research.
• Since the social and economic relations are not based on equality, it is imperative that we
analyse and observe deeply the political economy of new media.
• Traditional focus of research:
• How to increase access
• Content
• Development
• gender
Political Economy of ICT
• However, these studies scarcely takes into account social structure and the existing
power processes in it.
• Political economy of ICT:
• Particular historical context/circumstances
• In which new media products are manufactured (within a capitalistic system)
• And how these circumstances influence the consumption of these products.
• It also focuses on symbolic form, content, meaning.
The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook
• According to [Link] (February, 2020), Facebook is the fourth most
popular website in the world.
• Given the fact that Facebook is a tremendously successful project, it is an
important research task to critically analyze the economic structures and
the power relations of the platform.
• Analysis of the political economy of privacy and surveillance on
Facebook means that the task is to show how privacy on Facebook is
connected to surplus value, exploitation, and class.
The Liberal Concept of Privacy
• It is a typical American liberal belief that strengthening privacy can cause
no harm.
• Some form of data protection is needed.
• Countries like Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, or Austria have a
tradition of relative anonymity for bank accounts and transactions.
• Money as private property is seen as an aspect of privacy, which means
that financial information tends to be kept secret and withheld from the
public.
The Liberal Concept of Privacy
• In many countries, information about income and the profits of companies
(except for public companies) is treated as a secret, a form of financial
privacy.
• The problem of secret bank accounts/transactions and the
nontransparency of wealth and company profits is not only that financial
privacy can support tax evasion, black market affairs, and money
laundering, but also that it hides wealth gaps.
• Financial privacy reflects the classical liberal definition of privacy.
The Liberal Concept of Privacy
• Economic privacy under capitalism (the right to keep information about
income, profits, and bank transactions secret) protects companies and the
wealthy.
• The anonymity of wealth, high incomes, and profits makes income and
wealth gaps between the rich and the poor invisible and thereby
ideologically helps legitimate and uphold these gaps.
• Financial privacy is an ideological mechanism that helps reproduce and
deepen inequality.
The Liberal Concept of Privacy
• Capitalism protects privacy for the rich and companies, but,
at the same time, legitimates violations of consumers’ and
citizens’ privacy.
• When discussing privacy on Facebook, we should try to
advance a socialist concept of privacy that aims at
strengthening the protection of consumers and citizens from
corporate surveillance and other forms of domination.
The Liberal Concept of Privacy
• Economic privacy should be considered as undesirable when
it protects the rich and capital from public accountability.
• But as desirable when it tries to protect citizens, workers, and
consumers from corporate surveillance.
• In a socialist conception of privacy, the existing privacy
values have to be reversed.
A Socialist Concept of Privacy
• A socialist conception of privacy focuses on surveillance of capital and the rich
in order to increase transparency and privacy protections for consumers and
workers.
• A socialist conception of privacy conceives privacy as a collective right of
exploited groups that need protection from corporate domination that uses data
gathering:
• for accumulating capital,
• for disciplining workers and consumers, and
• for increasing the productivity of capitalist production and advertising.
A Socialist Concept of Privacy
• Privacy for dominant groups and the secrecy of their wealth and
power is problematic.
• However, privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for
consumers, workers, and normal citizens is a protection from
dominant interests.
• Privacy rights should therefore be differentiated according to
the position people and groups occupy in the power structure.
Privacy of Facebook
• In relation to Facebook, therefore, the main privacy issue is
not how much information users make available to the public.
• Rather: which user-data are used by Facebook for -
• advertising purposes;
• in which sense users are exploited in this process;
• and how users can be protected from the negative consequences of
economic surveillance on Facebook.
Privacy of Facebook
• Therefore, Facebook should reveal what data the platform
stores about its users, and users should be protected from
Facebook’s economic exploitation of their data.
• Mainstream research about Facebook and social networking
sites in general consider privacy threatened because users
would disclose too much information about themselves.
Privacy of Facebook
• They conceive privacy strictly as an individual phenomenon
that can be protected if users behave in the correct way and
do not disclose too much information.
• These studies ignore how Facebook commodifies data and
exploits users.
• Data: societal desires to express ourselves.
Privacy of Facebook
• Alvin Toffler (1980) introduced the notion of the ‘prosumer’ in the
early 1980s.
• It means the “progressive blurring of the line that separates producer
from consumer” (Toffler 1980, 267).
• Toffler describes the age of prosumption as the arrival of a new form
of economic and political democracy, self-determined work, labor
autonomy, local production, and autonomous self-production.
Privacy of Facebook
• But he overlooks that prosumption is used for outsourcing work to users and
consumers, who work without pay.
• In this model, corporations reduce their investment costs and labor costs,
destroy jobs, and exploit consumers who work for free.
• Free labor produces surplus value that is appropriated and turned into
corporate profit.
• Observers of Facebook argue that it exploits them by making profit with the
help of their data.
Privacy of Facebook
• Facebook sells the users’ data commodity to advertising clients at a price that is
larger than the invested capital.
• The surplus value contained in this commodity is partly created by the users,
partly by the Facebook employees.
• The difference is that the users are unpaid, and therefore infinitely exploited.
• Once the internet prosumer commodity (which contains the user-generated
content, transaction data,) is sold to advertising clients, the commodity is
transformed into monetary capital and surplus value is realized into money.
Privacy of Facebook
• In the case of Facebook, the exploitation of surplus value is not merely
accomplished by those who are employed for programming, updating, and
maintaining the soft- and hardware, performing marketing activities, and so on,
but by the users and prosumers that engage in the production of user-generated
content.
• A widely-used accumulation strategy is to give the users free access to services
and platforms, let them produce content, and to accumulate a mass of prosumers
that are sold as a commodity to third-party advertisers.
• No product is sold to the users; the users are sold as a commodity to advertisers.
Privacy of Facebook
• Facebook closely monitors users’ contacts, communication, and data,
selling this information to companies, which then send targeted
advertisements to them. Facebook thus profits and could not exist without
the unpaid labor that millions of Facebook workers conduct.
• Surveillance of Facebook prosumers occurs via corporate web platform
operators and third-party advertising clients, which continuously monitor
and record personal data and online activities.
• The exploitation of digital playbour is based on the collapse of the
distinction between work time and play time.
