CULTURE AND ECONOMY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Understanding social media requires us to engage with the individual and collective meanings that diverse stakeholders and participants give to platforms. It also requires us to analyse how social media companies try to make profits, how and which labour creates this profit, who creates social media ideologies, and the conditions under which such ideologies emerge. In short, understanding social media means coming to grips with the relationship between culture and the economy. In this thorough study, Christian Fuchs, one of the leading ana- lysts of the Internet and social media, delves deeply into the subject by applying the approach of cultural materialism to social media, offering readers theoreti- cal concepts, contemporary examples, and proposed opportunities for political intervention. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media is the ultimate resource for any- one who wants to understand culture and the economy in an era populated by social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google in the West and Weibo, Renren, and Baidu in the East. Updating the analysis of thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Karl Marx, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Jürgen Habermas, and Dallas W. Smythe for the twenty-first century, Fuchs presents a version of Marxist cultural theory and cultural materialism that allows us to critically under- stand social media’s influence on culture and the economy. Christian Fuchs is Professor of Social Media at the University of Westminster. He is author of Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2014), Digital Labour and Karl Marx (Routledge, 2014), OccupyMedia! (Zero Books, 2014), Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge, 2011), and Internet and Society (Routledge, 2008). This page intentionally left blank CULTURE AND ECONOMY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Christian Fuchs First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of Christian Fuchs to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuchs, Christian. Culture and economy in the age of social media/Christian Fuchs. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Social media—Economic aspects. 2. Online social networks. I. Title. HM742.F83 2015 302.30285—dc23 2014029193 ISBN: 978-1-138-83929-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-83931-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73351-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK DEDICATION This book is dedicated to the memory of the life and work of Raymond Williams and Dallas W. Smythe. May Critical Political Economy of the Media/Communication and Critical Cultural Studies forever unite under the banner of Marxist Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies! This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS List of Figures ix List of Tables xi 1 Introduction 1 PART I Theoretical Foundations 5 2 Culture and Work 7 Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval 3 Communication, Ideology, and Labour 54 PART II Social Media’s Cultural Political Economy of Time 91 4 Social Media and Labour Time 93 5 Social Media and Productive Labour 118 viii Contents PART III Social Media’s Cultural Political Economy of Global Space 205 6 Social Media’s International Division of Digital Labour 207 7 Baidu, Weibo, and Renren: The Global Political Economy of Social Media in China 246 PART IV Alternatives 313 8 Social Media and the Public Sphere 315 9 Conclusion 372 References 381 Index 402 FIGURES 2.1 A stage model of cultural work 17 2.2 The etymology of the terms “work”, “labour”, and Arbeit 24 2.3 The general work process 25 2.4 Labour as alienated work process 26 2.5 A model of modern society (Fuchs and Trottier 2013) 31 2.6 Dimensions of working conditions 33 3.1 The tripleC model of semiosis/information (see Hofkirchner 2013 for foundations of the tripleC theory) 68 3.2 The dialectic of structure and agency as a constitutive, reproductive, and transformative feature of society 70 3.3 The information process as work process 74 4.1 The logic of speed in the economic, political, and cultural systems of modern society (based on: Rosa 2005, 2012) 102 4.2 The role of time in the capitalist economy 104 4.3 Global Advertising Revenue, by Medium 2007–2011 Source: Ofcom 2012, 21 (data based on ZenithOptimedia), CAGR = compound annual growth rate 110 4.4 The commodity production process on Facebook (and other targeted advertising-based corporate social media) 113 5.1 Capital accumulation in the advertising-financed media industry 147 5.2 Capital accumulation in the mixed media industry 148 5.3 The relationships of corporate social media to the rest of the capitalist economy 157