Produser Commodity
= The category of the prosumer commodity/produser commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity.
Discussion
Christian Fuchs [1]:
"The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the Internet is that in the latter the users are also content producers: there is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building and content production. That the users are more active on the Internet than in the reception of television or radio content is due to the decentralized structure of the Internet that allows many-to-many communication. Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as prosumers, I would in the case of the Internet argue that the audience commodity is a prosumer commodity or produser commodity. The category of the prosumer commodity/produser commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity. Much of the time spent online produces profit for large corporations like Google, NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) or Yahoo (which owns Flickr). Advertisements on the Internet are frequently personalized. This is possible by surveilling, storing and assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases. This is another difference to television and radio, which due to their centralized structure provide less individualized content and advertisements. But in the area of the traditional mass media also, one can observe a certain shift as, for instance, in the case of pay-per-view, televotings, talkshows and call-in TV and radio shows. In the case of the Internet, the commodification of audience participation is easier to achieve than on other mass media.
The rise of the Internet prosumer commodity also shows that the visions of critical theorists like Benjamin, Brecht or Enzensberger of an emancipatory media structure has today been subsumed under capital. New media do carry a certain potential for advancing grassroots socialism, but this potential is antagonistically entangled in the dominant structures and it is unclear if the capitalist integument can be stripped away. Personalized advertisement on the Internet is an expression of the tendency towards what Deleuze has termed the ‘Society of Control’ as an aspect of contemporary marketing and capitalism, in the sense that individuals are activated to continuously participate in and integrate themselves into the structures of exploitation (see Fuchs 2008: 149ff.), during as well as outside wage labour time.
The more users make use of advertisement-based free online platforms and the more time they spend online producing, consuming and exchanging content, communicating with others, the higher the value of the prosumer commodity they produce will become, the higher the advertisement prices will rise and the higher the profits of the specific Internet corporations will be. ‘The price that corporations pay for advertising spots on particular programmes is determined by the size and social composition of the audience it attracts’ (Murdock and Golding, 2005: 65)." (http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/ICTS_EJC.pdf)