lecture 5: social media and participation

cultural studies

culturalist approach of social media and participation

culturalist approach (Jenkins)

• participatory culture: culture in which fans other consumers are invited to actively participate in creating and circulation of news content and involves participants who interact with each other

• focus on fan communities (rather than pol. communities and communities of activists)

• a focus on participation: fans speak back to networks and producers and make culture industry respect their ideas

active audiences

• consumers/audiences play active role in spreading content: consumers are grassroots advocates for materials which are personally and socially meaningful to them

  • audiences can be seen as rebelling and resisting

  • audiences shape media flows so that culture becomes far more participatory

participatory environment

• relatively low barriersto artistic expression and civic engagement

• strong support for creating and sharing creations with others

• some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

• members have the believe that their contributions have effect

• members feel some degree of social connection with one another

problems with culturalist approach: pol. economy critique

• ignores questions about ownership of platforms/companies, collective decision-making profit, etc.

• ignores issues related to social inequality

• overestimates cognitive capabilties of people

• => we may never live in society where every member able to fully participate

but what is participation?

• participation as object of struggle

  • partial participation: process in which two/more parties influence each other in making of decisions but final power to decide rests with one party only

  • full participation: process where each individual member of decision-making body has equal power to determine outcome of decisions

ladder of participation

• non-participation: objective not to enable people to participate, but to enable power holder to educate participants

• tokenism

  • informing: one-way communications

  • consultation: inviting people to communicate their opinions

  • placation: selection of have-nots are entitled to advice, while power holders still have the right to decide

• citizen power:

  • partnership: repsonsibilities of citizen and power holders are shared

  • delegated power: citizens achieve dominance in decision making

  • citizen control: further increased the power position of citizens

need for approach grounded in political theory

• participation as equalization of power relations between privileged and non-privileged actors in formal or informal decision-making processes

need for approach grounded in economic reality

• topic of inequality of ownership and wealth is ignored and declared to be secondary or unimportant. A truly participatory media democracy must also be an ownership of democracy

multi-dimensional approach of social media and participation

need for critical and nuanced cultural studies approach

• one of the key democratic possibilties of social media platforms is their capacity for bringing counter-discourses into circulation to wider publics

beyond the technology

• often focus on technological affordances (possibilites offered by technology, not what is realized) of social media such as instantaneous, dialogical communication that bypass traditional mass media filters

• to develop better understanding of possibilities and challenges that social media can offer pol. participation, we need to look beyond affordances

• model against determinism and reductionism, based on socially oriented media theory that conceptualizes media in context of other social institutions, shaping our sense of reality and question media’s overemphasized role for constructing social reality

four dimensions to take into account

• power relations

• affordances: possibilites

• practices: what they actually do/realize

• discourses: mini-ideologies, content, developed argumentation, representing something by selecting arguments, produce theory

discourse

• signifies certain part of social practice incorporating a particular perspective and interpretation of social reality

• as discourses condition our understandings of the world, they also condition our possibilities to act in that world. in that sense, discourses have performative power to structure pol. participation and pol. identities

• therefore, we need to pay attention to the discourses and counter-discourses that circulate on social media - and ways in which they are facilitated and constrained by social media affordances, power relations and practices

affordances

• = the action possibilties provided by and object/artefact or technological infrastructure (example, an algorithm)

• facebooks’s business model is embodied in technological affordances

• business model based on dispossession of creative expressions

• distribution system based on algorithms/social segmentation

fear of the algorithm

• social media encourage use of free info (free not neutral) and discourage search fo rdedicated info

• social media algorithms grant visibiltiy to posts in basis of reach and interaction

• possible consequence: organizations and social actors with resources, either capital to pay for reach or poeple with skills to circumvent the algorithm,a re priviliged in struggles for visibility in Facebook

• possible consequence: a lot of info what we receive via social media platforms presents one aspect of issues, bits of info, connecting like-minded users rather than challenging our presumption or offering new perspectives

practices

• what do we do with media? media practices as open set of practices relating to, or oriented around, media

• social media provide new platforms for expressing and acting out various forms of pol. participation

• some of these practices are changing power relations: news is increasingly co-constructed by bloggers, activists and journalists

power relations

• social media platforms characterised by increasing ownership concentration, with multinational media corporations such as Google and Facebook dominating majority of social media platforms

• commercial logic of popular social media platforms means that companies such as Facebook must cater for broad segments of users/advertisers, which often entails terms of service that impede anonymity and privileges copyright over subvertising, in some case eabling corporations to censor antagonistic pol. participation

practices

• however, social media have also been shown

  • to privilege formal modes of pol. participation over informal (radical and anti-systemic) modes and individual over collective participation

  • to increase surveillance from government and business

  • to manipulation and propaganda

conlusion

• power relations: social media can potentially help civil society actors access and circulate info in unprecedented ways; they are, however, embedded in unequal power relations that nedd to be considered when evaluating possibilities for civic engagement

political economy

recapitulation

• technology as ideology

  • economic transparency

  • cultural diversity

  • pol. participation

• technological determinism: technology looked at as discrete entity that has linear effects on society

• economic reductionism: complexity boiled down to its alleged economic essence, architecture of the internet articulated in dominance

the internet as an industry

participation and asymmetric information

• if there are, for example, asymmetries in terms of visibility and attention, then it is questionable that corporate social media are truly participatory

• no equal access to internet and asymmetry in capabilities of usage

  • increase rleative surplus by increasing productivity

Fuchs’ main assumption

• new capital accumulation models that wants to exploit user labour in order to raise profit rate in the digital media industry

• he refers to Marx’ value theory of labour

  • commodities are sold at prices higher than investment costs so that profit is generated

  • = surplus value, value not needed for survival (reproduction)

  • => inequality. how? capitalist appropriates part of the labour time, i.e. part of the surplus value

user commofification

• different means to increase revenue and productivity enhanced by social media

  • targeted advertising: on basis of accurate customer information, advertisement can be tailored and distributed more effectively and cheaply

  • extensive market monitoring: clicks are monitored and resold as marketing data

  • prosumption: users consume information that has been produced by themselves

• in all these instances, part of production (or labour time) is ransferred from producer on the consumer

  • consumer now at least partly become producer of his/her own consumption

• social media and mobile internat make audience commofity ubiquitous, internet user commodification part of tendency of commodification of everything that has resulted in generalization of factory and exploitation.

in addition…

• corporations surveillance of the prosumers permanently produces use value (personal data and interactions, enables targeted advertising aimed at luring prosumers into consumption and shopping). also aims at manipulating prosumers’ desires and needs in interest of corporations and commodities they offer

economy and ideology

• commercial social media are spheres of exploitation user labour and at same time objects of ideological mystifications that ideolize social media in order to detract attention from tehir class character or advance attraction of investors and creation and expansion of spheres of capital accumulation. commercial social media show that exploitation/capital accumulation and ideology are two important and entangled dimensions of the media in capitalism

Fuchs’ conclusion

• internet and social media are stratified, non-participatory spaces and an alternative, non-corporate internet is needed

• simplifying: internet revolution needed through which the people take over internet (thus global factory)

critique

• Fuchs: set of theories of both economy and polity designed for very differnt conditions

  • critique: not required to go back but to go beyond, which takes into account the real theoretical inadequancies of Marxism and lessons learnt by pol. economists

• Fuchs examplifies common failing of return to Marxism literature - its essentially religious cast, operating though ritual incantation of texts rather thanthrough argument and evidence

• problem faced by capitlaism’s Marxist critics not extraction fo surplus in production but problem of distribution

• it’s not clear that it tells us anything useful about position of media users withing capitalism