Chapter 5: The power and Political economy on Social media

5.1 & 5.2

To study power, one has to study both ideology and political economy. Making a critical analysis of the power structure of Twitter, one need to study both economy and ideological aspects. Participatory democracy theory have two main feature. First, the understanding that democracy is more than voting; for instance culture and economy are also areas of democracy. The theory is also questioning if participatory democracy and capitalism can work together.

Social media is not an open public sphere, it is a place colonialized by multimedia companies. People who celebrate social media as a democratic and political power tool, fail to see that they celebrate a capitalist ideology, they fail to see how the internet is shaped mostly by capitalist interests. Big companies own the social media sphere, and therefor they are the ones who decide what freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in social media is.

5.3 Capital accumulation and social media

Many companies use the Internet to target their customers in order to increase the income. By using Internet they can use different advertisements and many ads at the same time to different user groups depending on the users’ interests and online behavior. For advertisers internet is a good tool for reaching out to customers, because the advertisers can show more advertisement that are likely to fit the interests of the users in the same period as non-targeting advertising, for example the television. With the rise of user-generated content, free-access social networking platforms, that yield profit by online advertisement and have many users, the advertisement has a better effect on the customers. With users uploading photos and images, writing wall posting and comments, sending email to their contacts, accumulating friends or browsing other profiles on Facebook, they constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. In order to do targeted advertisement, the corporate web must monitor and record personal data and online activities and then store, merge and analyze the collected data. This allows them to create detailed user profiles and to know about the users’ personal interests and online behaviors. Social media that are based on targeted advertisement sell this information to advertisers to allow them economic surveillance. The more the companies are willing to pay, the more information they get from the internet users.

 5.4 Free labour and slave labour

With the Internet and social media also come a lot of problems. The existence of digital media is based on various forms of the exploited. Even if they all work with the same thing – digital media – but in various forms of labour, their value is based on how much profit they can give the advertisers. For example the ones with the highest salaries are the bourgeoisies of highly-paid workers in Internet companies. Then there are the low-paid precarious knowledge worker, unpaid Internet users and the highly exploited workers in developing countries. The ones with lowest value for the capitalists are the slave workers, with very little salary, who extract minerals that are used as raw materials in digital media. This also gives the problem with commercial social media, which idealize social media in order to detract attention from their class character. Or they simply want to advance the attraction of investors. In the end, it is all about profit. 

Erik Elmrud och Amanda Lindqvist