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Digital audiences’ disempowerment: Participation or free labour
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Volume 13, Issue 1
May 2016
Digital audiences’ disempowerment:
Participation or free labour
Lucia Vesnić-Alujević,
Independent Researcher, Italy
Maria Francesca Murru,
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy
Abstract:
The appearance of digital interactive technologies opened up space where the audiences
can express themselves freely through the user generated content. Often these new
possibilities have been associated with the concepts of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’
on one side, and ‘free labour’ and ‘exploitation’ on the other. Through literature published
during the past decade, this paper explores the relationship, tensions and connections
between different perspectives of cultural studies and political economy on these
phenomena. In some places this relationship is explained more directly, in the others
indirectly. While the cultural studies perspective considers media users as active and
productive, the political economy perspective looks at the audience’s activities as producing
profit for media industries.
As both perspectives are important and interlaced in audiences’ experiences, this
essay argues that there is a need for more studies that will try to build bridges between
participation and labour. This brings novelties and openings in the area of intersection of
cultural studies and political economy.
Keywords: participation, labor, digital technologies, cultural studies, political economy
Introduction
With the emergence of digital interactive technologies and the appearance of web 2.0,
many audiences’ studies have started to look at the active role of audiences, through the
production and creation of content. This ‘participatory’ turn has often been framed in terms
Volume 13, Issue 1
May 2016
Page 423
of civic and cultural ‘empowerment’, a buzzword that is especially present in the policy
makers’ discourses and industry that relies on techno-scientific utopia and imaginaries,
through which technology is presented as having a salvational role for the society (Van den
Hove et al, 2011; Benessia, 2013). Political economy scholars, such as Andrejevic (2009),
who base their work on Marxist theory, are equally interested in these changes but look at
them from another perspective. They use, instead, the concept of ‘free labour’ and
exploitation in relation to the user-generated content. Which of these concepts is used is
important, because it is connected to the ideas of power and control in the (digital) society.
Despite the different perspectives of cultural studies and political economy, this new
phenomenon is one of the dominant themes in digital audience research. As it consists of
two different perspectives, we argue that a merging view that would comprehend both, is
necessary. In this essay, we looked at 35 articles in the area of audience studies, published
in the period 2005-2015. For the purpose of selection, we used specific keywords (such as
participation, active audience, labour, produsage, playbor, exploitation) and the Google
Scholar database of published articles and books or book chapters. Based on a grounded
theory approach, we created 20 categories in the coding scheme. Through selected
literature, this essay explores the tensions between different views regarding participation,
empowerment, free labour and democratisation of production. It examines the relation
among these concepts and argues about the way they could complement each other.
Two exclusionary perspectives
Besides many old, new and revisited concepts that the analysed articles use (in relation to
free labour, participation, empowerment and so on), the main theme that we were looking
for was the relationship between labour and participation nowadays. In some places this
relationship is explained more directly, in others indirectly. While the cultural studies
perspective considers media users as active and productive and thus reception as subjective
– i.e. the audience is actively engaged in media texts – the political economy perspective
looks at the audience’s activities as producing profit for media industries that take
advantage of the ‘surplus watching’ (Bolin 2012). In cultural theory, user agency is
connected to participatory engagement, while in political economy it is a part of production
more than consumption, and in labour relations users are seen as amateur producers
compared to working professionals. For instance, Andrejevic (2008) agrees that
participation, defined as ‘creative activity’ and labour, i.e. ‘exploitation’, co-exists in the
online economy and he refers to it as ‘the exploitation of participation as a form of labour’.
However, as a political economist, Andrejevic opposes Jenkins’ (1988, 1992) views, which
are from a cultural theory perspective, that audience participation has some kind of
subversive character. According to him, it is nothing more than the exploitation of free
labour.
One of the rare authors who tries to embrace both the cultural studies and political
economy perspectives is Bolin (2012). By looking at both traditional and digital media, he
argues that the web 2.0 user produces aesthetic and social values through social labour as
Volume 13, Issue 1
May 2016
Page 424
well as user-generated content, which is appropriated by industries in order to make profit.
But he also states that while interacting with friends on Facebook for example, our activities
are framed by advertisements that are presented to us, which are calculated and do not
always represent our needs, but economic power relations.
Acknowledging as unavoidable the blurring of boundaries between production and
consumption, and between meaning and work (Deuze, 2009), some contributions have
proposed new concepts that try to embrace this constitutive duality. This is for instance the
case of ‘playbour’ (Fuchs & Sevignani, 2013) through which the authors try to grasp the
merging of ‘play’ and ‘labour’ in online activity. But the playful creativity that is experienced
by users is ultimately sold to advertising companies as a data commodity (Fuchs &
Sevignani, 2013).
1. Participation (Cultural Studies)
The notion of participation has attracted a growing interest among scholars of media and
communication to such an extent that a new research paradigm, entirely focused on how
media enables or impedes participation in society, seems to be gaining ground (Livingstone,
2013). While acknowledging how flawed the metaphor of paradigm is when applied to the
field of audience research, Livingstone (ibid) highlights some fundamental changes occurring
both in the object and in the purposes of research. Firstly, the centrality of participation is
closely related to the capillary mediatisation of society. More than through a noun
indicating a social entity circumscribed in time and space, the current relationship between
people and the media can be efficaciously grasped by the verb of ‘audiencing’ (Fiske, 1992),
intended as a vital mode of engaging with all the spheres of life through and within media.
As far as audiences are becoming more participatory, and participation to society is ever
more mediated, the agenda of audience research has undertaken a normative stance in
exploring to what extent participation to an audience is conducive of participation in
culture, community, civil society or democracy. This normative stance is exceptionally
relevant for the literature review we are following here because it has illuminated some of
the ambiguities that bring participation to structurally intersect with labour and
commodification of grassroots production. A clear articulation of this normative stance can
be found in the written dialogue on participation and politics between Jenkins and
Carpentier (2013). Both scholars attribute to participation the quality of utopia, and agree in
acknowledging that a proper participatory culture will remain an unachievable ideal,
constantly hindered by the conservative tendencies of elitist forces. Therefore, the criticalnormative
approach springs from the need of preserving this never-to-be-reached ideal
from becoming an inflated empty signifier that can be applied to deeply differentiated
media domains. Platforms for content-sharing and social networking have constructed their
social perception on a promise of participation that is up to user to actualize. Analysing the
discursive work done by online content providers as YouTube to position themselves to
users, clients, advertisers, Gillespie (2010) shows as the notion of ‘platform’ has been
efficacious ‘to make a broadly progressive sales pitch while also eliding the tensions
Volume 13, Issue 1
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Page 425
inherent in their service: between user-generated and commercially-produced content,
between cultivating community and serving up advertising’ (Ivi, p. 348). Proclaiming itself to
be ‘committed to offering the best user experience and the best platform for people to
share their videos around the world’ (YouTube, 2006, quoted in Gillespie, 2010, p. 352),
YouTube is exploiting the semantic richness of ‘platform’ hinging on both its political
resonance - ‘a place from which to speak and be heard’ - and architectural connotation - ‘in
that YouTube is designed as an open-armed, egalitarian, facilitation of expression, not an
elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical restrictions’ (Gillespie, 2010, p. 352). The
reassuring effect exerted by technical neutrality and progressive openness, allows
mediators like YouTube to ride the long-standing Web 2.0 rhetoric about user-generated
content and peer networking, while concealing the substantial work of gatekeeping they
carry out in selecting ‘what can appear, how it is organized, how it is monetized, what can
be removed and why, and what the technical architecture allows and prohibits’ (Ibid, p.359).
What is happening, in Jenkins words, is that these platforms are ‘over-promis(ing) and
under-deliver(ing) in terms of their promises of participation’ (Jenkins, Carpentier, 2013, p.
273). They promise to be at the service of the community but ultimately their constraints on
content ownership and circulation break down that logic of gift and freedom on which
participatory cultural production is based. It is therefore helpful to get back to the
etymologic sources of the term ‘participation’, as Livingstone (2013) does, to remind that,
according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word indicates the ‘state of being related
to a larger whole’. The distinction between participation in the media and through the
media, introduced a long time ago by Wasko and Mosco (1992), is no longer a sufficient
compass in an era where platforms such as Facebook and YouTube constitute efficient and
low-cost tools that can be used both for the self-production of media tools and for the
extensive participation in public debate. The ambiguity inherent in current networked
media resides exactly in the ‘whole’ that is pointed out by the etymology of the term, in that
this whole is at the same time the community and the public that are addressed and
mobilised by user-generated content, and it is also the economic system that is sustained by
grassroots production and whose working rules are completely out of their users’ control.
For Jenkins, the abstract promise of participation can be in itself a driver for solving this
structural ambiguity insofar as it brings users who rely upon it to struggle for achieving a
reality closer to their democratic utopia and for making platforms accountable and
responsive to its members (p. 272). From this statement, it comes that the acceptance of
the normative stance that is inherent to participation paradigm does not require us to
deflect the research focus from what users experience as creators and collaborators in their
use of media, and from the motivations and gratifications that bring them to play active
roles within these collaborative activities. A promising but still not enough explored
research path is that of conducting qualitative comparisons of the processes of produsage
with those that characterize ‘consumption communities’ and ‘grassroots creativity’
(Harrison, Barthel, 2009). This could help in uncovering those institutionalized or top-down
genres of participation that, according to Livingstone (2013), are materialized in
Volume 13, Issue 1
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Page 426
recognizable social and semiotic conventions through which media practices are actualized
and interpreted.
On the contrary, Carpentier makes claims for a normative closure of the notion of
participation. Its material and actionist consistence doesn’t allow us to ascribe its meanings
to how we think or feel about it (Dahlgren, 2011, p. 8, quoted in Jenkins, Carpentier, 2013,
p. 275). It’s for this reason that he proposes to restrict participation to the real practices of
involvement in decision-making processes and closely related to that ‘political dimension’
that ontologically pertains to every social domain (Mouffe, 2005). From this perspective,
being critical in regard to participation means to resort to a conceptual anchoring point
through which variable participatory intensities can be detected and assessed in effective
media practices. While distinguishing between access, interaction and participation
(Carpentier, 2011), Carpentier defines the latter as equal distribution of power in decisionmaking
process. Cultural participation, intended as the development of ‘latent capacities’ in
terms of our ability to form and navigate through social networks, to create and circulate
images (Zuckerman, 2013), is going to be effective only within a media culture where
equality of power relations encompasses all the different levels of media production
(Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013, p. 271). Both in its radical or moderate versions, the cultural
perspective on participation offers a conceptual fine-tuning and a set of new vocabularies
that may shorten the distance from the research focus on labour that will be discussed in
the following paragraph.
2. Labour (Digital Political Economy)
The notion of labour, either as labour exploitation in Marxist terms or the revisited notion of
free or immaterial labour, has been the leading concept present in the political economy
literature. The concepts of surveillance and control are discussed together with the notion
of labour and furthermore they are intertwined with it. Another new and important
phenomenon that can be found in the selected literature is the phenomenon of
‘crowdsourcing’.
Democratic character of the Internet and commodification of users
From the beginning of its existence, the Internet has been considered as inherently
democratic. The renewed deterministic techno-optimism is often seen through the
discourses of the democratisation of media and society through Internet (Fuchs, 2009).
Fuchs and Sevignani (2013) stress that online corporate platforms are always presented in a
positive light, as a part of democratic and participatory culture. For instance they were seen
as main instruments of the Arab Spring or as creators of a more open and connected world.
The negative impact of the Internet is often left out, which creates a very positive
perception of the internet among general audiences. In fact, the concept of Internet and
especially web 2.0 (or read-write web) is usually followed by attributes such as democratic,
participatory, or a stress on the role of users (Fisher, 2012). And consequently, through the
Volume 13, Issue 1
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creation of pleasure and usefulness, they become domesticated. This is connected to Marx’s
concept of the ‘social individual’, whereby the development of individual is a condition for
the development of all. In the Marxist tradition, Fisher (2012) connects participation with
capitalism and discusses the transformation of users into ‘losers’, and the role of active
audiences changes from meaning-making (Birmingham school) to money-making. This
process happens as use becomes a practice similar to work. It is not new that the mass
media are seen as the vendors of the audience commodity to advertisers (Smythe, 1994). In
this way, both media and audience became keys for the existence of capitalism. In addition,
while on television, users’ data are sold as a commodity, and in the world of web 2.0, users’
content is commodified. Therefore, Smythe’s (1994) concept of audiences as a commodity is
particularly suitable here. But, as users are at the same time consumers and producers of
information, Fuchs (2009) suggests the transformation of Smythe’s concept into a new
notion of ‘internet prosumer commodification’. He goes even further, by suggesting the
creation of a term ‘the total commodification of human creativity’ seen in the Internet era
(Fuchs, 2009, p.82).
Exploitation and participation or labor power = communication power
The exploitation of users is possible through the architecture of participation that allows the
companies to use the participatory potential and user-generated content to create profit
through making interfaces or other strategies, as well as through the creation of the
platforms such as social media that allow user-generated content (Fisher, 2012). That is why
Fisher (2012) argues that there is a need for a new theory of labour that will capture both
exploitation and free labour. One of the recurrent arguments when discussing the digital
labour is that users are not exploited, as they use a platform because they enjoy doing so, or
because they find it useful in order to socialize with other humans, since a considerable part
of communication nowadays takes place online. An interesting observation from Fuchs and
Sevignani (2013) is that consequently labour power can be partly considered as
communication power.
At the same time, even Marx’s theory of exploitation does not always refer to paid
labour. Thus, in that sense, Facebook users, as unpaid contributors, could fall into this
category (Fuchs & Sevignani, 2013) because their ‘brains, hands, mouths, ears and speech,
the Internet and platforms’ (p.258) are instrumentalized for advertising which ‘is part of the
alienation of the instruments of labour on Facebook’ (p.258).
Surveillance and control
The surveillance of Internet users is a common topic for political economy scholars who deal
with the web 2.0 and digital audiences. This concept also has direct advertising implications.
Manzerolle (2010), for instance, defines web 2.0 as ‘a set of marketing discourses’ with the
principal aim of rebranding the web through the creation of a perception of empowered
user.
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The theme of surveillance developed from the work of Foucault (1977), who made a
distinction between the ‘object of information’ and ‘subject in communication’. In the
context of web 2.0, the subjects of communication are considered to be users and
producers of social media who produce content, upload information, comment on
information of others, etc. But when users and producers are surveilled in order for their
data to be used in advertising and other purposes, they become objects of information,
providing information to companies. In that context the concept of users’ free labour can be
employed (Fuchs, 2010; Fuchs, 2011; Gandy, 1993). Following Andrejevic’s work,
Hesmondhalgh (2012) argues that the progressive elements of online participation and the
pleasure it brings are compromised by surveillance and profit-making.
Likewise, the role of users as data providers becomes more important than that of
content providers (Van Dijk, 2009). However, the creation of neologisms such as ‘produser’,
‘co-creator’, and ‘prosumer’ could lead to the opposite conclusion. Van Dijk (2009) sees the
relationship between media producers, advertisers and consumers becoming tighter than
ever, as users get a greater role in content production. Nevertheless, they lose agency as
consumers because they are surveilled and directed by media companies.
Conclusion
In this essay we explored how the concepts of participation and free labour have been used
in audience studies in the period 2005-2015. These two terms, ‘participation’ and ‘free
labour’, are the major terms that appear in cultural studies and political economy research
connected to the study of web 2.0 and digital audiences.
The most important problem that was identified in the analysed articles is the lack of
any merging of the perspectives of political economy and cultural studies. This means that in
the majority of cases, scholars from one field do not want to look at the same phenomenon
from the other angle as well. However, we have selected and discussed those contributions
that, through the development of a critical stance on their respective objects, have tried to
shed light on the area of intersection between the empirical areas currently grasped by the
two concepts. This is important because, as presented in this article, these two realities are
in the majority of cases clearly separated, due to two unsettled perspectives, but they are
intertwined in users’ experiences, and therefore one cannot exclude the other. Therefore
our aim has been to isolate the strand of reflections where space has been made for
potential bridges between participation and labour. We argue that these authors bring
novel ideas and new openings into this area of intersection of cultural studies and political
economy.
As underlined by Papacharissi (2010), it should not be forgotten that the pleasure
and advantages of online activities co-exist with the economic value to the benefit of online
companies and platforms. When we consider consumers as producers of culture (Bank &
Humphreys, 2008), we are automatically implying that the boundary between the access to
online production and ownership and control over them is fading. However, beyond this
consumers’ empowerment, their lack of control and possession over the platforms for the
Volume 13, Issue 1
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creation and maintenance of content sharing is at the core of online economy (Papacharissi,
2012). This structural ambiguity makes both the concept of exploitation and empowerment
deeply problematic and calls for new conceptual developments that can explain what is now
formulated as a dualism resistant to a higher synthesis. What our brief review of literature
shows, is that it is not any longer sufficient to acknowledge the co-existence of consumers’
pleasure with producers’ profit without overcoming the analytical separation that descends
from the two disciplinary perspectives that have been prevalent in the field. There is an
increasing need for a wider research perspective that could comprehend all the deep
implications of this structural ambivalence and that could explain in virtue of what this two
faces of the same coin are kept together or, if it is the case, are mutually distancing. The
number of studies that discuss both perspectives and try to connect them remains still very
limited. However, they can be seen as new openings in the field and as offering potential for
future studies in this direction. To conclude, we think that further efforts should be carried
out in order to explore the mutual crossing of the two perspectives that still frame
participation and labour as mutually exclusionary phenomena.
Biographical notes:
Lucia Vesnić-Alujević has a PhD in Communication Science from Ghent University. After her
postdoc at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, she has worked as a Visiting
Lecturer in Political Communication at Zagreb University. Her research focuses on social
media and political communication, European public sphere and public engagement with
science and technology. She has published in the fields of communication science, political
science and science and technology studies. Contact: lucy.vessal@gmail.com.
Maria Francesca Murru, PhD, is lecturer in Sociology of Media and Communication at
Università Cattolica di Milano, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. Her research interests
are focused on online public spheres and mediated civic participation and she is currently
engaged in research projects dealing with mediated civic literacy and emergent publics. She
has published in the field of media and audience research. Contact:
maria.murru@unicatt.it.
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