This third volume in Christian Fuchs’s Media, Communication and Society book series illuminates what it means to live in an age of digital capitalism, analysing its various aspects, and engaging with a variety of critical thinkers whose theories and approaches enable a critical understanding of digital capitalism for media and communication.
Each chapter focuses on a particular dimension of digital capitalism or a critical theorist whose work helps us to illuminate how digital capitalism works. Subjects covered include: digital positivism; administrative big data analytics; the role and relations of patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the context of digital labour; digital alienation; the role of social media in the capitalist crisis; the relationship between imperialism and digital labour; alternatives such as trade unions and class struggles in the digital age; platform co-operatives; digital commons; and public service Internet platforms. It also considers specific examples, including the digital labour of Foxconn and Pegatron workers, software engineers at Google, and online freelancers, as well as considering the political economy of targeted-advertising-based Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram.
Digital Capitalism illuminates how a digital capitalist society’s economy, politics, and culture work and interact, making it essential reading for both students and researchers in media, culture, and communication studies, as well as related disciplines.
Author(s): Christian Fuchs
Edition: First Editon
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 342
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgements
Part I: Introduction
Chapter One. Introduction: What is Digital Capitalism?
1.1. About this Book
1.2. This Book's Chapters
1.3. What is Capitalism?
Werner Sombart: Modern Capitalism as Entrepreneurial Acquisition
Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism as Entrepreneurial Creative Destruction
Max Weber: Capitalism as Calculation of Capital
Varieties and Commonalities of Capitalism
Karl Marx: Capitalism as a Formation of Society (Gesellschaftsformation)
David Harvey's Understanding of Capitalism
Capitalist Accumulation
Robert L. Heilbroner's Definition of Capitalism
1.4. What is Digital Capitalism?
References
Part II: Theorists
Chapter Two. Friedrich Engels in the Age of Digital Capitalism
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Computational Social Science and Scientific Socialism
2.3. The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today
2.3.1 Technology and Society
2.3.2. Digital Technology and Relative Surplus-Value Production
2.3.3. Absolute Surplus-Value Production at Foxconn
2.3.4. Play Labour at Google
2.3.5. Precarious Platform Workers
2.3.6. Facebook Labour
2.3.7. Section Summary
2.4. Working-Class Struggles in Digital Capitalism
2.5. Conclusion
Refrences
Chapter Three. History and Class Consciousness 2.0: Georg Lukács in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Big Data
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Ideology and Reified Consciousness
Reification
Ideology as Reified Class Consciousness
Right-Wing Authoritarianism and New Nationalisms Online: Reified Consciousness on the Internet
3.3. Journalism and Reification
Lukács on Journalism
The New Spirit of Capitalism
The Age of Online Fake News
3.4. The Reification of Communication Technologies
Lukács on Intellectual Workers
Knowledge Workers in the Information Society
Lukács' Critique of Technological Fetishism in the Age of Big Data Capitalism
Lukács' Critique of Quantification
Lukács' Critique of Quantification Revisited: the Critique of Big Data Analytics
3.5. Conclusion
References
Chapter Four. Adorno and the Media in Digital Capitalism
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Adorno's Demonisation
4.3. The Digital Culture Industry
4.4. Digital Authoritarianism
4.4.1. Top-Down Leadership
4.4.2. Nationalism
4.4.3. The Friend/Enemy-Scheme
4.4.4. Violence and Law-and-Order Politics
4.5. Digital Society or Capitalism?
4.6. Conclusion
References
Chapter Five. Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life. A Reading of Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life in the Age of Digital Capitalism
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Lefebvre's Concept of Society
5.2.1. Practices and Structures
5.2.2. Base/Superstructure, Material/Non-Material, Economic/Non-Economic
5.3. Communication in Everyday Life
5.4. Everyday Life and Communication in Capitalism
5.4.1. Alienation
5.4.2. Accumulation
5.4.3. Digital Capitalism
5.5. The Communication of Ideology
5.6. Conclusion
5.6.1 The Relationship of the Economy and Culture
5.6.2 Communication in Everyday Life
5.6.3 Communication in Capitalism
5.6.4 The Communication of Ideology
References
Chapter Six. Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour
6.1. Introduction
6.2. Audience Labour
6.2.1 Digital Labour
6.3. Digital Labour and Productive Labour
6.4. Conclusion
References
Part III: Themes
Chapter Seven. From Digital Positivism and Administrative Big Data Analytics Towards Critical Digital and Social Media Research
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Digital and Social Media Research's Mainstream: Positivist Big Data Analytics
7.3. Theory: Karl Marx and Critical Digital and Social Media Theory
7.4. Epistemology and Methodology: Critical Digital Methods
7.5. Critical-Realist Social Media Research Ethics
7.6. Conclusion
Acknowledgement
References
Chapter Eight. Social Media, Big Data, and Critical Marketing
8.1. Introduction
8.2. Key Theoretical Approaches
8.2.1. Dallas Smythe: Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism
8.2.2. Karl Marx: The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret
8.2.3. Sut Jhally's "Advertising as Religion" and Raymond Williams's "Advertising: The Magic System"
8.3. Current Key Areas of Research
8.3.1. Digital Labour
8.3.2. Digital Alienation
8.4. Directions for Future Research
8.5. Conclusion
References
Chapter Nine. Social Media and the Capitalist Crisis
9.1. Introduction
9.2. The Capitalist Crisis
9.3. Targeted Advertising and the Crisis
9.4. Social Media Ideology #1: "Twitter and Facebook Revolutions"
9.5. Social Media Ideology #2: Red Scare 2.0
9.6. Conclusion
References
Chapter Ten. Capitalism, Patriarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and Digital Labour
10.1. Introduction
10.2. Housework and Digital Labour
10.2.1 The Debate on Housework and Reproductive Labour
10.2.2 Digital Housework and Reproductive Labour
10.3. Slavery and Racism in the Age of Digital Labour
10.3.1 Slavery in the Age of Facebook
10.3.2 Racist Ideology and Digital Labour
10.4. Capitalism, Racism, and Patriarchy
10.5. Conclusion
References
Chapter Eleven. Digital Labour and Imperialism
11.1. Introduction
11.2. Imperialism and the Division of Labour
11.3. The International Division of Digital Labour
11.4. Conclusion
References
Chapter Twelve. The Information Economy and the Labour Theory of Value
12.1. Introduction
12.2. The Information Industry and Marx's Labour Theory of Value
12.3. Labour Productivity in the Information Sector
12.4. Conclusion
References
Methodological appendix: the information sector and the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities
Part IV: Conclusion
Chapter Thirteen. Conclusion
13.1. Digital Capitalism
13.2. Economic Aspects of Digital Capitalism
13.3. Political Aspects of Digital Capitalism
13.4. Ideological Aspects of Digital Capitalism
13.5. Alternatives to Digital Capitalism
Index
