The Exploitation of Audience Labour: A Missing Perspective on Communication and Capital in the Digital Era

Abstract

After 15 years of scholars theorizing and analysing aspects of digital media use as digital labour,¹ there has as yet been no consideration of the specificity, and importance, of audience labour. While interest in the political economy of digital labour has continued to grow, there seems to have been no inquiry into audience labour as a specific kind of digital labour.² The ability of scholars to make sense of the political economy of communication in the digital era remains hindered by the lack of any attention being paid to the specificity of audience labour, since capitalizing on communication remains a process of channelling and extracting value from activities of cultural consumption, which is to say audience activities. Dallas Smythe introduced the concept of audience labour to the political economy of communication nearly four decades ago, but the concept remained underdeveloped during debates in the 1970s and 1980s about the supposed “audience commodity”. In the twenty-first century, the issue of labour has been a focus of a much larger group of scholars through the concept of digital labour and related notions. However, the kind of labour specifically described by Smythe and others as audience labour is absent from the discussion. This chapter argues that audience labour should be made a more central concept in the political economy of communication and attempts to demonstrate the productive potential of that development through an outline of a political economy of audience labour that describes how the audience labour of cultural consumption and signification is exploited, including in the digital era in which “users” and “prosumers” are presumed to have replaced audiences.