The Power and Political Economy of Social Media
社交媒体的权力与政治经济学

Social Media: Participation as Ideology
社交媒体：作为意识形态的参与

Techno-deterministic approaches that assume that the rise of these technologies results in a more democratic society dominate studies of “web 2.0” and “social media”. This becomes especially clear when representatives of this approach speak of “participatory social media”. For example, Jenkins argues that increasingly “the Web has become a site of consumer participation” (Jenkins 2008, 137), Shirky (2008, 107) says that on web 2.0 there is a “linking of symmetrical participation and amateur production,” Tapscott and Williams (2007, 15) argue that “the new web” has resulted in “a new economic democracy,” Howe (2008, 14) speaks of social media crowdsourcing as a “manifestation of a larger trend toward greater democratization of commerce,” Benkler (2006, 15) states that due to commons-based peer production “culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory,” Bruns (2008, 17) says that Internet produsage allows “participation in networked culture,” Deuze (2007, 95) concludes that “new media technologies like the Internet have made visible […] the participatory engagement of people with their media”. To be fair, one has to say that Deuze (2008) has also written contributions in which he stresses the “corporate appropriation of participatory culture” (contribution title).
关于 "web2.0 "和 "社交媒体 "的研究主要采用技术决定论的方法，认为这些技术的兴起会带来一个更加民主的社会。当这种研究方法的代表谈到 "参与性社交媒体 "时，这一点变得尤为明显。例如，Jenkins 认为 "网络已日益成为消费者参与的场所"（Jenkins 2008, 137），Shirky（2008, 107）说，在 web 2.Tapscott和Williams（2007, 15）认为，"新网络 "产生了 "新的经济民主"；Howe（2008, 14）认为，社交媒体众包是 "商业更加民主化这一更大趋势的体现"；Benkler（2006, 15）指出，由于基于公共资源的同伴生产，"文化正变得更加民主：Bruns（2008, 17）说，互联网浪潮允许 "参与网络文化"，Deuze（2007, 95）得出结论说，"互联网等新媒体技术让人们看到了[......]人们对媒体的参与"。公平地说，Deuze（2008 年）也曾撰文强调 "企业对参与性文化的占有"（文章标题）。

Approaches like the ones just mentioned miss a theoretically grounded understanding of participation. They use claims about implications for democracy, but miss that in democracy theory mainly the approach of participatory democracy theory (Held 2006) uses the term “participation”. The earliest use of the term “participatory democracy” that I could trace in the literature is an article by Staughton Lynd (1965) that describes the grassroots organization of the student movement. Participatory democracy theory (for a more detailed discussion and its implications for the analysis of social media, see Fuchs 2011b, Chapter 7) has two central features:
刚才提到的那些方法没有从理论上理解参与。它们使用了对民主影响的说法，却忽略了在民主理论中，主要是参与式民主理论（Held，2006 年）使用了 "参与 "一词。我在文献中能找到的最早使用 "参与式民主 "一词的是 Staughton Lynd（1965 年）的一篇文章，其中描述了学生运动的基层组织。参与式民主理论（更详细的讨论及其对社交媒体分析的影响，请参见 Fuchs 2011b，第 7 章）有两个核心特征：

• the broad understanding of democracy as encompassing areas beyond voting, such as the economy, culture, and the household, and
  对民主的广义理解包括投票以外的领域，如经济、文化和家庭，以及
• the questioning of the compatibility of participatory democracy and capitalism.
  质疑参与式民主与资本主义的兼容性。

The Limits of YouTube  YouTube 的局限

One should analyze the political economy of social media platforms when making judgements about their participatory character. If there are, for example, asymmetries in terms of visibility and attention, then it is questionable that corporate social media are truly participatory. It is therefore not enough to stress enabling and limiting potentials of the Internet, but one rather needs to analyze the actual distribution of advantages and disadvantages. It is also important to analyze the negative aspects of social media in order to temper the uncritical social media-optimism that is an ideological manifestation of the search for new capital accumulation models that wants to exploit user labour in order to raise the profit rate in the digital media industry. Critics have stressed in this context that web 2.0 optimism is uncritical and an ideology that serves corporate interests (Fuchs 2011b; Van Dijck and Nieborg 2009) or that web 2.0 users are more passive users than active creators (Van Dijck 2009).
在判断社交媒体平台的参与性时，应分析其政治经济学。例如，如果在能见度和关注度方面存在不对称，那么企业社交媒体是否真正具有参与性就值得怀疑。因此，仅仅强调互联网的有利潜力和限制潜力是不够的，还需要分析利弊的实际分布情况。同样重要的是，要分析社交媒体的负面影响，以抑制不加批判的社交媒体乐观主义，这种乐观主义是寻求新的资本积累模式的意识形态表现，它希望利用用户的劳动来提高数字媒体行业的利润率。在这方面，批评者强调，web 2.0 的乐观主义是不加批判的，是一种为企业利益服务的意识形态（Fuchs，2011b；Van Dijck 和 Nieborg，2009 年），或者说，web 2.0 用户更多的是被动的使用者，而不是积极的创造者（Van Dijck，2009 年）。

Analysis of the ten most viewed videos on YouTube (see Table 5.1) shows that transnational media corporations, the organized exploiters of surplus value-generating labour, control YouTube's political attention economy. Entertainment and music are very popular on YouTube and Facebook (see also Table 5.2), whereas politics is a minority interest. An analysis of Facebook groups shows that the most popular groups are about IT and entertainment, whereas politics is of minor interest.
对 YouTube 上浏览量最高的十个视频的分析（见表 5.1）表明，跨国媒体公司--有组织的剩余价值创造者--控制着 YouTube 的政治注意力经济。娱乐和音乐在 YouTube 和 Facebook 上非常流行（另见表 5.2），而政治则是少数人的兴趣所在。对 Facebook 群组的分析表明，最受欢迎的群组是有关 IT 和娱乐的群组，而对政治的兴趣不大。

Table 5.1 The most viewed YouTube videos of all times
表 5.1观看次数最多的 YouTube 视频

icon downloadDownload Image as .jpg  下载图片为 .jpg 格式

Table 5.2 The most popular fan groups on Facebook
表 5.2Facebook上最受欢迎的粉丝群组

icon downloadDownload Image as .jpg  下载图片为 .jpg 格式

The Limits of Facebook  Facebook 的局限性

Powerful politicians, such as President Obama, dominate the attention given to the political Facebook groups, whereas alternative political figures, such as Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx, have a much lower number of fans (Table 5.2).
奥巴马总统等政界要人在 Facebook 政治团体中的关注度占主导地位，而迈克尔-摩尔、诺姆-乔姆斯基和卡尔-马克思等另类政治人物的粉丝数量要少得多（表 5.2）。

The Limits of Google  谷歌的局限性

The results yielded by a Google search for “political news” show that corporate news organizations dominate the top results (Table 5.3). Only one public service organization (BBC) and one non-profit organization (NPR) are under the top ten results. The top search keywords used on Google in 2010 show that the 12 most used keywords did not contain political topics. Instead, there was more interest in Whitney Houston, Gangnam Style, Hurricane Sandy, iPad 3, Diablo 3, Kate Middleton, Olympics 2012, Amanda Todd, Michael Clarke Duncan, Big Brother Brazil 12.1
谷歌搜索 "政治新闻 "的结果显示，企业新闻机构占据了搜索结果的前列（表 5.3）。只有一家公共服务机构（英国广播公司）和一家非营利性机构（美国国家公共电台）排在前十位。2010 年在谷歌上使用的热门搜索关键词显示，使用最多的 12 个关键词并不包含政治话题。相反，人们对惠特尼-休斯顿、江南风格、飓风桑迪、iPad 3、暗黑破坏神 3、凯特-米德尔顿、2012 年奥运会、阿曼达-托德、迈克尔-克拉克-邓肯、Big Brother Brazil 12.1 更感兴趣。

Table 5.3 Top results of a Google search for “political news”
表 5.3谷歌搜索 "政治新闻 "的热门结果

icon downloadDownload Image as .jpg  下载图片为 .jpg 格式

The Limits of Twitter  推特的局限性

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms. Blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote after the Iranian protests of 2009 that “the revolution will be [Page 101]twittered,” which contributed to the myth of Twitter revolutions.2 Can meaningful political debates be based on 140-character short messages? Short text invites simplistic arguments and is an expression of the commodification and speedup of culture. Table 5.4 shows that nine out of the ten most followed Twitter users are entertainment-oriented. Barack Obama is the only exception in the top ten. But Table 5.4 also shows that politics has a stratified attention economy [Page 102]on Twitter: whereas Barack Obama has a very large number of followers, the number is much lower for representatives of alternative politics, such as Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London.
推特是最流行的社交媒体平台之一。博客作家安德鲁-沙利文（Andrew Sullivan）在 2009 年伊朗抗议活动后写道："革命将被推特化"，这也促成了推特革命的神话。2 有意义的政治辩论可以基于 140 个字符的短信息吗？短文会引发简单化的争论，是文化商品化和加速的表现。表 5.4 显示，Twitter 上关注度最高的十位用户中，有九位以娱乐为导向。奥巴马是前十名中唯一的例外。但表 5.4还显示，政治在 Twitter 上的关注度是分层的：奥巴马的关注者人数非常多，而迈克尔-摩尔、诺姆-乔姆斯基、"占领华尔街 "和 "占领伦敦 "等另类政治代表的关注者人数要少得多。

The Corporate Colonization of Social Media
企业对社交媒体的殖民化

Such data make clear that corporations and their logic dominate social media and the Internet and that the Internet is predominantly capitalist in character. Social media do not constitute a public sphere or participatory democratic space, but are rather colonized by corporations, especially by multimedia companies that dominate attention and visibility. Politics is a minority issue on social media. Georg Lukács argues that ideology “by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately” (Lukács 1923/1972, 50). An ideology is a claim about a certain status of reality that does not correspond to actual reality. It deceives human subjects in order to forestall societal change. It is false consciousness (Lukács 1923/1972, 83).
这些数据清楚地表明，企业及其逻辑主宰着社交媒体和互联网，互联网主要是资本主义性质的。社交媒体并不构成公共领域或参与式民主空间，而是被企业，尤其是主导注意力和能见度的多媒体公司所殖民。政治是社交媒体上的少数议题。格奥尔格-卢卡奇（Georg Lukács）认为，意识形态 "绕过了社会演变的本质，未能准确定位和充分表达"（Lukács 1923/1972, 50）。意识形态是对现实某种状态的宣称，与实际现实并不相符。它欺骗人类主体，以阻止社会变革。它是虚假的意识（卢卡奇 1923/1972, 83）。

Observers who argue that the contemporary web and social media are participatory, cause revolutions, facilitate democracy or advance the public sphere, facilitate an ideology that celebrates capitalism and does not see how capitalist interests predominantly shape the Internet. Not only management gurus and marketing agencies, but also scholars in academia advance social media ideology. They postulate a false social media reality that neglects the role of capitalism. The implication of the claims that are made is that social media result in a better world. However, as the method of ideology critique that empirically compares claims to reality has frequently shown, we have a much more stratified reality that is shaped by structures of domination.
那些认为当代网络和社交媒体具有参与性、能引发革命、促进民主或推动公共领域发展的观察家，助长了一种颂扬资本主义的意识形态，却没有看到资本主义利益是如何主导互联网的。不仅是管理大师和营销机构，学术界的学者也在推进社交媒体意识形态。他们假设了一个虚假的社交媒体现实，忽视了资本主义的作用。这种说法的含义是，社交媒体会带来一个更美好的世界。然而，正如意识形态批判的方法--将主张与现实进行实证比较--经常显示的那样，我们的现实分层更深，是由统治结构塑造的。

The Internet and social media are today stratified, non-participatory spaces and an alternative, non-corporate Internet is needed (see Fuchs 2011b, chapters 7, 8 and 9). Large corporations colonize social media and dominate its attention economy. Even though Twitter and mobile phones supported the political rebellions, protests and revolutions in countries like Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen in early 2011, and the publishing of videos about the effects of domination (as the video about the death of Neda Soltani in the Iranian protests in 2009 or the video about the death of Ian Tomlinson at the London anti-G20 protests in 2009) can support the communication of protest, one should not overestimate these potentials. There are no Twitter-, Facebook- or YouTube-revolutions. Only people who live under certain social conditions and organize collectively can make rebellions and revolutions. Technology is, in itself, not a revolution. 

On corporate social media, the liberal freedom of association and assembly are suspended: big corporate and, to a lesser extent, political actors dominate and therefore centralize the formation of speech, association, assembly and opinion on social media. Liberal freedoms turn on capitalist social media into their opposite. 

The concept of social media participation is an ideology. Given this empirical result, it seems both necessary and feasible to theorize “web 2.0” not as a [Page 103]participatory system, but by employing more negative, critical terms such as class, exploitation and surplus value. This requires us to ground the analysis of social media in the works of the founding figure of critical political economy – Karl Marx. 

Relative Surplus Value 

Relative surplus value production means that productivity is increased so that more commodities and more surplus value can be produced in the same time period as before. 

Sut Jhally (1987, 78) argues that “reorganizing the watching audience in terms of demographics” is a form of relative surplus value production. One can interpret targeted Internet advertising as a form of relative surplus value production: at one point in time, the advertisers show not only one advertisement to the [Page 106]audience, as in non-targeted advertising, but also different advertisements to different user groups depending on the monitoring, assessment and comparison of the users' interests and online behaviour. On traditional forms of television, all watchers see the same advertisements at the same time. In targeted online advertising, advertising companies can present different ads at the same time. The efficiency of advertising is increased: the advertisers can show more advertisements that are likely to fit the interests of consumers in the same time period as in non-targeted advertising. Partly the advertising company's wage labourers and partly the Internet users, whose user-generated data and transaction data are utilized, produce the profit generated from these advertisements. The more targeted advertisements there are, the more likely it is that users recognize ads and click on them. 

The users' click-and-buy process is the surplus value realization process of the advertising company, in which surplus value is transformed into money profit. Targeted advertising allows Internet companies to present not just one advertisement at one point in time to users, but rather numerous advertisements so that there is the production of more total advertising time that presents commodities to users. Relative surplus value production means that more surplus value is generated in the same time period as earlier. Targeted online advertising is more productive than non-targeted online advertising because it allows presenting more ads in the same time period. These ads contain more surplus value than the non-targeted ads, i.e., more unpaid labour time of the advertising company's paid employees and of users, who generate user-generated content and transaction data.
用户的点击购买过程就是广告公司的剩余价值实现过程，在这个过程中，剩余价值转化为货币利润。定向广告使互联网公司在一个时间点上向用户展示的不仅仅是一个广告，而是无数个广告，这样就产生了更多向用户展示商品的广告总时间。相对剩余价值生产是指在相同的时间段内产生的剩余价值比之前更多。有针对性的在线广告比无针对性的在线广告更具生产力，因为它可以在相同的时间段内展示更多的广告。与非定向广告相比，这些广告包含更多的剩余价值，即广告公司有偿雇员和用户的更多无偿劳动时间，后者产生用户生成的内容和交易数据。

Prosumption  推定

Alvin Toffler (1980) introduced the notion of the prosumer in the early 1980s. It means the “progressive blurring of the line that separates producer from consumer” (Toffler 1980, 267). Toffler describes the age of prosumption as the arrival of a new form of economic and political democracy, self-determined work, labour autonomy, local production and autonomous self-production. But he overlooks that prosumption is used for outsourcing work to users and consumers, who work without payment. Thereby corporations reduce their investment costs and labour costs, jobs are destroyed, and consumers who work for free are extremely exploited. They produce surplus value that is appropriated and turned into profit by corporations without paying wages. Notwithstanding Toffler's uncritical optimism, his notion of the “prosumer” describes important changes of media structures and practices and can therefore also be adopted for critical studies.
阿尔文-托夫勒（Alvin Toffler，1980 年）在 20 世纪 80 年代初提出了 "前消费者"（prosumer）的概念。它意味着 "生产者与消费者之间的界限逐渐模糊"（Toffler，1980 年，第 267 页）。托夫勒将消费时代描述为一种新形式的经济和政治民主、自决工作、劳动自主、本地生产和自主自产的到来。但他忽略了，"消费 "是用来将工作外包给用户和消费者的，而用户和消费者的工作是无偿的。因此，企业降低了投资成本和劳动力成本，工作岗位被毁，免费工作的消费者受到极大剥削。他们生产的剩余价值被企业占有并转化为利润，而企业却不支付工资。尽管托夫勒不加批判地持乐观态度，但他的 "专业消费者 "概念描述了媒体结构和实践的重要变化，因此也可用于批判性研究。

Ritzer and Jurgenson (2010) argue that web 2.0 facilitates the emergence of “prosumer capitalism,” that the capitalist economy “has always been dominated by presumption” (14), and that prosumption is an inherent feature of McDonaldization. The two authors' rather simplistic and one-dimensional analysis ignores that prosumption is only one of many tendencies of capitalism, not its only quality and not the dominant quality. Capitalism is multidimensional and [Page 107]has multiple interlinked dimensions. It is at the same time finance capitalism, imperialistic capitalism, informational capitalism, hyperindustrial capitalism (oil, gas), crisis capitalism, etc. Not all of these dimensions are equally important (Fuchs 2011b, chapter 5). Critical scholars have introduced concepts such as consumption work (Huws 2003) and Internet prosumer labour (Fuchs 2010c) for stressing how the boundaries between leisure and work, as well as production and consumption, have become liquid in contemporary capitalism. 

Dallas Smythe, the Audience Commodity and Internet Prosumer Commodification 

Dallas Smythe (1981/2006) suggests that in the case of media advertisement models, media companies sell the audience as a commodity to advertisers:
斯迈思（Dallas Smythe）（1981/2006）认为，在媒体广告模式中，媒体公司将受众作为商品卖给广告商：

With the rise of user-generated content, free-access social networking platforms, and other free-access platforms that yield profit by online advertisement – a development subsumed under categories such as web 2.0, social software and social networking sites – the web seems to come close to accumulation strategies employed by capital on traditional mass media like TV or radio. Users who upload photos and images, write wall posting and comments, send mail to their contacts, accumulate friends or browse other profiles on Facebook, constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the Internet is that in the latter case the users are also content producers, there is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building and content-production. The fact that the users are more active on the Internet than in the reception of TV or radio content is due to the decentralized structure of the Internet, which allows many-to-many communication. Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as prosumers, we can say that in the case of corporate social media the audience commodity is an Internet prosumer commodity (Fuchs 2010c).
随着用户生成的内容、免费访问的社交网络平台以及其他通过在线广告获利的免费访问平台的兴起（这一发展归入 web 2.0、社交软件和社交网站等类别），网络似乎接近于资本在电视或广播等传统大众媒体上采用的积累战略。用户在 Facebook 上上传照片和图片、撰写墙贴和评论、向联系人发送邮件、积累好友或浏览其他资料，这些都构成了向广告商出售的受众商品。传统大众媒体的受众商品与互联网受众商品的区别在于，互联网受众商品的用户同时也是内容生产者，存在用户生成的内容，用户长期参与创造性活动、交流、社区建设和内容生产。与接收电视或广播内容相比，用户在互联网上更为活跃，这是由于互联网的分散结构允许多对多的交流。由于接收者的长期活动及其作为专业消费者的地位，我们可以说，在企业社交媒体中，受众商品是一种互联网专业消费者商品（Fuchs，2010c）。

The conflict between Cultural Studies and Critical Political Economy of the Media (see Ferguson and Golding 1997; Garnham 1995/1998; Grossberg 1995/1998) about the question of the activity and creativity of the user has been resolved in relation to web 2.0: on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., users are fairly active and creative, which reflects Cultural Studies insights about the active character of recipients, but this active and creative user character is the very source of exploitation, which reflects Critical Political Economy's stress on class and exploitation.
文化研究与媒体批判政治经济学（见 Ferguson 和 Golding 1997；Garnham 1995/1998；Grossberg 1995/1998）在用户的活跃性和创造性问题上的冲突在 Web 2.0 上得到了解决：在 Facebook、Twitter、博客等网站上，用户相当活跃且富有创造性，这反映了文化研究关于接受者活跃性的见解，但这种活跃且富有创造性的用户特性正是剥削的根源，这反映了批判政治经济学对阶级和剥削的强调。

Prosumer Surveillance  消费者监控

Economic surveillance on corporate social media is surveillance of prosumers, who dynamically and permanently create and share user-generated content, browse profiles and data, interact with others, join, create and build communities and co-create information. The corporate web platform operators and their third-party advertising clients continuously monitor and record personal data and online activities. They store, merge and analyze collected data. This allows them to create detailed user profiles and to know a lot about the users' personal interests and online behaviours. Social media that are based on targeted advertising sell prosumers as a commodity to advertising clients. There is an exchange of money for the access to user data that allows economic user surveillance. The exchange value of the social media prosumer commodity is the money value that the operators obtain from their clients. Its use value is the multitude of personal data and usage behaviour that is dominated by the commodity and exchange value form.
企业社交媒体上的经济监控是对专业消费者的监控，他们动态、永久地创建和分享用户生成的内容，浏览个人资料和数据，与他人互动，加入、创建和建立社区，共同创造信息。企业网络平台运营商及其第三方广告客户不断监控和记录个人数据和在线活动。他们存储、合并和分析收集到的数据。这使他们能够创建详细的用户档案，并对用户的个人兴趣和在线行为了如指掌。以定向广告为基础的社交媒体将用户作为商品卖给广告客户。通过金钱交换获取用户数据，从而实现对用户的经济监控。社交媒体消费者商品的交换价值是运营商从客户那里获得的金钱价值。其使用价值是由商品和交换价值形式主导的大量个人数据和使用行为。

The corporations' surveillance of the prosumers' permanently produced use values, i.e., personal data and interactions, enables targeted advertising that aims at luring the prosumers into consumption and shopping. It also aims at manipulating prosumers' desires and needs in the interest of corporations and the commodities they offer. Whereas audience commodification in newspapers and traditional broadcasting was always based on statistical assessments of audience rates and characteristics (Bolin 2011), Internet surveillance gives social media corporations an exact picture of the interests and activities of users (Andrejevic 2007, 2012). The characteristics (interests and usage behaviour) and the size (the number of users in a specific interest group) of the Internet prosumer commodity can therefore be exactly determined and it can also be exactly determined who is part of a consumer group that should be targeted by specific ads and who is not.
企业对消费者永久性使用价值（即个人数据和互动）的监控，使得有针对性的广告成为可能，从而诱使消费者进行消费和购物。广告的目的还在于操纵消费者的欲望和需求，使之符合企业及其所提供商品的利益。报纸和传统广播中的受众商品化总是基于对受众比率和特征的统计评估（Bolin，2011 年），而互联网监控则为社交媒体公司提供了用户兴趣和活动的准确信息（Andrejevic，2007 年，2012 年）。因此，互联网专业消费者商品的特征（兴趣和使用行为）和规模（特定兴趣群体中的用户数量）都可以准确确定，而且还可以准确确定谁是应被特定广告瞄准的消费群体的一部分，谁不是。

Panoptic Sorting of Internet Prosumers
互联网消费者的全景分类

“The panoptic sort is a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements. It is a discriminatory technology that allocates options and opportunities on the basis of those measures and the administrative models that they inform” (Gandy 1993, 15). It is a system of power and disciplinary surveillance that identifies, classifies and assesses (Gandy 1993, 15). The mechanism of targeted advertising on social media is the form of surveillance that Gandy has characterized as panoptic sorting: it identifies the interests of users by closely surveilling their personal data and usage behaviour, it classifies them into consumer groups, and assesses their interests in comparison to other consumers and to available advertisements that are then targeted at the users.
"全景分类是一种差异机器，它根据常规测量将个人分门别类。它是一种歧视性技术，根据这些衡量标准及其所依据的行政模式来分配选择和机会"（Gandy 1993, 15）。它是一个权力和纪律监控系统，对人的身份进行识别、分类和评估（Gandy 1993, 15）。社交媒体上的定向广告机制就是甘迪称之为全景分类的监控形式：它通过密切监视用户的个人数据和使用行为来识别用户的兴趣，将用户划分为不同的消费群体，将用户的兴趣与其他消费者和现有广告进行对比评估，然后将广告定向投放给用户。

Social media prosumers are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves and through this commodification their consciousness becomes, while online, permanently exposed to commodity logic in the form of [Page 109]advertisements. Most online time is advertising time. On corporate social media, targeted advertising makes use of the users' personal data, interests, interactions, information behaviour, and also the interactions with other websites. So while you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., it is not just you interacting with others and browsing profiles; all of these activities are framed by advertisements presented to you. These advertisements come about by permanent surveillance of your online activities. Such advertisements do not necessarily represent consumers' real needs and desires because the ads are based on calculated assumptions, whereas needs are much more complex and spontaneous. The ads mainly reflect marketing decisions and economic power relations. They do not simply provide information about products as offers to buy, but information about products of powerful companies.
社交媒体消费者是商品化的双重对象：他们本身就是商品，而通过这种商品化，他们的意识在上网时永久地暴露在广告形式的商品逻辑中。大多数在线时间都是广告时间。在企业社交媒体上，有针对性的广告会利用用户的个人数据、兴趣、互动、信息行为以及与其他网站的互动。因此，当你在使用 Facebook、Twitter、YouTube 等网站时，不仅仅是与他人互动和浏览个人资料，所有这些活动都被广告所框定。这些广告是通过对你的在线活动进行长期监控而产生的。这些广告并不一定代表消费者的真实需求和愿望，因为广告是基于计算得出的假设，而需求则更为复杂和自发。广告主要反映营销决策和经济权力关系。它们并不是简单地提供产品信息作为购买要约，而是提供强势公司的产品信息。

Capital Accumulation on Corporate Social Media
企业社交媒体上的资本积累

Figure 5.2 shows the process of capital accumulation on corporate social media platforms that are funded by targeted advertising. Social media corporations invest money (M) for buying capital: technologies (server space, computers, organizational infrastructure, etc.) and labour power (paid employees). These are the constant capital (c) and the variable capital v1 outlays. The outcome of the production process P1 is not a commodity that is directly sold, but rather social media services (the specific platforms) that are made available without payment to users. As a consequence of this circumstance, management literature has focused on identifying how to make profit from free Internet services.
图 5.2 显示了由定向广告资助的企业社交媒体平台的资本积累过程。社交媒体公司投入资金 (M) 购买资本：技术（服务器空间、计算机、组织基础设施等）和劳动力（有偿雇员）。这就是不变资本 (c) 和可变资本 v1 支出。生产过程的结果 P1 不是直接出售的商品，而是无偿提供给用户的社交媒体服务（特定平台）。在这种情况下，管理文献的重点是确定如何从免费互联网服务中获利。

Figure 5.2 Capital accumulation on corporate social media platforms that are based on targeted advertising
图 5.2基于定向广告的企业社交媒体平台的资本积累

icon downloadDownload Image as .jpg  下载图片为 .jpg 格式

[Page 110]The waged employees, who create social media online environments that are accessed by users, produce part of the surplus value. The users employ the platform for generating content that they upload (user-generated data). The constant and variable capital invested by social media companies (c, v1) that is objectified in the online environments is the prerequisite for their activities in the production process P2. Their products are user-generated data, personal data, and transaction data about their browsing behaviour and communication behaviour on corporate social media. They invest a certain labour time v2 in this process.
创造供用户访问的社交媒体在线环境的雇佣员工产生了部分剩余价值。用户利用平台生成自己上传的内容（用户生成的数据）。社交媒体公司投资于在线环境的不变资本和可变资本（c、v1）是他们在生产过程 P2 中开展活动的前提。他们的产品是用户生成的数据、个人数据以及有关他们在企业社交媒体上的浏览行为和交流行为的交易数据。他们在这一过程中投入了一定的劳动时间 v2 。

Corporate social media sell the users' data commodity to advertising clients at a price that is larger than the invested constant and variable capital. Partly the users and partly the corporations' employees create the surplus value contained in this commodity. The difference is that the users are unpaid and therefore infinitely exploited. Once the Internet prosumer commodity that contains the user-generated content, transaction data, and the right to access virtual advertising space and time is sold to advertising clients, the commodity is transformed into money capital and surplus value is transformed into money capital. A counter-argument to the insight that commercial social media companies exploit Internet prosumers is that the latter, in exchange for their work, receive access to a service. One can here, however, interpose that service access cannot be seen as a salary because users cannot “further convert this salary […] [They] cannot buy food” (Bolin 2011, 37) with it.
企业社交媒体将用户的数据商品出售给广告客户，价格高于投入的不变资本和可变资本。部分用户和部分企业员工创造了这一商品所包含的剩余价值。不同的是，用户是无偿的，因此被无限剥削。一旦包含用户生成的内容、交易数据以及访问虚拟广告空间和时间的权利的互联网专业消费者商品被出售给广告客户，该商品就会转化为货币资本，剩余价值也会转化为货币资本。对于商业社交媒体公司剥削互联网消费者的观点，有一种反驳意见认为，后者通过工作换取服务。但在此，我们可以插话说，服务使用权不能被视为工资，因为用户不能 "进一步转换工资[......][他们]不能用它购买食物"（Bolin 2011, 37）。

The Profit Rate and Social Media
利润率与社交媒体

For Marx (1867), the profit rate is the relation of profit to investment costs:
在马克思（1867 年）看来，利润率是利润与投资成本的关系：

If Internet users become productive web 2.0 prosumers, then in terms of Marxian class theory this means that they become productive labourers who produce surplus value and are exploited by capital because, for Marx, productive labour generates surplus value (Fuchs 2010c). Therefore exploited surplus value producers are not merely those who are employed by web 2.0 corporations for programming, updating and maintaining the soft- and hardware, performing marketing activities, etc., but are also the users and prosumers who engage in the production of user-generated content.
如果网民成为生产性的 Web 2.0 消费者，那么根据马克思的阶级理论，这就意味着他们成为生产剩余价值并被资本剥削的生产劳动者，因为在马克思看来，生产劳动产生剩余价值（福克斯，2010c）。因此，被剥削的剩余价值生产者不仅仅是那些受雇于 Web 2.0 公司从事编程、更新和维护软硬件、开展营销活动等工作的人，他们也是参与用户生成内容生产的用户和消费者。

New media corporations do not (or hardly) pay the users for the production of content. One accumulation strategy is to give them free access to services and platforms, let them produce content, and to accumulate a large number of prosumers that are sold as a commodity to third-party advertisers. No product is sold to the users, but the users are sold as a commodity to advertisers. The more users a platform has, the higher the advertising rates can be set. The productive labour time that capital exploits involves, on the one hand, the labour time of the paid employees and, on the other hand, all of the time that is spent online by the users. Digital media corporations pay salaries for the first type of knowledge labour. Users produce data that is used and sold by the platforms [Page 111]without payment. They work for free. There are neither variable nor constant investment costs. The formula for the profit rate needs to be transformed for this accumulation strategy:
新媒体公司不会（或几乎不会）向用户支付内容生产费用。一种积累策略是让用户免费使用服务和平台，让他们生产内容，并积累大量的用户，将其作为商品卖给第三方广告商。没有产品卖给用户，但用户作为商品卖给广告商。平台拥有的用户越多，广告费就可以定得越高。资本利用的生产性劳动时间，一方面包括付薪员工的劳动时间，另一方面包括用户上网的所有时间。数字媒体公司为第一类知识劳动支付工资。用户生产的数据被平台无偿使用和出售。他们免费工作。既没有可变投资成本，也没有不变投资成本。针对这种积累战略，需要对利润率公式进行转换：

s: surplus value, c: constant capital, v1: wages paid to fixed employees, v2: wages paid to users
s：剩余价值，c：不变资本，v1：支付给固定员工的工资，v2：支付给用户的工资

The typical situation is that v2 = > 0 and that v2 substitutes v1 (v1 = > v2= 0). If the production of content and the time spent online were carried out by paid employees, the variable costs (wages) would rise and profits would therefore decrease. This shows that prosumer activity in a capitalist society can be interpreted as the outsourcing of productive labour to users (in management literature the term “crowdsourcing” has been established; see Howe 2008) who work completely for free and help maximize the rate of exploitation:
典型的情况是 v2 = > 0，v2 替代 v1 （v1 = > v2= 0）。如果内容制作和在线时间由有偿雇员承担，可变成本（工资）就会增加，利润也会因此减少。这表明，资本主义社会中的亲消费者活动可以解释为将生产劳动外包给用户（在管理文献中，"众包 "一词已经确立；见 Howe 2008），用户完全免费工作，并帮助最大限度地提高剥削率：

The Rate of Exploitation and Social Media
剥削率与社交媒体

The rate of exploitation (also called the rate of surplus value) measures the relationship of workers' unpaid work time and paid work time. The higher the rate of exploitation, the more work time is unpaid. Users of commercial social media platforms have no wages (v = 0). Therefore the rate of surplus value converges towards infinity. Internet prosumer labour is infinitely exploited by capital. This means that capitalist prosumption is an extreme form of exploitation, in which the prosumers work completely for free. Marx (1867) distinguishes between necessary labour time and surplus labour time. The first is the time a person needs to work in order to create the money equivalent for a wage that is required for buying goods that are needed for survival. The second is all additional labour time. Users are not paid on corporate social media (or for consuming other types of corporate media), hence they cannot generate money for buying food or other goods needed for survival. Therefore, all online time on corporate social media like Google, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter is surplus labour time.
剥削率（也称剩余价值率）衡量工人的无偿工作时间与有偿工作时间之间的关系。剥削率越高，无偿工作时间越多。商业社交媒体平台的用户没有工资（v = 0）。因此，剩余价值率趋于无穷大。网络消费者的劳动被资本无限剥削。这意味着，资本主义的准消费是一种极端的剥削形式，在这种形式下，准消费者的工作是完全免费的。马克思（1867 年）区分了必要劳动时间和剩余劳动时间。前者是指一个人为了创造购买生存所需的商品所需的相当于工资的货币而需要的劳动时间。第二种是所有额外的劳动时间。用户在企业社交媒体上（或在消费其他类型的企业媒体时）没有报酬，因此他们无法创造金钱来购买食物或其他生存所需的物品。因此，谷歌、Facebook、YouTube 或 Twitter 等企业社交媒体上的所有在线时间都是剩余劳动时间。

The outsourcing of work to consumers is a general tendency of contemporary capitalism. Facebook has asked users to translate its site into other languages without payment. Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook, commented that it would be cool to use the wisdom of the crowds.3 Pepsi started a competition in which one could win US$10 000 for the best design of a Pepsi can. Ideabounty is a crowdsourcing platform that organizes crowdsourcing projects for corporations such as, for example, RedBull, BMW and Unilever. In such projects, most of the employed work is unpaid. Even if single individuals receive symbolic prize money, most of the work time employed by users and consumers is fully unpaid, which allows companies to outsource paid labour time to consumers or fans that work for free.
将工作外包给消费者是当代资本主义的普遍趋势。Facebook 曾要求用户将其网站翻译成其他语言，但不收取任何费用。3 百事可乐公司发起了一项竞赛，只要设计出最好的百事可乐罐，就能赢得 1 万美元。Ideabounty 是一个众包平台，为 RedBull、宝马和联合利华等公司组织众包项目。在这些项目中，大部分受雇工作都是无偿的。即使单个人获得象征性的奖金，用户和消费者的大部分工作时间也是完全无偿的，这使得公司可以将有偿劳动时间外包给免费工作的消费者或粉丝。

Value and Social Media  价值与社交媒体

Value is a complex concept (Fuchs 2014). Bolin (2011) identifies economic value, moral value, news value, public value, cultural value, aesthetic value, social value, educational value, political value and symbolic/sign value as specific interpretations of the term. Marx shared with Smith and Ricardo an objective concept of value. The value of a commodity is, for them, the “quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article,” “the amount of labour socially necessary” for its production (Marx 1867, 129). Marx argues that goods in capitalism have a dual character. They have a use value-side (they are used for achieving certain aims) and a value-side. There are aspects of concrete and abstract labour. Concrete labour generates the commodity's use value (the good's qualitative character as a useful good that satisfies human needs), abstract labour the commodity's value (the good's quantitative side that allows its exchange with other commodities in the form of the relationship × amount of commodity A = y amount of commodity B). Subjective concepts of economic value, as held, for example, by classical French political economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Frederic Bastiat, or by representatives of the neoclassical Austrian school, assume that the worth of a good is determined by humans' cognitive evaluations and moral judgements, and interpret the notion of value idealistically. They say that the value of a good is the value given to them by the subjective judgements of humans.
价值是一个复杂的概念（Fuchs，2014 年）。Bolin （2011）认为经济价值、道德价值、新闻价值、公共价值、文化价值、审美价值、社会价值、教育价值、政治价值和象征/符号价值是对这一术语的具体解释。马克思与斯密和李嘉图共享一个客观的价值概念。对他们来说，商品的价值就是 "商品中所包含的'价值形成物质'--劳动的数量"，是生产商品 "社会所必需的劳动量"（马克思，1867 年，129 页）。马克思认为，资本主义的商品具有双重性。它们既有使用价值的一面（用于实现某些目的），也有价值的一面。有具体劳动和抽象劳动之分。具体劳动产生商品的使用价值（商品作为满足人的需要的有用商品的质的方面），抽象劳动产生商品的价值（商品的量的方面，它允许商品与其他商品以 × 商品 A 的数量 = y 商品 B 的数量 的关系形式进行交换）。让-巴蒂斯特-萨伊（Jean-Baptiste Say）和弗雷德里克-巴斯蒂亚（Frederic Bastiat）等法国古典政治经济学家或新古典主义奥地利学派的代表人物所持的主观经济价值概念认为，商品的价值是由人类的认知评价和道德判断决定的，并对价值概念进行了理想主义的解释。他们认为，物品的价值是人类主观判断赋予它们的价值。

One problem of the value concept is that its subjective and objective meanings are often mixed up. As the moral value of capitalism is economic value, one needs a precise concept of value (Fuchs 2014). To focus the meaning of the term “value” on economic value does not automatically mean to speak in favour of capitalism and commodification; it only reflects the important role the capitalist economy has in modern society and stresses commodity logic's tendency to attempt to colonize non-commodified realms. The goal is a world not dominated by economic value, but achieving this goal does not necessarily need a non-economic definition of the value concept. Marx made a difference between the concept of value and the concept of price. When we talk about the value of a good, we talk about the average number of hours needed for its production, whereas the price is expressed in quantities of money. “The expression of the value of a commodity in gold – x commodity A = Y money commodity – is its money-form or price” (Marx 1867, 189). Marx argued that the value and the price of a commodity do not coincide: “the production price of a commodity is not at all identical with its value […] It has been shown that the production price of a commodity may stand above or below its value and coincides with it only in exceptional cases” (Marx 1894, 892). He also dealt with the question of how values are transformed into prices. Chapter 9 of Capital Volume III (Marx 1894, 254–272) is devoted to this question.
价值概念的一个问题是，其主观和客观含义经常被混淆。由于资本主义的道德价值是经济价值，人们需要一个精确的价值概念（福克斯，2014 年）。将 "价值 "一词的含义集中在经济价值上并不自动意味着赞成资本主义和商品化；它只是反映了资本主义经济在现代社会中的重要作用，并强调了商品逻辑试图殖民非商品化领域的趋势。我们的目标是建立一个不受经济价值支配的世界，但实现这一目标并不一定需要对价值概念进行非经济定义。马克思区分了价值概念和价格概念。当我们谈论一种商品的价值时，我们谈论的是生产这种商品所需的平均小时数，而价格则用货币量来表示。"商品的价值用黄金表示--x 商品 A = Y 货币商品--就是它的货币形式或价格"（马克思，1867 年，189 页）。马克思认为，商品的价值和价格并不一致："商品的生产价格与其价值并不完全一致[......]事实证明，商品的生产价格可能高于或低于其价值，只有在特殊情况下才与价值一致"（马克思 1894 年，892 页）。他还探讨了价值如何转化为价格的问题。 《资本论》第三卷（马克思，1894 年，254-272 页）第 9 章专门讨论了这个问题。

Information – A Peculiar Good
信息--一种奇特的物品

Information is a peculiar good:
信息是一种特殊的物品：

• It is not used up in consumption.
  它不会在消费中耗尽。
[Page 113]
• It can be infinitely shared and copied by one individual without losing the good itself. Several people can own it at the same time.
  它可以被一个人无限共享和复制，而不会丢失物品本身。几个人可以同时拥有它。
• It has no physical wear and tear. Its wear and tear is what Marx (1867, 528) called “moral depreciation”: it is caused by competition and the drive of companies to establish new versions of informational commodities, such as the newest version of the iPod or iPad or a new song by an artist in order to accumulate ever more capital and by the creation of symbolic difference postulated by advertising and branding so that the older informational commodities appear to consumers to be “outdated”.
  它没有物理磨损。它的磨损就是马克思（1867，528）所说的 "道德贬值"：它是由竞争造成的，是公司为了积累更多的资本而不断推出新版本的信息商品（如最新版本的 iPod 或 iPad 或某位艺术家的新歌）的驱动力，也是由广告和品牌塑造所假定的象征性差异造成的，这样，在消费者看来，旧的信息商品就显得 "过时 "了。
• It can be easily and cheaply copied and quickly transmitted.
  它可以方便、廉价地复制和快速传播。
• It is a social good that reflects the history of social interactions and the history of knowledge.
  它是一种社会商品，反映了社会交往的历史和知识的历史。
• The value for producing the initial form of information is relatively high (it includes many hours of development costs), whereas, starting with the second copy, the value is relatively low (work time mainly is the time of copying and distributing the good).
  制作初始形式信息的价值相对较高（包括许多小时的开发成本），而从第二份开始，价值则相对较低（工作时间主要是复制和分发商品的时间）。
• Information is, however, normally sold at a price that is higher than its value (measured in the amount of hours needed for its production). The difference between value and price is at the heart of profit making in the information industries.
  然而，信息的销售价格通常高于其价值（以生产信息所需的工时来衡量）。价值与价格之间的差异是信息产业盈利的核心所在。

A piece of artwork sold at a high price makes use of the value-price-differential and the ideological belief of the buyers in the superiority of the artist. Similarly, branding can constitute a value-price-differential. Branding is an ideological mechanism that wants to make consumers believe that a commodity has a symbolic value above its economic value. Consumers' ideological belief in the superiority of a certain commodity allows companies to achieve excess-profit, a profit higher than yielded for similar use values. Related phenomena are financial assets that are sold at prices that do not correspond to the profits the underlying commodities are yielding. Marx (1894) speaks in this respect of fictitious capital and David Harvey (2005b) talks of a temporal fix to overaccumulation that results in the deference of “the re-entry of capital values into circulation into the future” (Harvey 2005b, 109) so that the difference between profits and asset price can result in financial bubbles. Just like there can be a difference between value and price of a commodity, there can be a difference between profit and financial market worth of a financial asset.
一件高价出售的艺术品利用了价值-价格差异和购买者对艺术家优越性的意识形态信念。同样，品牌也可以构成价值-价格差异。品牌是一种意识形态机制，它希望让消费者相信商品具有高于其经济价值的象征性价值。消费者在意识形态上相信某种商品的优越性，可以让企业获得超额利润，即高于类似使用价值的利润。与此相关的现象是金融资产的销售价格与基础商品的利润不符。马克思（1894 年）在这方面谈到了虚构资本，戴维-哈维（2005 年 b）谈到了过度积累的时间固定性，这导致 "资本价值在未来重新进入流通"（哈维 2005 年 b，109），因此利润与资产价格之间的差异可能导致金融泡沫。正如商品的价值与价格之间可能存在差异一样，金融资产的利润与金融市场价值之间也可能存在差异。

Social Media Work  社交媒体工作

Bolin (2011) argues that in broadcasting, it is the statisticians, not the audiences, who work (see also: Maxwell 1991; Meehan 1984). The advertisers do not buy audiences, but the belief in a certain audience value generated by statisticians that relatively arbitrarily measure audience ratings. “Audiences do not work; it is rather the statisticians and market executives who do” (Bolin 2011, 84). From a Marxist perspective (that Smythe employed, see Fuchs 2014, chapter 4), [Page 114]audiences' work time is the time they consume commercial media. The exact quantity of labour value can never be determined. Therefore, Marx said that the “individual commodity counts […] only as an average sample of its kind” (Marx 1867, 129f). Audiences create the value of the commercial media commodity, whereas audience statistics determine the price of the audience commodity by approximating average audience numbers based on a sample of a certain size.
Bolin (2011) 认为，在广播领域，起作用的是统计人员，而不是受众（另见：Maxwell 1991；Meehan 1984）。广告商购买的不是受众，而是统计人员相对随意地衡量受众收视率所产生的对某种受众价值的信念。"观众不起作用，起作用的是统计人员和市场主管"（Bolin，2011 年，84）。从马克思主义的角度来看（斯迈思采用了这一观点，见 Fuchs 2014, chapter 4），受众的工作时间就是他们消费商业媒体的时间。劳动价值的确切数量永远无法确定。因此，马克思说，"单个商品[......]只能算作同类商品的平均样本"（马克思，1867 年，129f）。受众创造了商业媒体商品的价值，而受众统计则是根据一定规模的样本，通过近似平均受众人数来确定受众商品的价格。

There are two different basic understandings of the term “value”. In a subjective sense, some people understand it is giving mental worth to something, considering it as important. In a more objective sense, value means monetary value or the number of hours that people spend working on something. On corporate social media, users create content, browse content, establish and maintain relations with others by communication, and update their profiles. All the time they spend on these platforms is work time. The Internet prosumer commodity that an advertiser buys on, for example, Facebook or Google is based on specific demographic data (age, location, education, gender, workplace, etc.) and interests (e.g. certain keywords typed into Google or certain interests identified on Facebook). Thereby, a specific group can be identified as target group. All time spent by members of this group on the specific social media platform constitutes the economic value (work time) of a specific Internet prosumer commodity. This work time contains time for social relationship management and cultural activities that generate reputation. Users spend time creating appreciation of others and appreciation of themselves by others in the form of social relations, affects, social bonds, friendships, personal relations, communities, etc. One therefore needs to reflect on how economic value production by the media is connected to what Bourdieu termed social, cultural and symbolic capital (Bolin 2011). Users employ social media because they strive for a certain degree to achieve what Bourdieu (1986a, 1986b) terms social capital (the accumulation of social relations), cultural capital (the accumulation of qualification, education, knowledge) and symbolic capital (the accumulation of reputation). The time that users spend on commercial social media platforms generating social, cultural and symbolic capital is in the process of prosumer commodification transformed into economic capital. Labour time on commercial social media is the conversion of Bourdieuian social, cultural and symbolic capital into Marxian value and economic capital. The subjective and economic understanding of the term “value” are connected by circumstance that human subjectivity is the foundation of capital accumulation on corporate social media.
对 "价值 "一词有两种不同的基本理解。从主观意义上讲，有些人认为它是赋予某物精神价值，认为它很重要。在更客观的意义上，价值指的是金钱价值或人们花在某件事上的工作时间。在企业社交媒体上，用户创建内容、浏览内容、通过交流与他人建立并保持关系，以及更新个人资料。他们在这些平台上花费的所有时间都是工作时间。广告商在 Facebook 或 Google 等平台上购买的互联网专业消费者商品是基于特定的人口统计数据（年龄、地点、教育程度、性别、工作场所等）和兴趣（如在 Google 上输入的特定关键词或在 Facebook 上确定的特定兴趣）。因此，可以将特定群体确定为目标群体。该群体成员在特定社交媒体平台上花费的所有时间都构成了特定互联网专业消费者商品的经济价值（工作时间）。这种工作时间包括社会关系管理时间和产生声誉的文化活动时间。用户花费时间以社会关系、情感、社会纽带、友谊、个人关系、社区等形式创造他人对自己的赞赏和他人对自己的赞赏。因此，我们需要思考媒体的经济价值生产是如何与布迪厄所说的社会、文化和象征资本联系在一起的（Bolin，2011 年）。用户使用社交媒体是因为他们努力在一定程度上实现布迪厄（1986a，1986b）所说的社会资本（社会关系的积累）、文化资本（资格、教育、知识的积累）和象征资本（声誉的积累）。 用户在商业社交媒体平台上花费的时间产生了社会、文化和象征性资本，这些时间在消费商品化的过程中转化为经济资本。在商业社交媒体上的劳动时间是布尔迪厄社会资本、文化资本和象征资本向马克思价值资本和经济资本的转化。对 "价值 "一词的主观和经济理解是相通的，因为人的主观性是企业社交媒体资本积累的基础。

The Social Media Prosumer Commodity's Price
社交媒体商品的价格

How is the social media prosumer commodity's price determined and how is value transformed into money profit? Advertising clients are interested in the access to specific groups that can be targeted with individualized advertising that fit their interests. Access to this group and the data about their interests (who is a member of a specific consumer group that shares certain interests) is sold to advertisers. On Google and Facebook, advertisers set a maximum budget for one campaign and a maximum they are willing to pay for one click on their advertisement or for 1000 [Page 115]impressions (=presentations of an ad on a profile). The exact price for one click or for 1000 impressions is determined in an automated bidding process, in which all advertisers interested in a specific group (all ads targeted at this specific group) compete. In both models, every user is offered as a commodity and commodified, but only certain user groups are sold as a commodity. In the pay-per-click model, value is transformed into money (profit is realized) when a user clicks on an ad. In the pay-per-view model, value is transformed into money (profit is realized) when an ad is presented on a user's profile. Value and price of the social media prosumer commodity do not coincide; the price is mathematically determined by an algorithm and based on bids. The number of hours spent online by a specific group of users determines the value of the social media prosumer commodity. The price of this commodity is algorithmically determined.
社交媒体消费者商品的价格是如何确定的，价值又是如何转化为金钱利润的？广告客户希望获得特定群体的信息，以便针对这些群体投放符合其兴趣的个性化广告。这些群体的访问权和他们的兴趣数据（谁是特定消费群体的成员，谁与他们有共同的兴趣爱好）被出售给广告商。在谷歌和 Facebook 上，广告商为一次广告活动设定最高预算，并为一次广告点击或 1000 次广告印象（即广告在个人资料上的展示）设定他们愿意支付的最高金额。一次点击或 1000 次展示的确切价格由自动竞价程序决定，所有对特定组（针对该特定组的所有广告）感兴趣的广告商都要参与竞价。在这两种模式中，每个用户都被作为商品提供并商品化，但只有某些用户群被作为商品出售。在按点击付费模式中，当用户点击广告时，价值就会转化为金钱（实现利润）。在按次付费模式中，当广告出现在用户的个人资料中时，价值就会转化为金钱（实现利润）。社交媒体消费商品的价值和价格并不一致；价格是由算法根据出价以数学方式确定的。特定用户群的在线时长决定了社交媒体消费者商品的价值。这种商品的价格由算法决定。

All hours spent online by users of Facebook, Google and comparable corporate social media constitute work time, in which data commodities are generated, and potential time for profit realization. The maximum time of a single user that is productive (i.e. results in data commodities) is 100% of the time spent online. The maximum time that the same user contributes to profit realization by clicking on ads or viewing ads is the time that s/he spends on a specific platform. In practice, users only click on a small share of presented ads. So in the pay-per-click accumulation model, work time tends to be much larger than profit realization time. A lot of commodities that are offered for sale are created by online labour; only a certain share of it is sold and results in profits. This share is still large enough for companies like Google and Facebook to be able to generate significant profits. Online labour time is at the same time potential profit realization time. Capital tries to increase profit realization time in order to accumulate capital, i.e. to make an ever-larger share of productive labour time also profit realization time.
脸书、谷歌和同类企业社交媒体用户的所有在线时间都构成了工作时间，在工作时间内产生了数据商品，也是实现利润的潜在时间。单个用户的最大生产时间（即产生数据商品的时间）是在线时间的 100%。同一用户通过点击广告或浏览广告实现利润的最长时间是他/她在特定平台上花费的时间。实际上，用户只会点击一小部分展示的广告。因此，在按点击付费的积累模式中，工作时间往往远远大于利润实现时间。许多待售商品都是通过在线劳动创造出来的，其中只有一定份额的商品被售出并产生利润。这个份额仍然足够大，足以让谷歌和 Facebook 等公司创造可观的利润。在线劳动时间同时也是潜在的利润实现时间。资本试图增加利润实现时间，以积累资本，即让更多的生产劳动时间也成为利润实现时间。

The Law of Value on Social Media
社交媒体的价值规律

Marx formulated the law of value as saying that “the greater the labour-time necessary to produce an article, […] the greater its value” (Marx 1867, 131). It also applies in the case of commercial social media: the more time a user spends on commercial social media, the more data about her/his interests and activities are available and the more advertisements are presented to him/her. Users spending a lot of time online create more data and more value (work time) that is potentially transformed into profit.
马克思提出的价值规律是："生产一件物品所需的劳动时间越长，[......]其价值就越大"（马克思，1867 年，131 页）。这一规律同样适用于商业社交媒体：用户在商业社交媒体上花费的时间越长，有关其兴趣和活动的数据就越多，向其展示的广告也就越多。用户上网时间越长，创造的数据和价值（工作时间）也就越多，并有可能转化为利润。

Time dimensions play a crucial role in determining the price of an ad: the number of times people click on an ad, the number of times an ad or target URL has already been viewed, the number of times a keyword has been entered, the time that a specific user group spends on the platform. Furthermore, the bidding maximums used as well as the number of ad clients competing for ad space influence the ad prices. In the pay-per-view method, Facebook and Google earn more with an ad that is targeted at a group that spends a lot of time on Facebook. The larger the target group, the higher Facebook's and Google's profits tend to be. In the pay-per-click method, Facebook and Google only earn money if users [Page 116]click on an ad. According to studies, the average click-through-rate is 0.1%.4 This means that Facebook and Google tend to gain more profit if ads are presented to more users.
时间维度在决定广告价格方面起着至关重要的作用：人们点击广告的次数、广告或目标 URL 被浏览的次数、关键词被输入的次数、特定用户群在平台上花费的时间。此外，所使用的竞价上限以及竞争广告空间的广告客户数量也会影响广告价格。在 "按次付费 "方法中，Facebook 和谷歌通过针对在 Facebook 上花费大量时间的目标群体投放广告赚取更多利润。目标群体越大，Facebook 和 Google 的利润往往越高。在按点击付费的方法中，Facebook 和 Google 只有在用户点击广告时才能赚钱。根据研究，平均点击率为 0.1%。4 这意味着如果广告呈现给更多用户，Facebook 和 Google 往往会获得更多利润。

Generally, we can say that the higher the total attention time given to ads, the higher Google's and Facebook's profits tend to be. Attention time is determined by the size of a target group and the average time this group spends on the platforms. Online time on corporate social media is both labour time and attention time: all activities are monitored and result in data commodities, so users produce commodities online during their online time. In the pay-per-view mode, specific online time of specifically targeted groups is also attention time that realizes profit for Facebook or Google. In the pay-per-click mode, attention time that realizes profit is only the portion of the online time that users devote to clicking on ads that are presented to them. In both cases, online time is crucial for (a) the production of data commodities, and (b) the realization of profit derived from the sales of the data commodities. Both surveillance of online time (in the sphere of production) and attention time (in sphere of circulation) given to advertisements play an important role in corporate social media's capital accumulation model.
一般来说，我们可以说，广告的总关注时间越长，谷歌和 Facebook 的利润往往就越高。关注时间取决于目标群体的规模和该群体在平台上花费的平均时间。企业社交媒体上的在线时间既是劳动时间，也是注意力时间：所有活动都会受到监控，并产生数据商品，因此用户在在线时间内会产生在线商品。在按次付费模式下，特定目标群体的特定在线时间也是注意力时间，可为 Facebook 或 Google 带来利润。而在按点击付费模式下，实现利润的注意力时间只是用户用于点击广告的那部分在线时间。在这两种情况下，在线时间对于 (a) 生产数据商品和 (b) 实现数据商品销售利润都至关重要。在企业社交媒体的资本积累模式中，对广告在线时间（生产领域）和注意力时间（流通领域）的监控都发挥着重要作用。

According to Google Trends, Michael Jackson was among the top trending search keywords on Google on June 27, 2012. Using the Google AdWords traffic estimator (on June 27, 2012) showed that by creating a campaign with a maximum CPC of £10 and a budget of £1000 per day, one can expect to attract 2867–3504 impressions and 112–137 clicks for total costs of £900–1100 per day if one targets Google users who search for “Michael Jackson”. In comparison, I used the same settings for the keywords “Cat Power,” an indie rock singer whose music I like and who is definitely much less popular than Michael Jackson. In a campaign that targets users who google “Cat Power,” one can expect to attract 108–132 impressions and 3.9–4.7 clicks for total costs of £30.96–37.84 per day. The profit that Google makes with the data commodity associated with the keywords “Michael Jackson” is much larger than the one it makes with the keywords “Cat Power” because the first is more sought-after. And that a keyword is popular means that users spend more collective usage time per day entering the keyword and reading its result pages than for other keywords. The example shows that popular interests, for whose generation and result consumption users spend more labour time on the Internet than for not-so-popular keywords, tend to result in higher profits for Google than interests that are not so popular.

Possible Breakdown and Alternatives

That surplus value generating labour is an emergent property of capitalist production means that production and accumulation will break down if this labour is withdrawn. It is an essential part of the capitalist production process. That prosumers conduct surplus-generating labour can also be seen by imagining [Page 117]what would happen if they stopped using Facebook: the number of users would drop, advertisers would stop investments because there are no objects for their advertising messages and therefore no potential customers for their products, the profits of the new media corporations would drop, and they would go bankrupt. If such activities were carried out on a large scale, a new economy crisis would arise. This thought experiment shows that users are essential for generating profit in the new media economy. Furthermore, they produce and co-produce parts of the products, and therefore parts of the use value, value, and surplus value that are objectified in these products.

Not all prosumer work on social media is commodified (just like not all audience work is commodified). Work that contributes content, attention or comments to non-commercial non-profit projects (such as Wikipedia or alternative online news media, such as Indymedia, Alternet, Democracy Now!, openDemocracy, WikiLeaks, or the use of social media by non-governmental organizations (NGOs)) is work in the sense that it helps to create use values (alternative news, critical discourse, etc.), but it is non-commodified work – it cannot be exploited, does not have exchange value and does not yield profit. Such projects are an expression of the struggle for a society and an Internet that is not ruled by the logic of commodities and exchange value. Although they are precarious, the existence of alternatives shows that social media and media in general are, in capitalism, shaped by (a) class structures, (b) ideological “incorporation and legitimation” and (c) “gaps and contradictions” that constitute “cracks and fissures” that allow “currents of criticism and movements of contestation” (Golding and Murdock 1978, 353). The question of the alternatives will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 9 and 10.

The Social Factory

Unpaid Internet prosumer labour is a new form of labour that is connected to other forms of exploited labour (for foundations of a critical theory of digital labour see my book Karl Marx and digital labour, Fuchs 2014). The emergence of “playbour” does not replace Fordist and industrial forms of work that are based on the separation of labour time and reproductive spare time. It is a new quality of the organization of work that is connected to the rising importance of knowledge and creative work and the attempts of capital to overcome crises by reorganizing work.

In playbour, surveillance as a coercive means of work control is to a certain degree substituted or complemented by ideological forms of control, in which workers monitor and maximize their own performance or monitor themselves mutually. Surveillance thereby becomes transformed into control of the self. Playbour is an actual control strategy of humans that aims at enhancing productivity and capital accumulation. At the same time, it is an ideology that postulates (e.g. in management ideology, public debates, etc.) the democratization of work [Page 118]and thereby wants to create the illusionary impression that we have entered an age without alienation or exploitation.

The factory is the space for the production of economic value. Italian theorists such as Mario Tronti and Toni Negri have argued that, especially since the capitalist crisis in the 1970s, the production of value has diffused from the factory as a space for the organization of wage labour into the broader realm of society. The contemporary globalization of capitalism has dispersed the walls of the wage labour factory all over the globe. Due to the circumstance that capital cannot exist without non-wage labour and exploits the commons that are created by all, society has become a factory. Different forms of unpaid and low-paid work would be at the heart of what Autonomists call the social worker, who works in the social factory: “all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society” (Tronti, in Cleaver 1992, 137). Nick Dyer-Witheford (2010, 485) says that the rise of the social workers has resulted in the emergence of the “factory planet” – the factory as locus for the production of value and commodities is everywhere, commodification has become universal and total. The boundaries of the factory have enlarged from the wage labour place into society and thereby exploitation has become more global and more pervasive.

The factory is an inherent creation of capitalism. It is the space where the exploitation of labour and the creation of value take place. The factory is not static, but develops and changes its organizational forms along with the historical trajectory of capitalism. This means that there is not one type of factory in a historical period of capitalism, but there are different types of factories that are all connected to each other and are necessary organizational forms of capital accumulation. In contemporary capitalism, we find, for example, the blue-collar/white-collar factories, the Internet factory, the sweatshop factory, the domestic factory (household), etc.

The Social Factory Online

Social media and the mobile Internet make the audience commodity ubiquitous, and the factory is not limited to your living room and your wage workplace – the factory and workplace surveillance are also in all in-between spaces. The entire planet is today a capitalist factory. Internet user commodification is part of the tendency of the commodification of everything that has resulted in the generalization of the factory and of exploitation. Neoliberal capitalism has largely widened the boundaries of what is treated as a commodity.

Internet labour and its surveillance are based on the surveillance, blood and sweat of super-exploited labour in developing countries. Alain Lipietz (1995) has, in this context, spoken of the emergence of “bloody Taylorism” as a contemporary accumulation regime that is coupled with two other accumulation regimes (peripheral Fordism, post-Fordism). Bloody Taylorism is based on the “delocalization of certain limited Taylorist industrial activities towards social formations with very high rates of exploitation” (Lipietz 1995, 10). “To the traditional oppression of women, this strategy adds all the modern weapons of anti-labour repression (official unions, absence of civil rights, imprisonment and torture of opponents)” [Page 119](Lipietz 1995, 11). Taylorism has not been replaced, we do not live in an age of post-Taylorism; rather, we are experiencing an extension and intensification of Taylorism that is complemented by new ideological forms of workforce control. The emergence of “workplayplaces” is a tendency in contemporary capitalism that interacts with established forms of work, play and toil. The corporate Internet requires for its existence the exploitation of the labour that exists under bloody Taylorist conditions. On top of this foundation, which makes heavy use of traditional workplace surveillance, we find various workplayplaces on the Internet where users work without payment and deterritorialize the boundaries between play and work.

The iSlave Behind the iPhone

Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM)5 reported that Chinese Foxconn workers who produce iPhones, iPads, iPods, MacBooks and other ICTs are facing the withholding of wages, forced and unpaid overtime, exposure to chemicals, harsh management, low wages, bad work safety conditions, lack of basic facilities, etc. In 2010, 18 Foxconn employees attempted suicide, 14 of them succeeded.6 SACOM describes Foxconn workers as “iSlave Behind the iPhone”.7 This example shows that the exploitation and surveillance of digital labour, i.e. labour that is needed for capital accumulation with the help of ICTs, is in no way limited to unpaid user labour, but includes various forms of labour – user labour, wage labour in Western companies for the creation of applications, and slave-like labour that creates hardware (and partly software) in developing countries under inhumane conditions (Fuchs 2014, Hong 2011, Qiu 2009, Sandoval 2013, 2014, Zhao 2008).

Surveillance of Foxconn workers is direct, coercive, disciplinary and Taylorist. “Foxconn's stringent military-like culture is one of surveillance, obedience and not challenging authority. Workers are told obey or leave”.8 “Supervisors yell at workers with foul language. Workers experience pressure and humiliation. Workers are warned that they may be replaced by robots if they are not efficient enough. Apart from scolding by frontline supervisors, other forms of punishment include being required to write confession letters and copying the CEO's quotations. A majority of workers have to stand for ten hours during work shifts. There is no recess as promised by Foxconn. Some workers suffer from leg cramps after work. Workers have extra workloads or have to skip the second meal break under the arrangement of ‘continuous shifts’. […] At the entrance of each building, there is a worker station to check the identities of the workers”.9

The Joy of the Phone and Computer in the West Is the Blood and Sweat of Africans and Asians

iPhones, iPads, iMacs, Nokia phones etc. are also “blood phones” and “blood pads,” and “blood Macs” in another sense: many smartphones, laptops, digital cameras, mp3 players, etc. are made out of minerals (e.g. cassiterite, wolframite, coltan, gold, tungsten, tantalum, tin) that are extracted from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries under slave-like conditions (Fuchs 2014, chapter 6). Delly Mawazo Sesete describes the production conditions:

The Knowledge Labour Aristocracy

A software engineer at Google earns on average US$103 348 a year,11 a software engineer at Facebook on average US$111 428.12 They are highly paid and relatively wealthy, although, just like all workers, exploited. The mean average wage of software developers in the USA was $92 080 in May 2011, the mean average wage of telephone operators in call centres was $28 600.13 Both types of activities fall under the broad category of knowledge work that is separated by internal class divisions.

The knowledge labour aristocracy derives wage benefits at the expense of other workers. On the one side there are precarious proletarianized knowledge workers, and on the other side a well-paid labour aristocracy that forms a “salaried bourgeoisie”: the “members of the new bourgeoisie get wages, and even if they own part of their company, earn stocks as part of their remuneration (‘bonuses' for their ‘success’). This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point [Page 121]of reference whose only real example in today's global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status” (Žižek 2012a).

The Internet as Global Division of Labour

The existence of the Internet in its current dominant capitalist form is based on various forms of labour: the relatively highly-paid wage work of software engineers and low-paid proletarianized workers in Internet companies, the unpaid labour of users, the highly exploited bloody Taylorist work, highly toxic e-waste labour that disassembles ICTs and slave work in developing countries producing hardware and extracting “conflict minerals” (Fuchs 2014). There is a class conflict between capital and labour that is constituted through exploitation.

The rate of exploitation is varied depending on the type and location of activity. In the case of the salaried knowledge worker bourgeoisie, capital pays relatively high wages in order to try to gain their hegemonic consensus, whereas low-paid knowledge workers, users, hardware and software producers and mineral extractors in developing countries are facing precarious work conditions and varying degrees and forms of slavery and exploitation that, as a whole, help advancing the profits of capital by minimizing the wage costs. Free-labouring Internet users and the workers in conflict mines have in common that they are unpaid. The difference is that the former gain pleasure through their exploitation, whereas the latter suffer pain and die through their exploitation which enables the pleasure of the former. The main benefit from this situation is monetary and goes to companies like Google, Apple and Facebook that are the contemporary slaveholders and slave masters.

Different forms of control are needed for exploiting digital labour. Self-control and playbour that feel like fun but create parts of the value constitute only one part of the labour process that has its foundation in a racist mode of production and exploitation of workers in developing countries. The exploitation of play workers in the West is based on the pain, sweat, blood and death of workers in developing countries. The corporate Internet needs for its existence both playbour and toil, fun and misery, biopolitical power and disciplinary power, self-control and surveillance. The example of the Foxconn factories and Congolese conflict minerals shows that the exploitation of Internet playbour needs as a precondition, and is coupled with, the bloody Taylorist exploitation of workers in the developing world.