O trabalho produtivo na mercadoria audiência dos sites de redes sociais: uma revisão crítica

Abstract

In the 1970s, Dallas Smythe coined the concept of audience commodity as a part of his critique of the political economy of the means of mass communication. Criticized for his position on labor, the text remained as a classic of the political economy of communication. Today, the concept returns to the center of the debate facing the changes made by the Internet and social networking sites. At the core of the debate we find reflections upon value and productive labor. This work engages critically with the recent literature about productive labor on social networking sites, searching for the most appropriate characterization according to the marxist comprehension of the capitalist mode of production. Contra Fuchs, Smythe, Jhally and Livant, it is argued that the audience does not perform productive labor. Contra Caraway, Rigi and Prey, it is argued that it is not possible to characterize social networking sites as fictitious capital. It is concluded, with César Bolaño and Eloy S. Vieira, that the value of the audience commodity comes from the workers formally subsumed under capital and that this expenditure, for production in general, constitutes a productive cost of circulation, according to the Marxian theory of value.