NEW DIRECTIONS AND ENDURING SIGNPOSTS

The final section of this chapter addresses three major trends in the political economy of the Internet, including the globalization of the field, the shift from an emphasis on traditional to new media, and the growth of activism connected to the political economy tradition.

The global extension of political economy research is proceeding rapidly. Some of this is the result of the sheer movement of scholars, a development that has sped up over the last two decades. For example, the Canadian political economist of the Internet Robin Mansell established a base for institutional political economy at the London School of Economics. Yuezhi Zhao (2011), who has provided the foundation for a political economy of China’s media and telecommunications system, moved from that country to the United States and from there to Canada, establishing important connections among scholars in all three countries. One of her students, A.J.M. Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan came to Canada from Bangladesh and has produced important work on political economy of new media from the perspective of a postcolonial subject (Bhuiyan, 2008). The Korean political economist Dal Yong Jin (Winseck and Jin, 2011) moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked with political economist Dan Schiller to complete a dissertation on the political economy of telecommunications in South Korea. He has since joined Yuezhi Zhao and Robert Hackett to continue the historically strong presence of a political economy perspective at Simon Fraser University.

In addition to formal and informal movements of scholars across regions, universi­ties with a strong political economy orientation have established an institutional base concentrating on international research.

One might reasonably wonder what this expansion of scholarship means for the content of research in political economy. Aside from increasing the total volume of research - has this process of global expansion made a difference for what political economists of the Internet have to say? The primary difference is that current research addresses the profound integration of the global political economy and new media. Heretofore the focus was on how one (the USA), or just a handful of nation states (USA plus EU) and their corporations dominated weaker states and their nascent economies, in the process producing little more than dependency and underdevelopment. Today the emphasis of research is on the integration of corporations, nation-states and classes across national, regional and even developmental divides (Curtin, 2011; Ekecrantz, 2011; Mattelart, 2011). In the view of Chakravarrty and Zhao (2008), for example, this involves the creation of a ‘transcultural political economy’, which they document in a book con­taining contributions from primarily non-Western scholars.

Where once corporations, including those in the communication industry, were based in one country and moved through the rest of the world as an external force, today they are increasingly integrated into the fabric of societies to the point where it is often dif­ficult to determine their national origin. Operating as owners, partners, and in strategic alliances with companies based in the host country, they have led political economists to shift from addressing the power of multinational corporations to examining the rise of a worldwide transnational economy.

Attending to the governance of the Internet, political economic research has impor­tantly documented the restructuring of public authorities including nation-states, regional blocs and global governance organizations, and it has described their integration into the commercial sector to produce hybrids that blur the distinction between public and private at every level of government activity. Again, it is no longer just a question of demonstrating how a large corporation ‘captures’ a government by getting it to steer policies and resources to big business. Rather, we are witnessing the thorough integration of public and private decision-making in a transnationalization of political authority (Braman, 2007; Curtin, 2011), and a related shift in the global management of time and space that considerably favors concentrated private interests (Hope, 2009).

Nevertheless, the worldwide integration of capitalism with its corporate, government, and social structuring is a work in progress. The course is fraught with risks, tensions and contradictions, and there is considerable opposition. This is evidenced in the rise of social movements that have opposed its progression at meetings of international agencies like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international bodies such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that have attempted to provide a relatively public forum in which opposition could be extended into the communication industry (Pickard, 2007). Political economists have not only examined these developments, they have also taken praxis seriously and participated at the political and policy levels (Mansell and Nordenstreng, 2007). In doing so, they acknowledge the importance of the trend to transnationalize the political economy of communication.

A second trend in the political economy approach to the Internet aims to distinguish key similarities and differences articulated by this current configuration of communica­tion. Some political economists have responded by emphasizing continuities between old and new media. For them, history indicates the ways in which significant ‘old’ issues con­tinue to endure in the world of new media. For others, the emphasis is on discontinuities, or the new connections that networked media make possible. Still others remain skeptical of the potential and the promise that new media pundits and techno-gurus promote, while some concentrate on identifying and addressing the latest issues that today’s media raise.

In all of these cases, political economy continues to give considerable attention to analyzing and critiquing capitalism as an enduring and inherently exploitive system that turns workers, raw materials, land, technology, information, and communication itself into marketable commodities in order to earn profit for those who invest capital into the system. Political economists of communication have thus tended to focus on media, information, and audiences as resources, and charted the ways they are packaged into products for sale (Murdock and Wasko, 2007). Many who make the shift from the study of old media to the Internet emphasize the continuities between old and new media capi­talism (Mansell, 2011). For them, new media deepen and extend tendencies found within earlier forms of capitalism by opening new possibilities to turn media and audiences into saleable commodities.

Examining the process of commodification on social media, for example, Fuchs (2012) has examined the creation of audience commodities by Facebook and Twitter. His find­ings demonstrate that users are essentially working for Facebook for free, that is, their labor is exploited to make a profit for Facebook as the data generated from their per­sonal information, online behaviors, browsing and networking is sold to advertisers and marketers (and any other private or government entity), and without disclosure of who bought it, and for what purposes it will be used. This marks a distinction between old and new media, both in terms of conceptualizations and practices of labor and of privacy itself.

Other significant examples of the continuities and discontinuities in new media are Bermejo’s (2009) and Lee’s (2010) work that charts the rise of Google as a corporate power that has made commodification the center of its global strategy. Expanding its reach through vertical and horizontal ownership, the search giant follows the patterns of old media, and, together with social media corporations like Facebook, is using the data collected to build what can be called a ‘surveillance economy’ (Hirst et al., 2014, Chapter 12). In the meantime, however, Google is using the surveillance capabili­ties afforded by the new media to restructure information according to the necessities required by commodification and the security requirements of changing nation-states. In this variation of commodification, privacy is re-conceptualized so that it is no longer seen as a social right or a civil liberty to be exercised by the public; in the surveillance economy privacy becomes a means of exchange (ibid.). In the process, information is also reconstructed according to Google’s priorities.

The power structures that endure in new media can also be identified via the examina­tion of ‘web conglomeration’ and corporate boards of directors. As Simmons’s (2010, 2011) research indicates, corporate dominance strengthened by interpersonal and inter- organizational networks has extended to the Internet where an increasingly small number of decision-makers have the power to influence decision-making on a global scale. Simmons’s work demonstrates that boards of old media conglomerates are interlocked with new media to the extent that, in her words: ‘the Web does not serve as an alternative to media consolidation’ (Simmons, 2010, p. 105), but in fact, further facilitates it. Finally, Han (2012), following research by Bettig (1996) and McChesney and Schiller (2003), has documented how ownership and control is strengthened through the extension of copyright power to media labor. Han’s research showing how international intellectual property rights were extended in China indicates the variations in state-specific nego­tiations with capitalism, while confirming that copyright operates as a key vector in the marketization of communication and culture industries and the exploitation of labor, whether in old media or in new (Schiller, 2007). In essence, the Internet may lead us to call it ‘digital capitalism’, but it is still capitalism, and there is no doubt about which is the more important term.

For other political economists, the emphasis is on discontinuity and departure from historical tendencies in capitalism. For Hardt and Negri (2000), Terranova (2004) and Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter (2009), for example, their central concern is still about the power relations that mutually constitute the production, distribution and exchange of resources. However, as a result of the growth of the Internet, they view those power relations differently than do those who focus on continuity in capitalist relations. Their ‘autonomist’ perspective, so named because it starts from the autonomy of the working class, maintains that capitalism is propelled by the energy and activity of those who work within it. From this perspective, the focus needs to be placed on the self-activity and self­organization of what Hardt and Negri refer to as ‘the mass’ or ‘the multitude’ - the vast majority of people typically viewed as exploited from other critical perspectives (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004). Their research findings identify alternatives to traditional labor union structures and models of social movement organization indicating that the social relations of capitalism are never static or unchallenged. Furthermore, it is argued that the growth of communication and information technology does not just serve capitalism - it significantly disrupts it (Scholz, 2012).

In addition to approaches emphasizing continuity and disjunction, the political economy of communication has responded to new media in a third way, by taking a skep­tical view of the enthusiasm that inevitably accompanies it. As heretofore identified, this has been particularly important in historical work that demonstrates that much of what is considered new and revolutionary in new media was actually associated with every communication technology when present-day old media were new (Mosco, 2004; Flichy, 2007). Today, what Sussman (2011) calls the ‘promotional culture’ - the combination of media, public relations, advertising, marketing and spin - is increasingly effective in but­tressing the myths and optimistic visions of technological utopia, much to the detriment of critical reflection and praxis in general.

The fourth response of political economy to the Internet is to address new problem areas that are particularly significant in this cycle of development in communication and information technology. One should be hesitant to call them new issues because they are really not unique to the Internet and have been distinguished by political economy in the past. Nevertheless, enduring issues of ownership and control are arguably more acute today given the increase and extension of intellectual property rights (May, 2009), surveillance (Brown, 2006; Lyon, 2009; Andrejevic, 2011), and the tendency toward what some call a ‘network economy’ (Melody, 2007; Mansell, 2011).

Last but not least, praxis - or the unity of research and action - remains fundamental to a political economy approach. Most political economists of the Internet have been activists as well as scholars, involved in media democracy, development communication, independent media and universal access work, as well as with labor, feminist, and anti­racist movements through organizations like the Union for Democratic Communication and the International Association for Media and Communication’s working groups in communication, and its policy task force on Internet governance (www.iamcr.org). Important as these developments are, one of the most significant advances in public political activity has been the creation in 2002 of the Free Press by the political economist Robert W. McChesney (2007). The organization has been a focal point for the remarkably resurgent new media reform movement in the United States and is a model for reform movements around the world.

8.5