THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INTERNET: COMMODIFICATION, SPATIALIZATION, STRUCTURATION

One can also map the political economy of communication through three social proc­esses that are central to the field: commodification, spatialization and structuration. Commodification has long been understood as the process of taking goods and services that are valued for their use or need, for example, food to satisfy hunger, water as neces­sary for life, or information required for problem-solving, and transforming them into commodities that are valued for what they can earn in the marketplace, for example, proc­essed fast food, bottled and branded water, or intellectual property.

First, communication practices and technologies contribute to the general commodi­fication process throughout society. For example, the introduction of computer commu­nication gives all companies, not just communication companies, greater control over the entire process of production, distribution, and exchange, permitting retailers to monitor sales and inventory levels with ever-improving precision. This enables firms to produce and ship only what they know is likely to sell quickly, thereby reducing or outsourcing labor, inventory requirements and unnecessary merchandise. Second, commodification is an entry point to understand specific communication institutions and practices. For example, the general, worldwide expansion of commodification in the 1980s, partly in response to global declines in economic growth, led to changes in government priorities, the increased commercialization of media programming, the privatization of once-public media and telecommunications institutions, and the liberalization of communication markets.

As a result, when the Internet started to expand rapidly in the 1990s, it was easier to make the case to develop it as a commercial medium, shaped by private markets, and used to advance the global market system.

Even public regulation itself, which was considered essential to advance the demo­cratic development of radio and television, was eschewed by corporate and government officials - convinced by economic arguments - that the private market was the best means to develop the Internet. Political economists therefore concentrate on how the Internet has been exploited for commercial purposes by measuring and monitoring, packaging and repackaging communication and information, thereby turning Internet content into a marketable commodity. Political economy has thus examined the ways patent, copyright, and trademark law has taken content - which is in principle freely available to anyone with Internet access - and restricted access to those with the ability to pay (McChesney, 2007; Schiller, 2007, 2011; Tian, 2009).

Political economists have also extended the analysis of commodification in Internet use as prefigured by the concept of the ‘audience commodity’ (Smythe, 1981). As applied to television for example, Meehan (2005) identified how audiences are assembled into cate­gories and sold to advertisers. In the process this constructs artificial categories of people based on their market value - what Meehan (2005, pp. 34-5) calls ‘consumer castes’ - and this has both material and symbolic consequences. For instance, even though these categories are not actual social relations, the process reinforces social divisions of class, gender, race and ethnicity by catering only to those with the desired disposable income. This complements class divisions while at the same time drawing on and reinforcing exist­ing stereotypes of what ‘women’, ‘men’ or ‘Hispanics’ want, in a continual feedback loop that reifies constructed differences.

In addition to examining the process of commodifying media content and audiences, it is important to consider the commodification of media labor. Braverman’s (1973) now classic work directly confronted the transformation of the labor process in capitalism. According to him, general labor is constituted out of the unity of ‘conception’, the power to envision, imagine, and design work, and ‘execution’, the power to carry it out. Within the process of commodification, capital acts to separate conception from execution - to divide skill from the raw ability to carry out a task. This separation concentrates concep­tual power in a managerial class that is either a part of capital or represents its interests, and reconstitutes the labor process with this new distribution of skill and power at the point of production.

The process of commodification is also extended in the labor of communication workers directly experienced as wage labor, a development that increases in significance throughout the technology-mediated workplace. In order to cut labor costs and expand revenue in the print media, for example, managers replaced mechanical with electronic systems to eliminate thousands of jobs in the printing industry as electronic typesetting did away with the jobs of linotype operators. Today’s digital systems allow companies to expand and extend this process. Print reporters increasingly serve in the combined roles of editor and page producer. They not only report on a story, they also put it into a form for transmission to the printed, and increasingly, electronic page. Companies generally retain the rights to the multiplicity of repackaged forms and thereby profit from each use while the workers do not.

Wage labor may also be reduced or eliminated in the software industry. Companies now sell software and apps well before they have been debugged with the understanding that customers will report errors, download and install updates, and figure out how to work around problems. This ability to eliminate labor, combine it to perform multiple tasks, and shift labor to unpaid consumers further expands the revenue potential as Huws (2003) and Mosco (2011) have documented for example. Additional research, such as Mosco et al. (2010), identifies how workers have resisted and responded by bringing together people from different media, including journalists, broadcast professionals, and technical specialists in the film, video, telecommunications and computer services sectors into trade unions that represent large segments of the communications workforce.

Commodification of the Internet also suggests a reconceptualization of labor, also as prefigured in political economy by the concept of the audience commodity. Smythe (1981) identified the time and attention audiences give to media as ‘work’. In this view, the content - whatever its subjective use value (e.g., entertainment, information, and stress relief) - provides the metaphorical ‘free lunch’ designed to attract audiences since their time and attention is sold to advertisers (exchange value), which allows the media company to expand its profit. This put into question long-standing distinctions made between production (paid labor) and consumption (leisure, non-work or unpaid labor) at the center of feminist political economy, including debates around Marxism.

While efforts to commodify the use and future development of the Internet continue, political economy’s attention to power relations recognizes that this process is not com­plete without taking into account resistance, opposition, and the creation of alterna­tives. Historical and current evidence of alternative, autonomous, independent, radical, critical, and other variations of media all indicate the ways of negotiation or rejecting the processes of commodification (see Mazepa, 2007; McChesney, 2007; Feenberg and Friesen, 2011; Hands, 2011). This includes efforts to subvert commercial dominance of communication resources, with examples ranging from radio (e.g., the retaining of radio as a two-way communication device), to hacking into telephone monopolies (e.g., phreakers), to current digital alternatives such as the ‘free software’ movement. The latter - based as it is on the moral philosophy and ethics of public sharing, exchange and development of source code - is but one example (Stallman, 2002; Mansell and Berdou, 2010). As Milberry (2012, p. 116) points out, this is different from (the more commonly known) open software initiatives: it is not simply a question of using or developing technology in a particular way, or realizing one of the myths of the Internet such that capitalism remains intact; the ultimate goal is praxis - research and activism that sees communication resources as essential to progressive social change and inseparable from political economic change. These alternatives ‘subvert the dominant social order’ rather than mitigating, complementing, or extending it.

The second starting point for the political economy of communication is spatializa- tion, or the process of overcoming the constraints of space and time in social life.

Communication is central to spatialization because communication and informa­tion processes and technologies promote flexibility while simultaneously concentrating control throughout industry - but particularly within the communication and informa­tion sectors. Spatialization encompasses the process of globalization, the worldwide restructuring of industries and firms. Restructuring at the industry level is exemplified by the development of integrated markets based on digital technologies and, at the firm level, by the growth of the flexible or ‘virtual’ company, which makes use of communica­tion and information systems to continuously change structure, product line, marketing, and relationships with other companies, suppliers, its own workforce, and customers.

The political economy of communication has traditionally addressed spatialization as the institutional extension of corporate power in the communication industry. This is manifested in the sheer growth in size of media firms, measured by assets, revenues, profit, employees and stock share values, a development that has accelerated since the development of the Internet (Downing, 2011). In addition to demonstrating how media firms have developed into transnational conglomerates that now rival, in size and power, firms in any industry (as well as some nation-states), political economists are addressing the development of flexible forms of corporate power as evident in term- and project­specific arrangements. In addition to international free trade agreements, these can take the form of informal or formal agreements - identified as synergies, joint ventures or stra­tegic alliances - that take advantage of more flexible means of communication to unite and separate corporations according to mutual interests. As Hope (2011) explains, these create networks of supra-state corporations that can manage time and space to their own substantial advantage. Identifying how this control shapes labor on a worldwide scale, political economists of the Internet have also focused on how globalization is manifested in a new international division of labor that places China at the base of a network of commodity chains that embody both the power of capitalism to exploit labor and the challenges it faces. Such exploitation leads to the upheavals that regularly mark ICT com­panies such as in the Taiwan-based electronics company Foxconn, and as epitomized by its employees’ suicides (Qiu, 2010; Yu, 2011; Zhao, 2011).

The third entry point for the political economy of communication is structuration, which, drawing from the work of Karl Marx and Anthony Giddens, describes the ways people actively make history, but not under conditions of their own making. Specifically, research based on structuration helps to balance a tendency in political economic analysis to concentrate primarily on structures, typically business and governmental institutions, by incorporating the ideas of agency, social process, and social practice into analysis.

The political economy of the Internet addresses social class in these terms by producing research that documents persistent inequities in communication systems, particularly in access to the means of communication, and the reproduction of these inequities in social institutions (Eubanks, 2011). Class structuration is taken as a central entry point for com­prehending social life, and numerous studies have documented the persistence of class divisions in the political economy of the Internet. Nevertheless, there are other dimen­sions to structuration that complement and conflict with class structuration, including gender, race, and those broadly defined social movements, which, along with class, make up much of the social relations of communication (Castells, 2012). Political economy has also made important strides in addressing the intersection of feminist studies and the political economy of the media (Daniels, 2009; Eubanks, 2011). It has taken major steps in research on information technology, gender, and the international division of labor, which addresses the double oppression that female workers face in industries like micro­electronics, where empirical evidence indicates that they have experienced the lowest wages and the most brutalizing working conditions (Huws, 2003; Ngai, 2005), and where unequal gender relations and power disparities between the Global North and South persist despite the introduction of new information technologies (Lee, 2011).

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