Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism
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Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism Edited by Christian Fuchs Vincent Mosco LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> Contents List of Figures and Tables vii About the Authors viii 1 Introduction: Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today 1 Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco 2 Towards Marxian Internet Studies 22 Christian Fuchs 3 Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media 68 Andreas Wittel 4 The Relevance of Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation for Media and Communication Research 105 Mattias Ekman 5 The Internet and “Frictionless Capitalism” 133 Jens Schröter 6 Digital Media and Capital’s Logic of Acceleration 151 Vincent Manzerolle and Atle Mikkola Kjøsen 7 How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation? Audience Labour on Social Network Sites 180 Eran Fisher 8 The Network’s Blindspot: Exclusion, Exploitation and Marx’s Process-Relational Ontology 204 Robert Prey 9 3C: Commodifying Communication in Capitalism 233 Jernej A. Prodnik 10 The Construction of Platform Imperialism in the Globalisation Era 322 Dal Yong Jin <UN> vi contents 11 Foxconned Labour as the Dark Side of the Information Age: Working Conditions at Apple’s Contract Manufacturers in China 350 Marisol Sandoval 12 The Pastoral Power of Technology. Rethinking Alienation in Digital Culture 396 Katarina Giritli Nygren and Katarina L Gidlund 13 The Problem of Privacy in Capitalism and Alternative Social Media: The Case of Diaspora 413 Sebastian Sevignani 14 “A Workers’ Inquiry 2.0”: An Ethnographic Method for the Study of Produsage in Social Media Contexts 447 Brian A. Brown and Anabel Quan-Haase 15 Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions 482 Miriyam Aouragh 16 Marx in the Cloud 516 Vincent Mosco Index 537 <UN> About the Authors Editors Christian Fuchs is Professor at and Director of the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media research Institute (camri). He is co-editor of the open access online journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www. triple-c.at). His research interests lie in the fields of Critical Information Society Studies, Critical Internet Research, critical social theory, media & soci- ety and the Critical Political Economy of Media, Communication & Society. He is author of numerous publications on these topics, including the monographs “Reading Marx in the Information Age: A Media and Communication Studies Perspective on Capital Volume 1” (Routledge 2016), “Digital Labour and Karl Marx” (Routledge 2014), “Social Media: A Critical Introduction” (Sage 2014), “Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media” (2015), “OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism” (Zer0 Books 2014), “Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies” (Routledge 2011), “Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age” (Routledge 2008). Vincent Mosco is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen's University where he was Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society and head of the Department of Sociology. His most recent books include To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (2014), The Laboring of Communication (with Catherine McKercher, 2008), The Political Economy of Communication, second edition (2009), Getting the Message: Communication Workers and Global Value Chains (edited with Ursula Huws and Catherine McKercher, 2010), and Critical Studies in Communication and Society (edited with Cao Jin and Leslie Regan Shade, 2014). Authors Miriyam Aouragh is Leverhulme fellow at the University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (camri). Her research concerns the everyday impli- cations of the internet for activists and qcyber warfare in the Arab-Israeli con- flict. Her Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet and the Construction of Identity came out in 2011 (ib Tauris). Miriyam is a socialist activist. <UN> about the authors ix Brian A. Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media & Film at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. His research is focused on the biopolitics of social media, autonomist theory, and visual cul- ture studies. Mattias Ekman is working as a researcher at the Swedish Media Council and as a lecturer at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. His research deals fore- most with political mobilization and social media, right-wing extremism and the Internet, political communication and news media, and most recently, domes- tic media cultures. His latest publications include contributions in Ethnic and Racial Studies Journalism Practice, Celebrity Studies and Mediekultur. Eran Fisher is a senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication, The Open University, Israel. He studies the intersection of new media and capitalism. His books include Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age (2010, Palgrave), Internet and Emotions (2014, Routledge, co-edited with Tova Benski), and Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (2015, Palgrave, co-edited with Christian Fuchs). Katarina L. Gidlund is associate Professor of Informatics at Mid Sweden University. Her main research interest is critical studies of digital technology and societal change. This involves issues such as critical and reflexive design, , the discursive level of design, and the interplay between rhetoric and practice (hegemonies and their material practices, power structures, the visualization of dominant stories, and embedded internationalities). She is co-coordinator of the Swedish eGovern- ment Research Network, programme committee member of the International egov conference and the Scandinavian Information Systems Conference, and appointed member in Användningsforum, the forum for usability and acces- sibility in the ict domain iniated by the Swedish government. Dal Yong Jin is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has taught in several institutions, including the University of Illinois in Chicago and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (kaist). His major research and teaching interests are on globalization and media, information <UN> x about the authors technology policy, new media and game studies, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media and culture. He is the author of numerous books, including Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political Culture (2015), De-Convergence of Global Media Industries (2013), Hands On/Hands Off: The Korean State and the Market Liberalization of the Communication Industry (2011), and Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (2010). Atle Mikkola Kjøsen is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario where he researches Marxist value theory, media theory, logistics and supply chains, mobility, time-critical media and artificial intelligence. Vincent Manzerolle is an Assistant Professor in the Communication, Media & Film Department at the University of Windsor. He earned his PhD in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario. His teaching and research focuses generally on the history, political economy, and theory of media. He has published on a range of topics including credit technologies, consumer databases, apps, wire- less connectivity, mobile payment systems, and he is a co-editor of The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age (Peter Lang, 2014). Katarina Giritli Nygren is Associate Professor in Sociology and Director of the Forum for Gender Studies at Mid Sweden University. Her current research deals with the shifting govern- mentalities of and beyond neoliberalism in different contexts with a particular focus on the ways in which they produce inclusion as well as exclusion and how it intersects with class, gender and ethnicity. A particular attention has been paid to outline the theoretical arguments for developed analysis of the intercon- nections between risk, neo-liberal subjectivities and normalization processes. Robert Prey is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. He earned his PhD from the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Canada. His research interests include the political economy of new media, popular music, global communication, and social and media theory. Robert’s work has been pub- lished in numerous academic journals including TripleC, Global Media Journal, The Information Society and The Asia-Pacific Journal. Robert was a visiting researcher in the Department of Sociology at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul, <UN> about the authors xi South Korea from 2007-2008. Prior to, and in between academic degrees he has worked in radio in Canada and with multicultural television in South Korea. Jernej Amon Prodnik is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague (the PolCoRe group), and a researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He defended his PhD in media and communication studies at the University of Ljubljana in 2013 under the title Political Economy of Communication and Structural Transformations of Capitalism. His principal research interests include critique of political economy (with a focus on media and communica-