York University
Labour in the Communication and Cultural Industries
COMN3213, Group Discussion Report, Group 2.
Group Discussion #5
1. “Web 2.0 corporations and the usage they enable are not an expression of participatory democracy. As long as corporations dominate the Internet, it will not be participatory”. Do you agree? Why? Why not?
2. Fuchs claims that “audiences of advertising-financed newspapers, TV and radio stations work when giving attention to these media (audience labour) and produce themselves as a commodity (the audience commodity) that is sold to advertisers” […] “If exploitation does not feel like exploitation, then this does not mean that it does not exist. It is exploitation even if users like it.” Do you believe you are exploited when you perform digital labour? Why? Why not?
3. “When Theodore Adorno wrote of the ‘culture industry’, arguing that culture was being universally commodified and homogenized, it was arguably an elitist simplification. Even the Hollywood production-line showed more variation than Adorno admitted. The social industry, by contrast, has gone much further, subjecting social life to an invariant written formula.” (Seymour). Discuss in relation to course themes.
4. “The nuance added by social industry’s platforms is that they don’t necessarily have to spy on us. They have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, professional colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us, after keeping a record of the data.” (Seymour). Why is this significant?
5. “Now the data platforms know us better than we know ourselves” (Seymour). Do you agree? Why? Why not?