Adam Arvidsson

Brands A critical perspective

This article proposes a critical perspectives on brands based on recent developments within Marxist thought. It argues that brands build on the immaterial labour of consumers: their ability to create an ethical surplus (a social bond, a shared experience, a common identity) through productive communication. This labour is generally free in the sense that it is both un-paid and more or less autonomous. Contemporary brand management consists in a series of techniques by means of which such free labor is managed so that it comes to produce desirable and valuable outcomes. By thus making productive communication unfold on the plateau of brands, the enhanced ability of the contemporary multitude to produce a common social world is exploited as a source of surplus value.This article proposes a critical perspectives on brands based on recent developments within Marxist thought. It argues that brands build on the immaterial labour of consumers: their ability to crea...

Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet and we are interested in which dimensions of the content of a tweet leads to retweeting. We hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. Our findings may be summarized ‘If you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public’.

The Ethical Economy of Customer Coproduction

In this article, the author argues that customer coproduction should be understood as an expression of a large-scale trend toward the increasing power and relevance of social production. Social production consists in the self-organized systems of (mostly immaterial) production that have evolved around the diffusion of networked information and communication technologies. An analysis of the genealogy of social production is shared; this includes tracing it to the process of re-mediation of social relations put in motion by the expansion of the capitalist economy into the fields of culture and consciousness and the concomitant socialization of production relations. The author then argues that social production, including customer coproduction, follows a very particular economic logic—that is, an ethical economy where value is related to social impact rather than monetary accumulation. A detailed analysis of the logic of this ethical economy is offered; it draws out some implications for the successful management of ever more customer-centric brands, whereby the consumers are directly involved in the processes that add value.

Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet

We engage with recent applications of the Marxist “labor theory of value” to online prosumer practices, and offer an alternative framework for theorizing value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. One, value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Two, the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs in financial markets, rather than in direct commodity exchange. In an alternative framework, we offer an understanding of value creation as based primarily on the capacity to initiate and sustain webs of affective relations, and value realization as linked to a reputation based financial economy. We argue that this model describes the process of value creation and appropriation in the context of online prosumer platforms better than an approach based on the Marxist labor theory of value. We also suggest that our approach can cast new light on value creation within informational capitalism in general.

The ethical economy: Towards a post-capitalist theory of value

Social production has risen on the agenda of the social sciences. Ye t most observers have been reluctant to confront the question of the value of these practices. Instead they have mostly been characterised as ‘free’, ‘common’ or beyond value. This article argues that far from being free, social production abides to a particular value logic, an ‘ethical economy’ where value is related not to the input of labour time, but to the ability to give productive organisation to a diffuse connectivity or, which is the same thing, to transform weak ties into affectively significant strong ones. The article concludes that progressive politics should work with this new emerging value logic.

Ethics and value in customer co-production

This article will make one argument and one suggestion. The first part will argue that practices of customer co-production raise a serious challenge to established theories of value. The second part will suggest that these new practices, although widely disparate in nature, do move according to a common logic of value, and that this new value logic can be fruitfully organized around the concept of ‘ethics’. Let me clarify already here that I intend ‘ethics’ in the sense of the ability to create the values that ‘make a multitude into a community’ (Marazzi, 2008: 66). As I will further elaborate below, this concept of ethics is closer to the original Aristotelian sense of that term, than to the Kantian ethics that has been central to modern, enlightenment discourse. My use of ‘ethics’, in this, Aristotelian sense, is not taken out of the blue. Rather, I propose that a notion of value based on ethics is already emerging within a range of cutting-edge economic practices involving aspects of customer co-production — from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to Open Source production and brand valuation. In other words, I am not proposing a new notion of value as I would like it to be, but I am pointing at actually existing trends and developments. However, since these developments are emergent they cannot be grasped as fully formed facts. My ambition in the second part of this paper is thus limited to suggesting a theoretical framework within which these emergent tendencies can be read in a novel way; and from which a more definite shape can be discerned.

‘Quality singles’: internet dating and the work of fantasy

This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative and affective capacities of internet users to work in ways so that this produces economically valuable content. This is primarily achieved through branding, which as a technique of governance that seeks to work ‘from below’ and ‘empower’ users to deploy their freedom in certain particular, pre-programmed ways. The argument is that online dating provides a good illustration of how the information economy actively subsumes communicative action as a form of immaterial labour.

General Sentiment - How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy

The Fordist economy was marked by what David Stark calls a Parsonian Compromise in which economic value and other values were clearly separated, in theory as well as in practice. Today this is changing. Trends such as Ethical Consumerism and Corporate Social Responsibility are on the rise. More fundamentally, the economic importance of intangible assets like brands has increased. Together these developments testify to a new role for a wider range of values in determining price formation. In this paper I will argue that this trend has two principal causes. First, the socialization of production has increased the importance of affective investments in things like brands, reputation, corporate culture and efficient teamwork as sources of value. Second, a common criterion for the measurement of affective investments is forming, based on the new abstract or General Sentiment that is emerging as a new ‘general equivalent’ as a consequence of the present remediation of communicative relations, primarily throughout the diffusion of social media. Together these two dimensions make up the foundations for a new value logic, an ‘ethical economy’ that is emerging within contemporary wealth creation. After briefly summarizing the first argument, this paper will concentrate on the second, describing the emergence and features of General Sentiment as a criterion of value. The conclusion will suggest possible consequences of this development in both practical and theoretical terms.

Crowds and value. Italian Directioners on Twitter

This paper addresses crowd-based dynamics of value creation in participatory culture. Based on a corpus of 114,931 tweets associated with One Direction and similar boy bands, we draw on recent theories of crowd-based organization in digital media as well as classical crowd theory to build a theoretical model of collective value creation. In our model, the achievement of value in the form of trending and individual microcelebrity is based on affectively driven processes of imitation, rather than on rational evaluation and deliberation. We contrast this model with established accounts of microcelebrity and draw out implications for theories of crowd-based organization in digital media and for theories of participatory culture and collaborative value creation in general.

Facebook and Finance: On the Social Logic of the Derivative:

This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the ‘social logic of the derivative’. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of derivative financial instruments. Second, that the algorithms that Facebook uses share a genealogy with those of derivative financial instruments – both are outcomes of the influence of the ‘cyber sciences’ on managerial practice in the post-war years. Third, that the future potential of Facebook lies in its ability to apply the logic of derivatives to the financial valuation of ordinary social relations, thus further extending the process of financialization of everyday life.