César Ricardo Siqueira Bolaño

The Political Economy of the Internet Social Networking Sites and a Reply to Fuchs

The privatization of the Internet meant not simply a passage from a state-logic organization to an economic one but something more complex. The year 1995 marked a disruption when the National Science Foundation (NSF), the public agency that controlled and exploited the network, transferred its regulatory responsibilities to the private sector. Despite the system’s provision of free access to information, the Internet’s entire economic logic was modified when advertising became the standard norm. The objective of this article is to summarize the history of the Internet and the points that are important to understanding its actual political and economic logic via an emphasis on social networking sites. Our argument also involves a Marxist critique of a theoretical element that Fuchs has contributed to this discussion.

Monopoly Capitalism and the Culture Industry

Up to this point I have only dealt with the specific problems of the Culture Industry at a very superficial level. I previously tried to define the relations between capital, state and information for a given level of abstraction, and especially the contradictions of the capitalist form of information as it can be derived from capital and the capital–state relationship at the same theoretical level. In the previous section I presented what Habermas considers to be the problem in the creation and the contradictions of the bourgeois public sphere, understood as where the contradictions of the information in classical capitalism come about. If this is true, then information would primarily take on a role of articulating the public sphere, ideologically intended to serve capital. However, it is only with monopoly capitalism and especially with the emergence of the so-called Culture Industry that information acquires this special importance in the maintenance of the system, from the point of view of both its ideological reproduction and the accumulation of capital.

The Political Economy of Communication and Culture

The second half of the 1970s saw the birth in Europe of a new critical economy of communications and culture. Richeri’s 1983 publication is a collection of foundational literature on the subject. It brings together the work of Smythe and Cesareo (as previously discussed), a revised version of Garnham’s classic article (1979a) and various other important texts. The question of the economy of the media is raised across Europe at this time, in reaction to the massive technological changes occurring in the audiovisual world — changes that were to completely transform the face of Western European television by the end of the 1980s.

Conclusion and Prospects: Communication and Capitalism in the 21st Century

The idea of competition and disputes is deeply ingrained in the ideological mindset projected by the Culture Industry, which stimulates the ostentatious display of symbols of wealth and differentiated individual consumption. Differentiation is the necessary assumption of homogeneity fabricated by mass culture, whereas individualism is the opposite of massification. In short, it is the relationship between these opposing concepts (differentiation/homogeneity, masses/individuals), under the primacy of technical progress and efficiency (instead of ideology) on which the Culture Industry is based. This industry is destined to serve as a general competitive space for wide-ranging monopolistic business sectors (differentiated consumer goods, commerce, banks, companies producing manufactured goods and running certain services, etc.).

The Contradictions of Information

The greatest difficulty in constructing a Marxist theory of mass communication under capitalism is the fact that the few references by Marx pertinent to the subject are clearly insufficient for such an undertaking. Apart from the historical references to the revolution in transport systems, a product of capitalist expansion which, together with other factors, would provide mechanized production with “enormous power to quickly expand by leaps and bounds” (Capital, Volume I*), and his statement that the “development of ocean navigation and of the means of communication generally has swept away the technical basis on which seasonal work was really supported” (ibid.), Marx’s main reference to the subject in Volume I is in the section on “Division of Labour in Manufacture, and Division of Labour in Society”. The famous reference to the town-country antithesis is followed by the comment that […] the number and density of the population [are] a necessary condition for the division of labour in society. Nevertheless, this density is more or less relative. A relatively thinly populated country, with well-developed means of communication, has a denser population than a more numerously populated country, with badly-developed means of communication.

Subsumption of Intellectual Work and the Political Economy of the Internet

The essentially linked nature of the political domination, economic exploitation and ideological reproduction processes of the capitalist form of information has not changed because of the development of information technology and communication, although the most interesting aspect of the internet is its potential to democratize information, encourage horizontal communication and connect society in a way that is more independent and relatively invisible to the state and economic powers.

The Culture Industry and Its Functions

In Chapter 1, I explained the derivation of capitalist information, highlighting its different manifestations and its immanent contradictions. This was in fact a purely formal explanation in an attempt to describe what we can term the “backbone of capitalist industrialized culture”. However, at that point, it was not possible to provide a full designation of the Culture Industry. A number of key categories were missing that can only be understood on the basis of rigorous historical analysis. Derivation is a logical movement that only partially defines our objective and whose complete specification demands a subsequent shift in characterizing historic categories. Note that in the opening chapter I introduced the concept of the bourgeois public sphere, defining it as one manifestation of the contradictions of information in classic capitalism.

TV digital, potencialidades e disputas

O artigo analisa o mercado televisivo brasileiro, em especial ante a implantacao da TV digital terrestre. A partir da Economia Politica da Comunicacao, trabalha-se a digitalizacao e sua potencialidade, os limites da tecnologia, a convergencia, a disputa por audiencia na televisao aberta e o endividamento das grandes redes. Conclui-se pela necessidade de uma politica publica para o audiovisual que ataque os problemas historicos do setor.