Essay Example on Term Paper Political economy of the Communication

Political Economy of Media MED 411 Term Paper Political economy of the communication is about nature relations between media and communication systems with social structure That includes ownership support structures government policies that affect media and media content Robert McChesney When Industrial Revolution age came world had a new perspective for living With that new perspectives emerge in terms of economy and politics This leads us to two important perspective occurred with Karl Marx and Adam Smith Adam Smith approach was suggesting a free market with limited government limitations This is also known as liberal economy Karl Marx took that idea and add his thoughts to make a new perspective for new era Thus lead us to capitalism and new terms for understanding the concept like commodity and surplus value Commodity basically a thing has value to others can sell and trade and surplus value is a value that made by worker s labour and goes to the owner of the workers the capital according to Marx These perspectives develop in 18th and 19th century As time passed Marx became more and more important for political economy of communication and social studies Between 1968 and 1977 there were 1537 articles about Marx and Marxism Articles increased in 1978 1987 We can tell that 1988 2007 has the most articles Fuchs 2014 

As we look in cultural pay for a movie ticket to see the movie And in digital age humans audiences can be a commodity like a movie ticket As it is definition commodity a material substance which can be bought or sold In 1977 Dallas Smythe come with a concept or term called audience labour For his point of view he claimed when you started watching TV show or read newspaper is audience labour But this point of view has errors We can see that after Smythe other political economy of communication thinkers came with different point of views but in their core audience labour was in there Nixon Although when using and consuming cultural products as an audience you help newspaper or TV channel to make money With the technological developments in past few years surveillance became a high value for companies Surveillance is come up with digital media Everyone who used a internet or a app leave a footprint and the help of the new technologies it will make a cyber identity What this person like what is gender Where do this person live 

Thus they are the criterion to earn money for the site As an example Google has bought YouTube Site is for watching videos but videos making by users and again users watch other user s videos via YouTube As Fuchs points put the users who upload or watch videos on YouTube constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet And Brice Nixon had a critique to sentence Fuchs has missed the fact that uploading and watching videos on YouTube are two different kinds of productive labour from the perspective of YouTube as a digital communicative capitalist Users who watch videos on YouTube are the objects of advertiser attention because it is their work of watching that advertisers want to direct toward watching advertisements Users who upload videos to YouTube are doing the work of creating user generated content Those users and that work are not sold to advertisers Nixon