Nyberg: “Men kravet att följa nationell lagstiftning kan ingen teleoperatör avvika från”:
En teleoperatör kan alltid bestämma sig att underlåta vissa investeringar som t.ex. i Vitryssland.

Nyberg: “Samtidigt måste vi vara tydliga med att det inte är telebolagen som bryter mot mänskliga rättigheter”…
Men det är telebolagen som gör vinster fån investeringar i diktaturer, vad som betyder att de gör vinster från kontexter i vilka mänskliga rättigheter kränks…

Nyberg: “Brott mot de mänskliga rättigheterna är ett problem för oss alla – alltså alla vi som har förmånen att leva i demokrati, för politikerna och för internationella organisationer som FN, EU och OECD”.
Brott mot de mänskliga rättigheterna är ett särskilt problem där teleoperatörer lämna över personaliga uppgifter som används för förtrycket av den politiska oppositionen eller där de försäljer övervakningsteknologier till diktaturer… Ingen har tvingat TeliaSonera att investera i Vitryssland.

Nyberg: “Enskilda bolag är aldrig skyldiga. […] Telekom bidrar till att göra världen mer öppen”.
I Telekommunikation ingår inte bara kommunikationsteknologier, men också telekommunikationsövervakning. Telekomindustrin har också bidragit till utvecklingen att världen har blivit mer repressiv. TeliaSonera har inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket i Vitryssland? Trovicor har inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket i Bahrain och Iran, Gamma Group inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket i Egypten, Nokia Siemens inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket i Egypten och Syrien, i2e Technologies inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket I Libyen, Areas Spa, Qosmos, Utimaco har inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket i Syrien, Eriksson har inget moraliskt ansvar för förtrycket I Iran, osv.?

Under Nazitiden exporterade IBM räknemaskiner till Tyskland. Nazisterna använde maskinerna för att arrangera deporteringarna till förintelselägren. IBM hade inget moraliskt ansvar? Företagen kan göra vad som helst? Problemet är att vinsten står i sådana fall över mänskliga intressen.

Problemet är den immanenta förbindelsen mellan kapitalism och förtrycket… Problemet är att kapitalism skapar ett instrumentellt förnuft som gör ekonomisk vinst det högsta moraliska värdet. Ekonomiskt värde är tyvärr oftast det viktigaste moraliskt värde. Problemet är att Nybergs artikel är ett uttryck för detta instrumentella förnuft.

Den vitryska journalisten Irina Chalip säger i slutet av SVTs dokumentär ”Uppdrag granskning: De svarta lådorna“:
“Om jag köper ett koncentrationsläger kan jag också säga – att det som händer inomhus inte är min sak. Jag äger bara marken.
Bolag som investerar i totalitära länder måste väl förstå – att de kommer att bli indragna i diktaturens smutsiga affärer. De blir medbrottslingar”. Det betyder att hon menar att det är dags att inte längre prata så mycket om företags samhällsansvar (“corporate social responsibility”) i samhällsdiskussioner utan mer om företagsbrott.

On March 1^st, 2012, Google changed its terms of use and privacy policy. What has changed? Has something changed?

Google’s general terms of services that were valid from April 16, 2007, until the end of February 2012, applied to all of its services. It thereby enabled the economic surveillance of a diverse multitude of user data that was collected from various services and user activities for the purpose of targeted advertising: “Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information”.

Google specified in its old privacy policy (valid from October 20, 2011, until the end of February 2012) that the company “may collect the following types of information”: personal registration information, cookies that store “user preferences”, log information (requests, interactions with a service, IP address, browser type, browser language, date and time of requests, cookies that uniquely identify a user), user communications, location data, unique application number. Google said that it was using Cookies for “improving search results and ad selection”, which is only a euphemism for saying that Google sells user data for advertising purposes. “Google also uses cookies in its advertising services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web and on Google services”. To “serve and manage ads” means to exploit user data for economic purposes. The Google ad preferences manager displays the user interests and preferences that are collected by the use of cookies and used for targeted advertising.

Google’s old privacy policy specified that “Google uses the DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web”. Google used DoubleClick, a commercial advertising server owned by Google since 2007 that collects and networks data about usage behaviour on various websites, sells this data, and helps providing targeted advertising – for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other web platforms. There was only an opt-out option from this form of networked economic surveillance. Google’s privacy policy provided a link to this option. Opt-out options are always rather unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and are therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Many Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because such mechanisms can drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising. That Google helped advertisers to “serve and manage ads across the web” means that it used the DoubleClick server for collecting user behaviour data from all over the WWW and using this data for targeted advertising. Google’s exploitation of users is not only limited to its own sites, its surveillance process is networked, spreads and tries to reach all over the WWW.

The analysis shows that Google makes use of privacy policies and terms of service that enable the large-scale economic surveillance of users for the purpose of capital accumulation. Advertising clients of Google that use Google AdWords are able to target ads for example by country, exact location of users and distance from a certain location, language users speak, the type of device used: (desktop/laptop computer, mobile device (specifiable)), the mobile phone operator used (specifiable), gender, or age group.

On January 25, 2012, the EU released a proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation that defines a right of individuals not to be subject to profiling, which is understood as  “automated processing intended to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to this natural person or to analyse or predict in particular the natural person’s performance at work, economic situation, location, health, personal preferences, reliability or behaviour“ (article 20, 1). Targeted advertising is such a form of profiling. According to (the planned) article 20, 2 (c), profiling is allowed if the data subject consents according to the conditions of article 7, which says that if the consent is given as part of a written declaration (as e.g. a web site’s terms of use or privacy policy), the “consent must be presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter“ (article 7, 2). The regulation furthermore proposes a right of citizens to be forgotten (article 17), which also includes that third parties should be informed and asked to erase the same data (article 17, 2), the right to data portability (article 18), which e.g. means that all personal data must be exportable from Facebook to other social networking sites. A further suggested regulation is that by default only the minimum of data that is necessary for obtaining the purpose of processing is collected and stored (article 23). Fines of up to 1 000 000 Euros and 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of a company are implemented (article 79). The EU regulation to a certain extent limits targeted advertising by the right to be forgotten and the special form in which consensus must be given, it does however not make targeted advertising a pure opt-in option, which were a more efficient way for protecting consumers’ and users’ privacy.

As a result of the announcement of the EU Data Protection Regulation, Google over night announced the change and unification of all its privacy policies and the change of its terms of use. In the new terms of use, the use of targeted advertising is no longer defined in the terms of use, but the privacy policy: “We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads”. Although Google presents its new policies as major privacy enhancement (“a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. […]  we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy. Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies – and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html).

The core of the regulations – the automatic use of targeted advertising – has not changed. The European Union does not require Google to base targeted ads on opt-in. Google offers two opt-out options for targeted ads: one can opt-out from the basing of targeted ads on a) search keywords and b) visited websites that have Google ads (Ads Preferences Manager, https://www.google.com/settings/ads/preferences/).

In the new privacy policy, “user communications” are no longer mentioned separately as collected user information. But rather content is defined as part of log information: “Log information. When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include: details of how you used our service, such as your search queries”.  Search keywords can be interpreted as the content of a Google search. The formulation that log information is how one uses a service is vague. It can be interpreted to also include all type of Google content, such as the text of a gMail message or a Google+ posting.

In the new privacy policy, Google says: “We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services – for example to make it easier to share things with people you know. We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent”. This change is significant and reflects the circumstance of the EU data protection regulation’s third-party regulation in the right to be forgotten (article 17, 2). The question if DoubleClick is used for Google’s targeted ads more or less is based on the question how extensively and aggressively Google tries to make users to opt-in to DoubleClick. The effect is that Google will no longer be able to automatically use general Internet user data collected by DoubleClick. However, the unification of the privacy policies and the provision that information from all Google services and all Google ads on external sites can be combined allows Google to base targeted advertising on user profiles that contain a broad range of user data. The sources of user surveillance are now mainly Google services. As Google spreads its ad service all over the web, this surveillance is still networked and spread out. Google tries to compensate the limited use of DoubleClick data for targeted advertising with an integration of the data that it collects itself.

Concerning the use of sensitive data, both the old and the new privacy policy specify: “We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information”.  In addition, the new policy says: “When showing you tailored ads, we will not associate a cookie or anonymous identifier with sensitive categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation or health”. Targeted ads use data from all Google services, including content data”.

The proposed EU Data Protection Regulation says that the processing of sensitive data (race, ethnicity, political opinions, religion, beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic data, health data, sex life, criminal convictions or related security measures) is forbidden, except if the data subject consents (article 9). Google continues to use content data (such as search queries) for targeting advertising that is based on algorithms that make an automatic classification of interests. By collecting a large number of search keywords by one individual, the likelihood that he or she can be personally identified increases. Search keywords are furthermore linked to IP addresses that make the computers of users identifiable. Algorithms can never perfectly analyze the semantics of data. Therefore use of sensitive data for targeted advertising cannot be avoided as long as search queries and other content are automatically analyzed. Google’s provision that it does not use sensitive data for targeted ads stands in contradiction with the fact that it says it uses “details of how you used our service, such as your search queries”.

The overall changes introduced by Google’s new privacy policies and terms of use are modest, the fundamentals remains unchanged: Google uses targeted advertising as a default. DoubleClick is now less likely to be used for targeted advertising. Google has unified its privacy policies. Whereas Google presents this move as providing more transparency (“We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer”, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html), it also enables Google to base its targeted ads on a wide range of user data that stem from across all its services.

Google claims that it does not use sensitive data for targeted ads, which is contradicted by the definition of content data as log data that can be used for targeted ads. Google’s old privacy terms (version from October 20, 2011) had 10 917 characters, which is an increase of 30%. The main privacy terms have thereby grown in complexity, although the number of privacy policies that apply to Google services was reduced from more than 70 to one.

Google present its updated terms of use and privacy policies as new, although no fundamental improvements of user privacy protection can be found. The “change” is an ideological marketing strategy aimed at maintaining the stability of the exploitation of the labour of users that generates value and generates Google’s profits that in 2011 amounted to $8.5 billion (http://www.forbes.com/global2000/#p_1_s_arank_ComputerServices_All_All). Google continues to automatically collect, analyse and commodify a multitude of user data that is generated by searches and the use of Google services. The Marxist communication scholar Dallas Smythe wrote in 1981: “For the great majority of the population […] 24 hours a day is work time. […] [Audiences] work to market […] things to themselves”. For the great majority of Internet users, most of Internet use is (value-generating) labour time. Internet users work on Google and other corporate platforms to market things to themselves and are transformed into an Internet commodity that is sold to targeted advertising clients in order to accumulate capital in the amount of billions of Euros.

In a response letter to the EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (concerning Google’s updated policies and terms; see http://www.edri.org/book/export/html/1225), Google’s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer writes that “we are not selling our users’ data”. One wonders where Google’s $US 8.5 billion profits come from, except from the commodification of the data results of users’ activities?

The EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party asked the French National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL) to analyse Google’s new policies. In a letter to Google, CNIL shows deep concern and said that “our preliminary analysis shows that Google’s new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection […] Moreover, rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy and the fact that Google claims publicly that it will combine data across services raises fears about Google’s actual practices. Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals. In addition, Google is using cookies (among other tools) for these combinations and in this regard, it is not clear how Google aims to comply with the principle of consent laid down in Article 5(3) of the revised ePrivacy Directive, when applicable. The CNIL and the EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: they have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing, and about its compliance with European Data Protection legislation”. Big Brother Watch reports that only 12% of the Google users have read the new policy and that 65% are not aware that the changes have now come into effect. The initiative says: “Google is putting advertiser’s interests before user privacy and should not be rushing ahead before the public understand what the changes will mean”.

According to the proposed new EU Data Protection Regulation (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm), Google’s exploitation of users is perfectly legal. That it is legal does however not mean that we cannot consider Google commodification as a violation of user/consumer/Internet workers’ privacy, but rather that the EU’s suggested legal provisions do not provide enough protection for users. The only way forward is to legally require all Internet companies (and companies in general) to necessarily make targeted advertising an opt-in option by law, which would give users and consumers more control. Implementing such a provision requires not only courage, it also requires not to be afraid of organised business interests. It is however the only way for putting privacy interests first. Today, profit stands over privacy protection and therefore over people. Google is one of the best examples for this circumstance. Google’s “new” privacy policy is not new at all and should consequently best be renamed to “privacy violation policy” or “user exploitation policy”.

Related publication:
Fuchs, Christian. 2011. A contribution to the critique of the political economy of Google. Fast Capitalism 8 (1). http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/8_1/fuchs8_1.html

Related stories:
Google’s Privacy Policy Changing For Everyone: So What’s Really Goign to Happen? The Huffington Post, 29.2.2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/29/google-privacy-policy-changes_n_1310506.html

Thoms Gideon and James Losey: The Real Problem with Google’s New Privacy Policy. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/02/google_privacy_policy_the_missing_opt_out_isn_t_the_only_problem_.html

Google answers Article 29 Working Party on data protection standards. European Digital Rights, http://www.edri.org/book/export/html/1225

9 in 10 People Haven’t Read Google’s New Privacy Policy. Big Brother Watch UK, http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/home/2012/02/ten-people-havent-read-googles.html#more-4205

France Says Google Privacy Plan Likely Violates European Law. New York Times, 28.2.2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/technology/france-says-google-privacy-plan-likely-violates-european-law.html

Googles neuer Daten-Schmu. Der Spiegel Online, 29.2.2012, http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,818105,00.html

Call for Participation/Abstracts

PDF Version

October 18-20, 2012. University of the Basque Country, Bilbao

Keynote Talk: Prof. Peter Golding (Northumbria University, UK) – Why a Sociologist should take Communications and Media Seriously

Abstract
In the presentation of this paper, Peter Golding will reflect on why the study of communications and media demands the insights and methods of sociology, and why RN18 therefore is an appropriate network within the European Sociological Association. He will present reflections on how such key sociological concerns as inequality, identity, power, and change are at the heart of the questions we should be posing in addressing the nature and role of the media as institutions and communications as a social process. The paper will also address how far changes in the technologies of media and communications alter, or should alter, our approach to generating research and insight in this field.

Peter Golding is pro-vice chancellor of research & innovation at Northumbria University. He is founder and honorary chair of ESA RN18, an editor of the European Journal of Communication, and was Co-Chair of the European Science Foundation Programme “Changing Media, Changing Europe”. Peter Golding’s research interests are in media sociology generally, journalism, media political economy, social inequality, international communications, new media, and media constructs of public and social policy. See also: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/about/media/staff/profpgolding/

Call for Submissions

We are living in times of global capitalist crisis that require rethinking the ways we organize society, communication, the media, and our lives. The current crisis seems to a certain degree be different compared to previous ones, among other reasons due to the role of mediated communication and information in establishing/changing economic, political, and social relations as well as the crisis itself. The crisis can also be seen as crisis of what has been called consumer capitalism or informational capitalism. More precisely it has resulted on the one hand in a hyperneoliberal intensification of neo-conservative policies and on the other hand in the emergence of new popular movements that are critical of the commodification of everything and demand the strengthening of society’s commons. The second movement has in the social sciences been accompanied by a renewed interest in critical studies, the critique and analysis of class and capitalism, and critical political economy. The overall goal of this conference is to foster scholarly presentations, networking, and exchange on the question of which transitions media and communication and media sociology are undergoing in contemporary society. The conference particularly welcomes contributions that are inspired by sociological theories, critical studies, and various strands and traditions of the critical study of media & society.

Questions that can be covered by presentations include, but are not limited to:

* What is a crisis? What forms of crisis are there? How do they relate to capitalism and communication?

* How have the media presented the crisis? Which similarities and differences in crisis reporting are there between different media (television, press, and new media) or between media in different countries?

* How has the crisis affected various media and cultural industries? What is the role of changing media technology in the economic crisis?  How has the media economy changed since the start of the crisis in 2008? How have advertising investments, profits, market values, etc developed in the media economy since the start of the crisis? How has the global expansion of media industries been reshaped by the crisis and what is the future of global media and news agencies? What changes can be traced in the production of news and other media content? Are there changes in the nature of media products?

* What is the role of media and communication technologies in the financialization, acceleration, and globalization of the capitalist economy? How can a post-crisis media economy look like? How has advertising favoured a climate of private consumer debt?

* What are the ideological implications of the crisis for mediascapes? Which ideological discourses do companies, CEOs, managers, or neoliberal politicians use for justifying their interests, lay-offs, high bonuses, inequalities, etc and how are these discourses represented by the media or in strategic company reports? How are hyper-neoliberal crisis policy responses (“socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor” in the form of bank bail outs and budget cuts in areas like welfare, education, social security, health care, etc) ideologically justified and how do the media represent such ideologies? What is the role of finance capital in the media and cultural industries? Which hegemonic, alternative, or contradictory interpretations and reception practices of media content that relates to the crisis are there? Which ideologies and myths underlie the capitalist crisis?

* What is the role of media, communication, critical journalism, and alternative media in contemporary uproars, riots, rebellions, social movements, protests, demonstrations, and revolutions?

* How do identities and mediated identities change in times of crisis? How should one think about the relationship of economy and culture in light of the capitalist crisis? What is the relationship of class and identities and of politics of redistribution and recognition today? How do we have to rethink and reshape the relation between political economy and cultural studies in the light of capitalist crisis in order to adequately study the media and communication?

* How is the public sphere changing in the light of the global crisis? What are perspectives for politics, participation, and democracy today and how do these perspectives relate to the media and communication? Is the role of media in democracy changing? If so, how? Are media a distinct player in politics? If the established media form an estate of power in democracy, do we today new a new estate of power? If so, how could it look like

* What are the causes, realities, and consequences of the commodification of the communication commons? What are alternatives to the commodification of the communication commons? How can one strengthen and create public media and commons-based forms of communication? What are the relationships and differences between the commodity logic, the gift logic, and the logic of public goods and how do these logics shape the media?

* How do contemporary societal trends, such as integration, diversity and conflicts in Europe and the world, transnationalism and networking, digitization, informatization, globalization, glocalization, prosumption, neoliberalism, privatization and commodification, migration, racism, changing gender relations, consumer and advertising culture, warfare, terrorism, the new imperialism, surveillance, social movement protests, global societal risks, the strengthening of right-wing extremist and fascist movements, or the anti-corporate movement and other movements, shape media and communication and how do media and communication in turn shape society in times of crisis and transition?

* What are the tasks, roles, responsibilities, and identities of the sociology of media and communication in a society that is facing deep crisis? What is the actual or potential role of critique, ethics, struggles, counter-power, resistance, protest, civil society, and social movements in contemporary societies and contemporary communications?

* What are the major trends that shape contemporary society and how are these trends related to mediated communication and knowledge production? In what society do we live? What society do we desire to have? What forms of media and communication do we find in contemporary society? What forms of media and communication do we desire and how must society change in order to achieve these goals?

* What are the major trends in respect to crisis, communication, and critique in Europe? What are the major trends in respect to crisis, communication, and critique in other parts of the world?

* How do different companies and organizations make use of different information transmission technologies? What is the role of high speed financial flows and associated transmission networks in the finance industry? How (in)visible are these flows?

Submission

An abstract of 200-250 words should be sent to Dr. Romina Surugiu, University of Bucharest, at the following e-mail address: bilbao.conference@yahoo.com. Please insert the words Bilbao in the subject. The deadline for abstract submission is May 31^st, 2012.

Conference Fee

For members of ESA RN18: 35 Euros
For non-members of ESA RN18: 50 Euros
The fee will be collected from the participants at the registration in Bilbao.
You can become a member of ESA RN18 by joining the ESA and subscribing to the network. The network subscription fee is only 10 Euros for a 2-year period:
http://www.europeansociology.org/member/

Travel and accommodation support for a few PhD students will be available. This will not cover the whole costs, but part of them. Preference will be given to PhD students, who submit an abstract in order to give a presentation at the conference that well suits the overall conference topic. Furthermore preference will be given to PhD students from lower income countries (band 2 countries, see http://www.europeansociology.org/member/). If you are a PhD student and want to apply for travel support, then please indicate this in your abstract submission by adding the sentence “I want to apply for travel and accommodation support”. The notifications about travel support will be sent out together with the notifications of acceptance or rejection of presentations.

Conference venue

Bizkaia Aretoa Auditorium
University of the Basque Country
Abandoibarra Avenue, 3
48009 Bilbao
http://www.bizkaia.ehu.es/p209-sharethm/es/

List of Accommodation Possibilities Recommended by the Local Host

Walking distance from the conference venue:

* Silken Gran Domine Bilbao
www.hoteles-silken.com/gran-hotel-domine-bilbao/

* Miró Bilbao
www.mirohotelbilbao.com/

* Meliá Bilbao

http://www.melia-bilbao.com/en/index.html

5-10 min. by Tram:

* Barceló Nervión Bilbao

http://www.barcelo.com/BarceloHotels/es-ES/Hotels/Spain/Bilbao/Nervion/Home.htm

* Hotel Esperia Bilbao
www.hesperia.es/Hesperia-Bilbao

* Peiti Palace Arana Bilbao
www.petitpalacearana.com/index.html

* Husa Jardines de Albia
www.hotelhusaspajardinesdealbia.com/

* Hotel Abando
www.hotelabando.com/

You can check the availability and prices on this website: http://hotels.skyscanner.net/
Enter “Bilbao, Spain” in the field “search field”, specify the duration of the stay and then press the search button, which brings up a list of hotels and prices

Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21^st Century Information Society.
Towards Critical Theories of Social Media.
The Fourth ICTs and Society-Conference.

Uppsala University. May 2^nd-4^th, 2012.

A unique event for networking, presentation of critical ideas, critical engagement, and featuring leading critical scholars in the area of Critical Internet Studies and Critical Studies of Media & Society.

Call for Abstracts

Announcement and Call-Flyer PDF

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
* Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University, Canada): Great Refusal and Long March: How to Use Critical Theory to Think About the Internet.
* Charles Ess (Aarhus University, Denmark): Digital Media Ethics and Philosophy in 21^st Century Information Society
* Christian Christensen (Uppsala University, Sweden): WikiLeaks: Mainstreaming Transparency?
* Christian Fuchs (Uppsala University, Sweden): Critique of the Political Economy of Social Media and Informational Capitalism
* Graham Murdock (Loughborough University, UK): The Peculiarities of Media Commodities: Consumer Labour, Ideology, and Exploitation Today
* Gunilla Bradley (KTH, Sweden): Social Informatics and Ethics: Towards a Good Information Society
* Mark Andrejevic (University of Queensland, Australia): Social Media: Surveillance and Exploitation 2.0
* Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario, Canada): Cybermarxism Today: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in 21^st Century Capitalism
* Peter Dahlgren (Lund University, Sweden): Social Media and the Civic Sphere: Perspectives for the Future of Democracy
* Tobias Olsson (Jönköping University, Sweden): Social Media Participation and the Organized Production of Net Culture
* Trebor Scholz (New School, USA): The Internet as Playground and Factory
* Ursula Huws (University of Hertfordshire, UK): Virtual Work and the Cybertariat in Contemporary Capitalism
* Vincent Mosco (Queen’s University, Canada): Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and Communication Today
* Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Vienna University of Technology, Austria): Potentials and Risks for Creating a Global Sustainable Information Society

Conference Topic

This conference provides a forum for the discussion of how to critically study social media and their relevance for critique, democracy, politics and philosophy in 21^st century information society.

We are living in times of global capitalist crisis. In this situation, we are witnessing a return of critique in the form of a surging interest in critical theories (such as the critical political economy of Karl Marx, critical theory, etc) and revolutions, rebellions, and political movements against neoliberalism that are reactions to the commodification and instrumentalization of everything. On the one hand there are overdrawn claims that social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, mobile Internet, etc) have caused rebellions and uproars in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which brings up the question to which extent these are claims are ideological or not. On the other hand, the question arises what actual role social media play in contemporary capitalism, power structures, crisis, rebellions, uproar, revolutions, the strengthening of the commons, and the potential creation of participatory democracy. The commodification of everything has resulted also in a commodification of the communication commons, including Internet communication that is today largely commercial in character. The question is how to make sense of a world in crisis, how a different future can look like, and how we can create Internet commons and a commons-based participatory democracy.

This conference deals with the question of what kind of society and what kind of Internet are desirable, what steps need to be taken for advancing a good Internet in a sustainable information society, how capitalism, power structures and social media are connected, what the main problems, risks, opportunities and challenges are for the current and future development of Internet and society, how struggles are connected to social media, what the role, problems and opportunities of social media, web 2.0, the mobile Internet and the ubiquitous Internet are today and in the future, what current developments of the Internet and society tell us about potential futures, how an alternative Internet can look like, and how a participatory, commons-based Internet and a co-operative, participatory, sustainable information society can be achieved.

Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* What does it mean to study the Internet, social media and society in a critical way? What are Critical Internet Studies and Critical Theories of Social Media? What does it mean to study the media and communication critically?
* What is the role of the Internet and social media in contemporary capitalism?
* How do power structures, exploitation, domination, class, digital labour, commodification of the communication commons, ideology, and audience/user commodification, and surveillance shape the Internet and social media?
* How do these phenomena shape concrete platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc?
* How does contemporary capitalism look like? What is the role of the Internet and social media in contemporary capitalism?
* In what society do we live? What is the actual role of information, ICTs, and knowledge in contemporary society? Are concepts like network society, information society, informational capitalism, etc adequate characterizations of contemporary society or overdrawn claims? What are the fundamental characteristics of contemporary society and which concept(s) should be used for describing this society?
* What is digital labour and how do exploitation and surplus value generation work on the Internet? Which forms of exploitation and class structuration do we find on the Internet, how do they work, what are their commonalities and differences? How does the relation between toil and play change in a digital world? How do classes and class struggles look like in 21^st century informational capitalism?
* What are ideologies of the Internet, web 2.0, and social media? How can they be deconstructed and criticized? How does ideology critique work as an empirical method and theory that is applied to the Internet and social media?
* Which philosophies, ethics and which philosophers are needed today in order to understand the Internet, democracy and society and to achieve a global sustainable information society and a participatory Internet? What are perspectives for political philosophy and social theory in 21^st century information society?
* What contradictions, conflicts, ambiguities, and dialectics shape 21^st century information society and social media?
* What theories are needed for studying the Internet, social media, web 2.0, or certain platforms or applications in a critical way?
* What is the role of counter-power, resistance, struggles, social movements, civil society, rebellions, uproars, riots, revolutions, and political transformations in 21^st century information society and how (if at all) are they connected to social media?
* What is the actual role of social media and social networking sites in political revolutions, uproars, and rebellions (like the recent Maghrebian revolutions, contemporary protests in Europe and the world, the Occupy movement, etc)?
* How can an alternative Internet look like and what are the conditions for creating such an Internet? What are the opportunities and challenges posed by projects like Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, Diaspora, IndyMedia, Democracy Now! and other alternative media? What is a commons-based Internet and how can it be created?
* What is the role of ethics, politics, and activism for Critical Internet Studies?
* What is the role of critical theories in studying the information society, social media, and the Internet?
* What is a critical methodology in Critical Internet Studies? Which research methods are needed on how need existing research methods be adapted for studying the Internet and society in a critical way?
* What are ethical problems, opportunities, and challenges of social media? How are they framed by the complex contradictions of contemporary capitalism?
* Who and what and where are we in 21^st century capitalist information society? How have different identities changed in the global world, what conflicts relate to it, and what is the role of class and class identity in informational capitalism?
* What is democracy? What is the future of democracy in the global information society? And what is or should democracy be today? What is the relation of democracy and social media? How do the public sphere and the colonization of the public sphere look like today? What is the role of social media in the public sphere and its colonization?

The conference is the fourth in the ICTs and Society-Conference Series (http://www.icts-and-society.net). The ICTs and Society-Network is an international forum that networks scholars in the interdisciplinary areas of Critical Internet Studies, digital media studies, Internet & society studies and information society studies. The ICTs and Society Conference series was in previous years organized at the University of Salzburg (Austria, June 2008), the University of Trento (Italy, June 2009) and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (Spain, July 2010).

About Uppsala, Uppsala University and the Department of Informatics and Media

Uppsala University (http://www.uu.se) was founded in 1477 and is the oldest university in the Nordic countries. Every year 45 000 undergraduate and graduate students enroll for classes. Uppsala is an academic and students-oriented city with old academic tradition.

The Department of Informatics and Media (http://www.im.uu.se) is a newly established institution at Uppsala University. Its research focuses on understanding and designing digital media in the information society. Among its educational programmes is a new master’s programme in Digital Media & Society that will start in August 2012.

Early May is a particularly nice time to come and visit Uppsala. It is the time of spring festivities and the awakening of nature and the city. The end of April has since medieval times been a time of celebrating the spring, especially in Eastern Sweden. Uppsala and especially Uppsala’s students have participated in this tradition, especially on the last of April (“sista april”, Valborg, http://www.valborgiuppsala.se/en) that features various celebrations and special activities all over the town.

Time Plan

February 29^th, 2012, 17:00, Central European Time (CET): Abstract Submission Deadline
Until March 11^th, 2012: information about acceptance or rejection of presentations
March 30^th, 2012, 17:00, CET: registration deadline
May 2^nd-4^th, 2012: Conference, Ekonomikum, University of Uppsala, Kyrkogårdsgatan 10, Uppsala

Abstract Submission

a) For submission, please first register your profile on the ICTs and Society platform:
http://www.icts-and-society.net/register/
b) Please download the abstract submission form:

http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/ASF.doc

, insert your presentation title, contact data, and an abstract of 200-500 words. The abstract should clearly set out goals, questions, the way taken for answering the questions, main results, the importance of the topic for critically studying the information society and/or social media and for the conference.
Please submit your abstract until February 29^th, 2012, per e-mail to Marisol Sandoval: marisol.sandoval@uti.at

Organizer
Uppsala University, Department of Informatics and Media, Kyrkogårdsgatan 10, Box 513, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden http://www.im.uu.se
Contact for academic questions in respect to the conference:
Prof. Christian Fuchs, christian.fuchs@im.uu.se , Tel +46 18 471 1019
Contact for questions concerning conference organization and administration:
Marisol Sandoval, marisol.sandoval@uti.at

Co-organizers:
* ICTs and Society Network http://www.icts-and-society.net
* European Sociological Association – Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research, http://tiny.cc/hpdao
* tripleC – Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, http://www.triple-c.at
* Unified Theory of Information Research Group (UTI), Austria, http://www.uti.at
* Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, http://www.imv.au.dk/en/studies/
* Institute for Design & Assessment of Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Austria http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/
* Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication, Sweden,
http://hj.se/en/about-the-university/information-material/campus-in-360-degrees/school-of-education-and-communication.html

Conference Board and Organization Committee
Charles Ess, Aarhus University
Christian Christensen, Uppsala University
Christian Fuchs, Uppsala University + UTI Research Group
Göran Svensson, Uppsala University
Marisol Sandoval, Unified Theory of Information Research Group
Sebastian Sevignani, Unified Theory of Information Research Group
Sylvain Firer-Blaess, Uppsala University
Thomas Allmer, Unified Theory of Information (UTI) Research Group
Tobias Olsson, Jönköping University
Verena Kreilinger, Unified Theory of Information Research Group
Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Vienna University of Technology + UTI Research Group

Registration and Conference Fee
Registration will open in early 2012 and more information about how to make payments will follow.
Registration fees:
Regular conference fee, including the conference dinner: 130 € or 1200 SEK
Regular conference fee, excluding conference dinner: 85 € or 780 SEK
Student conference fee, including the conference dinner: 110 € or 1000 SEK
Student conference fee, without conference dinner: 60 € or 550 SEK

Hotel Booking
More information about hotels in Uppsala will follow.

Welcome to Uppsala in Spring 2012!

New Master Programme (MA) in Digital Media & Society at Uppsala University

Uppsala University has introduced a new master programme in Digital Media & Society as part of the Social Science Master. It is a 2-year-programme that will start at the end of August 2012 with its first year of students. The programme’s teaching language is English.

The application period for students starts now and lasts until January 16, 2012.

The goal of this programme is that students acquire skills to critically study the role of digital media in society. Students study the economic, political, cultural, social and practical impacts of digital media. This programme focuses on teaching theoretical, empirical, ethical, critical and practical skills for studying digital media in the information society.

European Union students do not pay fees for studying in Sweden.

Uppsala University is among the 100 best universities in the world (Times Higher Education University Ranking 2011: #87). Every year 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students enroll for classes. Uppsala University offers some 30 international master programmes and 300 single-subject courses taught in English. It is the oldest university in the Nordic countries – founded in 1477.

Programme

The programme consists of one semester of advanced core courses (30 credits) that focus on theoretical knowledge, empirical skills and ethical reasoning required for understanding and analyzing digital media & society. 30 credits (= 4 courses, one semester study time) is made up of basic social science skills courses that are taught together with the other specialties in the Social Science Master. Another 30 credits are elective courses that the students choose from various courses taught at Uppsala University. Also an internship at a company or a research internship at a university department are options for the elective courses. The master’s thesis (30 credits) is the final stage in the programme.

The four core courses are:
* Introduction to Information Society Studies (semester 1)
* Internet, Social Media and Society (semester 1)
* Cyberculture and Politics (semester 2)
* Organizations and Communication in Global Society (semester 2)

The four skills courses are:
* Quantitative Methods
* Qualitative Methods
* Science Theory and Methodology
* Social Science Methods and Research Design

Further information for students:
Flyer (PDF) http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/DM&S_flyer.pdf
Programme site:
http://www.uu.se/en/education/courses_and_programmes/selma/program/?pKod=SSV2M&lasar=12/13
Facebook-Group http://www.facebook.com/pages/Master-in-Digital-Media-Society/156723914419506

Application
Application site:
www.antagning.se/intl/search?period=HT_2012&freeText=UU-P2052
All applicants need to verify English language profiency. This is normally attested by an internationally recognised test such as TOEFL or IELTS.

Eligibility
Bachelor’s degree equivalent to a Swedish degree of at least 180 ECTS credits (i.e. three years of full-time studies), including at least 90 ECTS credits of studies in social sciences or a comparable field that qualifies for studies on the specilisation in Digital Media & Society.

Selection and Application Letter
Selection will be based on previous academic studies and degrees with emphasis on grades in relevant fields and degree project (if any), a summary in English (1–2 pages) of a previous degree project (if any), and a statement of intent (3–5 pages).
Students should accompany their application with a statement of intent, in which they engage with each of the following questions:
* Please describe the undergraduate (bachelor) studies that you completed.
* What were your favourite topics, main interests, favourite courses in your undergraduate (bachelor) studies and why?
* Why are you interested in studying in the master’s programme focusing on Digital Media & Society?
* What do you expect to learn studying Digital Media & Society?
* What qualifies you for studying in the field of Digital Media & Society?
* What are your future plans and goals after you have finished your studies and how can a social science master’s degree focusing on Digital Media & Society support you in achieving your goals?
* Why do you want to study in Sweden and at Uppsala University’s Department of Informatics and Media?

Contact
Department of Informatics and Media
Uppsala University

http://www.im.uu.se

Director of Studies Göran Svensson
goran.svensson@im.uu.se
Tel +46-18-4711514

On September 7th, 2011, Facebook changed its privacy policy, replacing the policy that was updated on December 22, 2010.

The policy’s length increased from 35 709 characters to 40 085 characters (from approximately 11 single-spaced A4 pages to 12), which shows that the complexity of the regulations increased.

Facebook continues to collect data about user behaviour from other websites.
New policy: “Sometimes we get data from our advertising partners, customers and other third parties that helps us (or them) deliver ads, understand online activity, and generally make Facebook better. For example, an advertiser may tell us how you responded to an ad on Facebook or on another site in order to measure the effectiveness of – and improve the quality of – those ads”.

Old policy: “Information from other websites. We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:

• We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.
• We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.“

The content of this regulation has not much changed, but Facebook now claims that it collects information about users from other websites in order to “make Facebook better”. It is intransparent to the single user, which data from which websites Facebook stores about him/her. If a lack of data storage transparency “makes Facebook better” is a question of interpretation. The question is if it makes Facebook a privacy-respecting platform or not.

The regulations about the storage of location data have been expanded, which reflects the increasing importance of mobile Internet use and therefore of mobile targeted advertising for Facebook:
New policy: “We may put together your current city with GPS and other location information we have about you to, for example, tell you and your friends about people or events nearby, or offer deals to you that you might be interested in. We may also put together data about you to serve you ads that might be more relevant to you. When we get your GPS location, we put it together with other location information we have about you (like your current city). But we only keep it until it is no longer useful to provide you services”.
Old policy: “When you access Facebook from a computer, mobile phone, or other device, we may collect information from that device about your browser type, location, and IP address, as well as the pages you visit“.

Another new quality of Facebook’s privacy policy is the “instant personalization” feature. Facebook shares certain user data with other platforms, with which it has entered business partnerships. The first time a user goes to the partner website, the platform should inform him/her that it uses Facebook information about the user. In Facebook’s privacy settings, one can turn off instant personalization for all of Facebook’s partner sites. This is, however, a opt-out solution, which shows that Facebook wants to share the information it collects about users with partner sites so that they can also use the data for targeted advertising. This circumstance is typical for the networked character of Internet commerce and shows how strongly advertising culture shapes social media and the World Wide Web (WWW). If a user at some point of time decides to deactivate instant personalization, but used a Facebook partner site that employ instant personalization before, the data that the partner site uses is not automatically deleted: “If you turn off an instant personalization site after you have been using it or visited it a few times (or after you have given it specific permission to access your data), it will not automatically delete your data. But the site is contractually required to delete your data if you ask it to”. This means that the user has to explicitly write to Facebook’s partner sites to delete personal data. Furthermore, it is not transparent to a single user, which data exactly Facebook partners store about him or her. Facebook’s instant personalization feature increases the non-transparency of data storage.

The description of how targeted advertising works on Facebook has changed, but not the content of the description. Facebook still makes use of all user data, user communication data, user browsing behaviour, and even data collected from other websites in order to sell these data as commodity to advertising clients that serve targeted ads to users. Facebook thereby makes profit, the users create value, are not paid for this work and their data becomes a commodity. I have termed this process Internet prosumer commodification (see the articles here, here and here). Facebook’s advertising settings have remained unchanged. There is no opt-in advertising and targeted advertising is always activated. The only opt-out options concern social adverts and the use of names and pictures in third-party advertisements.

Regulations about targeted advertising in the new privacy policy: “We do not share any of your information with advertisers (unless, of course, you give us permission).When an advertiser creates an ad on Facebook, they are given the opportunity to choose their audience by location, demographics, likes, keywords, and any other information we receive or can tell about you and other users. For example, an advertiser can choose to target 18 to 35 year-old women who live in the United States and like basketball. Try this tool yourself to see one of the ways advertisers target ads and what information they see at: https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ If the advertiser chooses to run the ad (also known as placing the order), we serve the ad to people who meet the criteria the advertiser selected, but we do not tell the advertiser who any of those people are. So, for example, if a person clicks on the ad, the advertiser might infer that the person is an 18-to-35-year-old woman who lives in the US and likes basketball. But we would not tell the advertiser who that person is.
After the ad runs, we provide advertisers with reports on how their ads performed. For example we give advertisers reports telling them how many users saw or clicked on their ads. But these reports are anonymous. We do not tell advertisers who saw or clicked on their ads.
Advertisers sometimes place cookies on your computer in order to make their ads more effective. Learn more at: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
Sometimes we allow advertisers to target a category of user, like a “moviegoer” or a “sci-fi fan.” We do this by bundling characteristics that we believe are related to the category. For example, if a person “likes” the “Star Trek” Page and mentions “Star Wars” when they check into a movie theater, we may conclude that this person is likely to be a sci-fi fan.”

Regulations about targeted advertising in the old privacy policy: “Advertisements. Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on Facebook use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. You may opt-out of the placement of cookies by many of these advertisers here. You may also use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.  Facebook does not share personally identifiable information with advertisers unless we get your permission. [...] We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.) We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. You can see the criteria advertisers may select by visiting our advertising page. Even though we do not share your information with advertisers without your consent, when you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected“.

The policy regulation concerning deletion of an account has been changed. The major change is that Facebook now says that all information of an account will be deleted at latest 90 days after the user deleted the account, whereas the regulation in the old policy was somehow unclear, saying on the one hand that data is deleted, but on the other hand “that Facebook we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested“.

New policy: “When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook. It typically takes about one month to delete an account, but some information may remain in backup copies and logs for up to 90 days. You should only delete your account if you are sure you never want to reactivate it. You can delete your account at:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
Old policy: “When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook. [...] Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested. [...] Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Facebook. (For example, if you post something to another user’s profile and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an “Anonymous Facebook User.”)  Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested. If you have given third party applications or websites access to your information, they may retain your information to the extent permitted under their terms of service or privacy policies.  But they will no longer be able to access the information through our Platform after you disconnect from them. Backup copies. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others“.

On August 18, 2011, members of the initiative “Europe vs. Facebook” that was founded by Austrian law students filed a complaint against Facebook to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Facebook Europe is legally registered in Ireland. The initiative members made 16 complaint points and asked the Commissioner to check Facebook violates European data protection laws in these 16 privacy areas.

One point of complaint is that Facebook engages in excessive processing of data. One of the complainers demanded from Facebook to send him the data it stores about him. Although he had deleted his account, he received a print out with 1 200 pages of personal data stored about him by Facebook. This topic is addressed in the complaint under point 15: “After using facebook.com for 3 years, Facebook Ireland gathered more than 1.200 pages of personal information about me (in fact Facebook Ireland might hold a much bigger amount of data, see Complaint 10), even though I have deleted just about everything I could (e.g. all my posts, all messages, and many friends)”.

The Irish Data Protection Act says that data “(iii) shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they were collected or are further processed, and (iv) shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes“ (DPA §2 (1) (c) (iii) (iv)). The EU Data Protection Directive regulates that ”Member States shall provide that personal data must be: […](c) adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collected and/or further processed” (Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament, §6 (1) (c)).

Another complaint is that Facebook does not use opt-in options and thereby may breach the regulation that users have to give consensus to the processing of their personal data. This regulation is specifically important among other topics also for targeted advertising, which is organized without opt-in on Facebook. “2A. (1) Personal data shall not be processed by a data controller unless section 2 of this Act (as amended by the Act of 2003) is complied with by the data controller and at least one of the following conditions is met: (a) the data subject has given his or her consent to the processing or“ (Irish Data Protection Act, §2A (1) (a)). “Member States shall provide that personal data may be processed only if: (a) the data subject has unambiguously given his consent” (Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament, §7 (a)).

Facebook’s change of the data deletion regulations from rather ambiguous and unclear formulations to a clearer version may reflect the circumstance that a complaint against its privacy practices has been filed. This might be a direct reaction to the complaints filed by “Europe versus Facebook”, which were however filed on August, 18^th, 2011, whereas Facebook changed its policy on September 7^th. Therefore the old privacy policy is subject of the complaints. Furthermore it looks like many of the privacy areas addressed by the complaints have not been cleared out by the new privacy policy. “Europe versus Facebook” is not only a highly important initiative, it also shows that companies are unlikely to voluntarily protect users’ privacy, but to be only willing to do so if they feel the threat of the state’s law enforcement capacities. The profit motive is so inherent to companies that they always tend to put profit interests above users’ privacy concerns. The only two alternatives are to make use of the law for enforcing privacy protection and to support the creation of alternative non-profit platforms.

Facebook has changed the content sharing options, it is now relatively easily possible to define with whom one wants to share content and to share it only with customized users. This change is also reflected in the privacy policy (in the section titled “Control over your profile”). It is likely that it has been taken because Google in June 2011 introduced its own social networking site Google+, which poses competition to Facebook and is based on the “friend circles” concept that allows customization of content. Other new regulations include a section about tagging (“Tags”), the possibility for other websites to provide a login into their sites by enabling users to log in with their Facebook accounts (section “Logging in to another site using Facebook”), social plugins (section “About social plugins”), sponsored stories (section “Sponsored stories”), and featured content (section “Featured content”).

A new regulation is that Facebook says that it allows users to vote privacy changes under certain circumstances: “Unless we make a change for legal or administrative reasons, or to correct an inaccurate statement, we will give you seven (7) days to provide us with comments on the change. If we receive more than 7000 comments concerning a particular change, we will put the change up for a vote. The vote will be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote”.

This regulation is extremely unclear. One can interpret every imaginable privacy policy change as legal change, administrative change or change of an inaccurate statement. It is therefore arbitrary and unclear, on which changes Facebook users are able to vote or not. Furthermore no link for comments is provided. It is also unlikely that 30% of all registered users will ever engage in a vote because privacy policy matters are a complex issue. It looks like Facebook wants to respond to the criticism that users have no decision-rights about the privacy of their personal data, but at the same time wants to immunize itself against loosing control of decision making power.

We can summarize the changes of the Facebook privacy policy that took effect on September 7^th, 2011:

* The change of Facebook’s privacy policies has come shortly after members of the initiative “Europe versus Facebook” filed privacy violation complaints against Facebook to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.
* The length and complexity of Facebook’s privacy policy has increased.
* Facebook has introduced new features like instant personalization that have increased the non-transparency of data storage. It is not clear for a user, which data Facebook stores about her/him, with whom Facebook shares user data, and which data exactly Facebook partners store.
* Facebook continues to receive data about users from other websites.
* Facebook continues to commodify user data by using targeted advertising. It does not use opt-in for advertising, targeted ads are automatically and always activated. Internet prosumer commodification continues to be Facebook’s capital accumulation model.
* Facebook has implemented a user participation mechanism in privacy decision-making that is formulated in an extremely shallow way so that this regulation seems to be an ideological pseudo-participation strategy.

The PPT presentation that I used can be found here. Some of the presented content and the logic of arguments that I presented can be found in this paper, this paper, this paper and in chapter 7 of my book “Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies”.

Abstract of the Presentation “Internet Prosumption in Contemporary Capitalism”

Are the prosumption of information and communication with the help of digital media in contemporary capitalism new forms of participation or forms of exploitation? Who benefits from global Internet prosumption? What is the role of class, crisis and participatory democracy in contemporary society and its media landscape?

Prosumption is the convergence of production and consumption. I will discuss the prosumption concept in relation to the approaches of Karl Marx, Alvin Toffler, George Ritzer and Manuel Castells. A critique of Castells’ “theory” of communication power in the “network society” will be presented.
The idea of authors like Henry Jenkins or Yochai Benkler that online prosumption (“social media”, “web 2.0”) has resulted in a “participatory Internet” will be criticized. It will in contrast be stressed that in the contemporary situation of global capitalist crisis it is important to remember the socialist origins of the concept of participatory democracy (Crawford Macpherson, Carole Pateman) and of Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere when reflecting about the Internet.
Internet prosumption will be discussed by analyzing to which extent the following web platforms advance participatory or exploitative prosumption: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, WikiLeaks.
It will be maintained that in order to understand social relations offline and online in the current turbulent times a renewal of Karl Marx’s theory and of critical political economy is needed. The contributions to class theory by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Erik Olin Wright and Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri will be discussed. A specific model of class in contemporary capitalist society will be used for explaining and criticizing the exploitation of Internet prosumers. Based on the theory tradition of the critical political economy of the media and communication, the concept of Internet prosumer commodification will be introduced.
Based on Slavoj Žižek’s, David Harvey’s and Alain Badiou’s recent contributions, I suggest that we need to strengthen the commons and to create a commons-based Internet in order to democratize prosumption, communication and society.

“One formula [...] can be that of the mob: gullible, fickle, herdlike, low in taste and habit. [...] If [...] our purpsoe is manipulation – the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, known in certain ways – the convenient formula will be that of the masses”. — Raymond Williams

“What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together”. This passage could be a description of the social conditions in the United Kingdom today. It is, however, a passage from Friedrich Engels’ report about the “Working Class in England”, published in 1845.

In his book “Folk Devils and Moral Panics, first published in 1972, Stanley Cohen shows how public discourse tends to blame media and popular culture for triggering, causing or stimulating violence. “There is a long history of moral panics about the alleged harmful effects of exposure to popular media and cultural forms – comics and cartoons, popular theatre, cinema, rock music, video nasties, computer games, internet porn” – and, one should add today, social media. “For conservatives, the media glamorize crime, trivialize public insecurities and undermine moral authority; for liberals the media exaggerate the risks of crime and whip up moral panics to vindicate an unjust and authoritarian crime control policy” (Cohen, Stanley. 1972/2002. Folk devils and moral panics. Oxon: Routledge. Third edition. page xvii).

The shooting of Mark Duggan by the London police on August 4^th 2011 in Tottenham triggered riots in London areas such as Tottenham, Wood Green, Enfield Town, Ponders End, Brixton, Walthamstow, Walthamstow Central, Chingford Mount, Hackney, Croydon, Ealing and in other UK areas such as Toxteth (Liverpool), Handsworth (Birmingham), St. Ann’s (Nottingham), West Bromwich, Wolverhampton, Salford, or Central Manchester.

Parts of the mass media started blaming social media for being the cause of the violence. The Sun reported on August 8^th: “Rioting thugs use Twitter to boost their numbers in thieving store raids. [...] THUGS used social network Twitter to orchestrate the Tottenham violence and incite others to join in as they sent messages urging: ’Roll up and loot’“.  The Telegraph wrote on the same day: “How technology fuelled Britain’s first 21st century riot. The Tottenham riots were orchestrated by teenage gang members, who used the latest mobile phone technology to incite and film the looting and violence. Gang members used Blackberry smart-phones designed as a communications tool for high-flying executives to organise the mayhem”. The Daily Mail wrote on August 7^th that there are “fears that violence was fanned by Twitter as picture of burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times”.

Even the BBC took up the social media panic discourse on August 9^th and reported about the power of social media to bring together not only five, but 200 people for forming a rioting “mob”. Media and politicians created the impression that the riots were orchestrated by “Twitter mobs”, “Facebook mobs” and “Blackberry mobs”. After one a few month ago told we had “Twitter revolutions” and “Facebook revolutions” in Egypt and Tunisia, one now hears about “social media mobs” in the UK. So what to make of these claims?

And also, as usual in moral panics, the call for policing technology can be heard. The Daily Express (August 10th, 2011) wrote: ”Thugs and looters are thought to have sent messages via the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service to other troublemakers, alerting them to riot scenes and inciting further violence. Technology writer Mike Butcher said it was unbelievable the service had not already been shut down. He said: ’Mobile phones have become weaponised. It’s like text messaging with steroids – you can send messages to hundreds of people that cannot be traced back to you.’ Tottenham MP David Lammy appealed for BlackBerry to suspend the service“. The police published pictures of rioters recorded by CCTV and asked the public to identify the people. The mass media published these pictures. The Sun called for “naming and shaming a rioter” and for “shopping a moron”. The mass media also reported about citizens, who self-organized over social media in order to gather in affected neighbourhoods for cleaning the streets.

Blaming technology or popular culture for violence – the Daily Mirror blamed “the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority (especially the police but including parents), exalts trashy materialism and raves about drugs“ for the riots – is an old and typical ideology that avoids engaging with the real societal causes of riots and unrest and promises easy solutions: policing, control of technology, surveillance. It neglects the structural causes of riots and how violence is built into contemporary societies. Focusing on technology (as cause of or solution for riots) is the ideological search for control, simplicity and predictability in a situation of high complexity, unpredictability and uncertainty. It is also an expression of fear. It projects society’s guilt and shame into objects. Explanations are not sought in complex social relations, but in the fetishism of things. Social media and technology-centrism, both in its optimistic form (“social media will help our communities to overcome the riots”, “social media and mobile phones should be surveilled by the police”, “Blackberrys should be forbidden”, “more CCTV surveillance is needed”, “CCTV will help us find and imprison all rioters”) and its pessimistic form (“social media triggered, caused, stimulated, boosted, orchestrated, organized or fanned violence”), is a techno-deterministic ideology that subsitutes thinking about society by the focus on technology. Societal problems are reduced to the level of technology.

Let’s talk about the society, in which these riots have taken place. Is it really a surprise that riots emerged in the UK,  a country with high socio-economic inequality and youth unemployment, in a situation of global economic crisis? The United Kingdom has a high level of income inequality, its Gini level was 32.4 in 2009 (0 means absolute equality, 100 absolute inequality), a level that is only topped by a few countries in Europe and that is comparable to the level of Greece (33.1) (data source: Eurostat). 17.3% of the UK population had a risk of living in poverty in 2009 (data source: Eurostat). In early 2011, the youth unemployment rate in the UK rose to 20.3%, the highest level since these statistics started being recorded in 1992.

The UK is not only one of the most advanced developed countries today in economic temrs, it is at the same time a developing country in social terms with a lot of structurally deprived areas. Is it a surprise that riots erupted especially in East London, the West Midlands and Greater Manchester?  The UK Department of Communities and Local Government reported in its analysis “The English Indices of Deprivation 2010”: “Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Knowsley, the City of Kingston-upon Hull, Hackney and Tower Hamlets are the local authorities with the highest proportion of LSOAs amongst the most deprived in England. [...] The north east quarter of London, particularly Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets continue to exhibit very high levels of deprivation“ (pages 1, 3). Decades of UK capitalist development shaped by deindustrialization and neoliberalism have had effects on the creation, intensification and extension of precariousness and deprivation.

Calls for more police, surveillance, crowd control and the blames of popular culture and social media are helpless. It is too late once riots erupt. One should not blame social media or popular culture, but the violent conditions of society for the UK riots. The mass media’s and politics’ focus on surveillance, law and order politics and the condemnation of social media will not solve the problems. A serious discussion about class, inequality and racism is needed, which also requires a change of policy regimes. The UK riots are not a “Blackberry mob”, not a “Facebook mob” and not a “Twitter mob”; they are the effects of the structural violence of neoliberalism and capitalism. Capitalism, crisis and class are the main contexts of unrests, uproars and social media today.

Mirror posting on Dwayne’s site.

The full conversation has also been published as journal article here.

Part 1 of the conversation can be found on Christian’s blog here and on Dwayne’s blog here.
Part 2 of the conversation can be found on Dwayne’s blog here and on Christian’s blog here.
Part 3 of the conversation can be found on Christian’s blog here and on Dwayne’s blog here.
Part 4 of the conversation can be found on Dwayne’s blog here and on Christian’s blog here.

Christian Fuchs: Hello Dwayne,

Thank you for your detailed and interesting response. I will try to answer on a more general level by (1) taking up some points about ideology, (2) making 7 thematic sets of hypotheses about Critical Media and Communication Studies today, and (3) commenting on the status of the field of Political Economy/Economies of the Media. Except for some comments about ideology critique (1), I do not come back to every single unresolved question that relates to our previous conversation, but rather focus on the larger context of our discussion – the status of Critical Media and Communication Studies today (2+3).

(1) The Concept of Ideology

Allow me to note that I did not say that ideology is “behind the dot.com crisis and then the Global Financial Crisis”, but that crisis results and expresses itself in an intensified presence of certain ideologies. I think that your positive assessment of Smythe’s and Garnham’s assumption that ideology critique diverts “our attention from economic realities” risks economism, neglecting how culture and the world of ideas always interacts with the economy. But you also talk about the role of “elite knowledge” and ICT/media myths in capitalism. But that is exactly part of the domain of ideology. What we have to add is that there are also attempts to make everyday citizens follow ideologies and that ideology can be (and often is, but not automatically) a site of struggle. If dominant ideas are ideas of the dominant, then it is likely that they use media for trying to reproduce their hegemony. This does not mean that they always are successful in doing so, but that it is likely that we find hegemonic ideas in mainstream media. This is contradicted by the possibility (and reality) of alternative interpretations and alternative media, which are ways of challenging hegemonic ideas. But of course counter-hegemonic projects are facing power asymmetries. I would also add that academia is a site of ideological struggle. Isn’t it also the task of Critical Political economy to question myths about media and capitalism that are advanced in Media and Communication Studies? If we understand ourselves as critical scholars, then our critique has an object within academia and in society and we are the subjects conducting this critique. All of this is part of struggles relating to ideology.

Ideology critique tries to show differences between essence and existence and between claims about reality and reality itself. Take as example for ideology critique an analysis by Dwayne Winseck (in the introduction to the book “The Political Economies of Media”, pp. 43f) that shows with statistics that the music industry is growing and not in decline, whereas the International Federation of Phonographic Industries continues to state the lack of profitability of the recording industry due to file sharing. What we have here is the empirical testing of the correspondence or difference of claim and reality that as a result shows the falseness of the claims. Add to this an analysis of the linguistic ways that the recording industry employs for making its claims about its dwindling profits and how it identifies filesharers as enemies in order to criminalize them so to make even more profits, then you have an excellent ideology critique. Dwayne, you are more into ideology critique than you think you are, so there is no need to understate the importance of this dimension of Critical Media and Communication Studies. The question to which extent the public believes the industry claims or not is another task of ideology critique.

You can of course interpose to my arguments that ideology is a philosophical idealistic phenomenon and that the field of Political Economy/Economies of Media should focus on studying materialistic phenomena. But this were a crude separation of base and superstructure, not taking into account that base and superstructure always interact, put pressures on each other, are dialectically interconnected. The German philosopher Hans Heinz Holz speaks of dialectics as Übergreifen of categories (encroaching). The economy and the world of ideas necessarily dialectically encroach each other in complex ways. You cannot split the world of ideas off from the economy (the role of ideology, cultural industry as the collapse between the boundaries of base and superstructure, knowledge work as interconnection between the two, etc).

Allow me to note that for Marx ideology certainly was a dimension of Political Economy, which is documented by the chapter “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” in Capital, Volume 1, which is probably one of the most difficult chapters in the book. Marx points out the logical mistake of taking historical circumstances as natural for all societies (naturalization), stresses that the thinkers of the Classical Political Economy frequently make this mistake, that the same mode of thinking can also be found in everyday thinking, that this fetishistic thinking stems from the very structure of capitalist production itself, i.e. has a material grounding, that ideologies are not just ideas, but at the same time social and material practices grounded in the economy, and that overcoming fetishism requires a fundamental transformation of society. I think this chapter is, where we should start the discussion when we talk about the role of ideology for Political Economy/Economies of the Media.

We will not be able to go into it in any more detail of these questions now, but we can see from our discussion that the question of ideology in capitalism is a hotly debated issue within Critical Media and Communication Studies. We should also note that when discussing ideology, we need an understanding of what ideology is. And there is no consensus on this. Terry Eagleton has notes six understandings of the concept of ideology:
a) The general material process of production of ideas, beliefs and values in social life.
b) Ideas symbolizing the conditions if life-experiences of a specific group or class.
c) The promotion and legitimatization of the interests of a group or class in the face of opposing interests.
d) The promotion and legitimization of the interests of a dominant group or class in the face of opposing interests.

e) The promotion and legitimization of the interests of a dominant group or class in the face of opposing interests with the help of distortion and dissimulation.
f) False and deceptive beliefs arising from the material structure of society as a whole.
There are differences in the ideology concepts of say e.g. Georg Lukács (and based on him the Frankfurt School), Karl Mannheim, Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser and these differences are based on specific interpretations of Marx.

We will, however, not solve the question of ideology here. We can for now only acknowledge the complexity of this problem and that its status in Critical Media and Communication Studies is contested.

However, we can think about Eagleton’s six concepts of ideology as variously interlinked levels of ideology. The differentiation between levels allows us also to see that false consciousness is not a necessary element of ideology; it may be just one outcome of ideological strategies, but can also be resisted (although there is no automatism of resistance and the means for producing hegemonic ideology and counter-hegemony are unequally distributed). Ideology is not necessarily a state of consciousness of dominated groups. It can be, but it is more a process, in which dominant groups communicate dominant ideas, to which others react in certain ways or do not react. Dominant ideas impact the culture of the dominant itself (e.g. neoliberal work norms – the new spirit of networked capitalism – that impact not only what is expected of the behaviour of workers, but also managers).

(2) 7 Sets of Hypotheses about Critical Media and Communication Studies Today

(H1) The Task of Critical Media and Communication Studies

The task for Critical Media and Communication Studies is to focus on the critique and analysis of the role of communication, culture, information and the media in society in the context of
a) processes of capital accumulation (including the analysis of capital, markets, commodity logic, competition, exchange value, the antagonisms of the mode of production, productive forces, crises, advertising, etc),
c) The promotion and legitimatization of the interests of a group or class in the face of opposing interests. b) class relations (with a focus on work, labour, the mode of the exploitation of surplus value, etc),
d) domination in general,
e) ideology (both in academia and everyday life) as well as the analysis of and engagement in
f) struggles against the dominant order, which includes the analysis and advancement of
g) social movement struggles and
h) social movement media that
i) establishing a democratic socialist society that is based on communication commons as part of structures of commonly-owned means of production. The approach thereby realizes that in capitalism all forms of domination are connected to forms of exploitation.

Critical Media and Communication Studies has the potential for combining all or at least several of these dimensions of analysis and in doing so to bring together Critical Theory, Critical Political Economy, Critical Cultural Studies, Alternative Media Studies, etc. This is again mainly a resource questions and as a result we find a division of labour in Critical Media and Communication Studies. We should draw on the vast history of critical traditions in Critical Media and Communication Studies and bring them together in interdisciplinary research programmes. So there should not be one project of Critical Media and Communication Studies, but a diversity of projects. But they should be networked and their diversity be united (unity in diversity) by the critical outlook and a theoretical and philosophical connection. Critical philosophy and social theory have a particular role in such research programmes and in establishing unity in diversity because due to their operation on a meta-level of analysis and as meta-theory they can help researchers to communicate with each other and they allow contextualizing research in a broader context.

(H2) The Form of Critical Media and Communication Studies

Critical Media and Communication Studies best operate as combination of critical social theory, critical empirical social research and critical ethics. Resource limitations make it frequently not possible to combine theory, empirical research and critical ethics in single projects/papers/research. The result is a division of labour (critical media theorists, critical empirical media researchers, critical information/media ethics). The goal should be to build interdisciplinary teams, research programmes and projects that pool resources and bring together theory, empirical research and ethics in conducting Critical Media and Communication research and that draws on knowledge from various disciplines. Such research structures reflect Max Horkheimer’s vision of a critical interdisciplinary research programme formulated in 1930.

(H3) Critical Media and Communication Studies and Philosophy

There is a lack of social philosophical and social theoretical grounding of Critical Media and Communication Studies. One of the reasons is that the division of labour results due to institutional limits and a neglect of philosophy. Critical philosophy and social theory can provide systematic guidance for engaging with questions relating to which society we live in and what role media and communication play in contemporary societies.

(H4) Critical Media and Communication Studies and Dialectical Philosophy

Dialectical philosophy can provide a strong philosophical and theoretical grounding of Critical Media and Communication Studies (see chapters 2+3 in my book “Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies”). This type of philosophy can provide us with tools of thought that allow us to systematically conceive, analyze and criticize the contradictions, relations, dynamics, positive and negative potentials, as well as struggles relating to media, communication, culture, information and technology.  Dialectical philosophy can be an extremely helpful guide for theoretical, methodological and practical-political aspects of Critical Media and Communication Research.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory is the tradition of Critical Cultural Analysis that has most thoroughly and systematically engaged with dialectical philosophical and theoretical foundations. Such foundations have for example been elaborated in Herbert Marcuse’s “Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory“ and Theodor W. Adorno’s “Hegel: Three Studies”. The dedication of the Frankfurt School to profound philosophical questions (although not necessarily the content of its theories) can inspire us today to create a dialectical-philosophical foundation of Critical Media and Communication Studies.

Social theory of the media and communication in society needs to start with providing an understanding of questions like: What is society? How is a society made up? How does social transformation work in society? What is the role of structures and agency in society? What is the relationship of the human individual and society? Dialectical philosophy is well suited for helping to bridge gaps in the field of Critical Media and Communication Studies (between the focus on structure and agency, subject and object, reason and experience, technology and society, economy and culture, pessimism and optimism, risks and opportunities, work and pleasure/joy, alienation and self-actualization, etc) and for avoiding one-sided approaches.

(H5) The analysis of capitalism

Capitalism is a system characterized by the dialectical unity of diversity of its political economy. It has at the same time a unified political economy and diverse political economies; it is at the same time capitalism and many capitalisms. Capitalism is today at the same time to various degrees finance capitalism, hyperindustrial capitalism, crisis capitalism, new imperialistic capitalism, media/informational/communicative capitalism, capitalist patriarchy, a racist mode of production, etc. The danger for analyses of media, information, culture and communication in capitalism today is to overstate the relevance of specific phenomena of informational capitalism and to neglect the other capitalisms as contexts of informational capitalism and the interaction of these dimensions.

Informational/Media/Communicative capitalism is a tendency, and a relative one, in the development of contemporary capitalism. This does not mean that it is the only or the dominant tendency. Capitalism is many things at the same time, it is to a certain degree informational, but at the same time to a certain degree finance all the other kinds of capitalisms that I just listed. Capitalism is contradictory, it contains in itself to certain degrees different modes of production, such as pre-modern production forms and voluntary, self-managed, non-commercial, or non-profit projects and organizations, and an articulation of different modes of production. It is the task of research to find out which capitalism is present to which extent in which context.

The unity of all capitalisms is that they are all oriented to capital accumulation by exploiting surplus value in class relations.  The diversity of capitalisms is united, capitalism needs to be dynamic, complex, multidimensional and diverse in order to maintain the continuity of capital accumulation and to create ever newer spheres and spaces of commodification, production, circulation, consumption and accumulation. Debates about media in the information society are often stuck in either stressing pure continuity or pure discontinuity of capitalism. We need to grasp and analyze the dialectics of capitalism.

(H6) The analysis of media communication in capitalism

Informational/media/communicative capitalism as one of the dimensions of contemporary capitalism is itself internally shaped by the dialectical unity of diversity. It is many-sided, contradictory, multifaceted, multidimensional. Capitalist media are, in complex and contradictory ways, but to varying historical and changing degrees, connected to non-capitalist media. Analyzing media communication in contemporary society requires us to see the dialectics of structure and agency, object and subject, opportunities and risks, work and play/pleasure, continuity and discontinuity, commodity and gift, and other dialectics. At the same time, we should be under no illusion that the dialectic is symmetrical. Instead, we must look for the asymmetries in power relations and strategies in order to politically empower alternative and critical forms of communication where need it most.

(H7) The analysis of exploitation and domination in Critical Media and Communication Studies

The rise of neoliberalism in society and of Postmodernism, Cultural Studies, Post-Marxism and Constructivism in academia have worked on decentering theory from class analysis and focusing on non-class based domination and discrimination. Identity politics tended to be substituted for class politics. The neoliberal phase of capitalism was/has been/is an intensification of class struggle-from-above, at the top of the power hierarchy, by capital. This has resulted in a strong increase of socio-economic inequality and an extension and intensification of precarious living and working conditions. At the same time that academia was saying goodbye to class, material reality brought class back in. The rise of the movement for democratic globalization showed that it is a movement galvanizing around the topic of class, in the 1980s and 1990s new social movements were quite separate around topics like gender, racism, peace, nature, etc – the rise of neoliberalism resulted since the late 1990s in a movement of movements. The global capitalist crisis has finally brought a return to the economy and class, not only in society, but also in academia.

Class needs to be conceived today in a form that takes non-wage labour (like unemployment, house work, use of corporate Internet platforms, etc) as forms of exploitation and as part of the class antagonism into account. Theorizing class as a foundation for understanding knowledge work and “digital labour” on the Internet needs to be attuned to the idea of multiple class positions: the flexibilization, dynamization and pluralization of class positions, and the antagonistic class character of knowledge production/producers themselves.

These diversities find their unity in the production and exploitation of value. There is a dialectical unity of diversity in class analysis. If we think dialectically about class, then necessarily the class antagonism is maintained by an internal dynamic change of class positions. Attention needs to be given also to the circumstance that an individual can occupy multiple class positions at the same time and that these positions shift. Knowledge work is today often overstated and it is often conceptualized as being too homogenous, although from a class perspective it is quite heterogeneous, fragmented, and ruptured by internal class antagonisms.

Various forms of domination in capitalism are always articulated with class. Capitalism can in principle be ecologically sustainable, respectful of gender differences, minorities, immigrants, etc as long as capital accumulation is guaranteed, but it can never be socio-economically just. Class is the key to understanding and criticizing domination and exploitation in capitalism. Domination cannot be reduced to class, but exploitation always prefigures, exerts pressure, conditions and sets the context and limits for various forms of domination.

(3) The Field of (Critical) Political Economy/Economies of the Media

You on the one hand use the term political economies for saying that we have multiple economies, i.e. you want to stress the complex and contradictory character of capitalism. To a certain extent I agree (see H5+H6). I would only add that there is a unity in this diversity and a predominance of the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand you use the term Political Economies of the Media (see Dwayne’s introduction in the important collected volume “The Political Economies of Media”). You want to stress the importance of the plurality of schools of Political Economy of the Media and to also express that one to a certain extent should leave aside “one’s own politics and agendas” in academia and engage in broad academic collaborations. Implicitly you also thereby say or want to warn that being too critical can be a barrier to communication and can advance separation.

I really recommend everyone interested in contemporary Media and Communication Studies to read this introduction and the book. Your introduction is excellent. It is a convincing empirical analysis, deeply informed by knowledge of different theoretical traditions.

You provide a mapping of the landscape of Political Economy research in Media and Communication Studies by identifying four approaches and speaking of Political Economies of Media:

(a) Neoclassical Political Economy of the Media
(b) Radical Political Economy of the Media
(c) Schumpeterian Institutional Political Economy of the Media
(d) The Cultural Industries School.

You stress the diversity of the field that conducts inquiries of the social, political and economic contexts of media communication. Your classification is very helpful for distinguishing Critical Political Economy from other approaches (a distinction that is frequently missing in other accounts and creates a lot of confusion). It is perfectly feasible and welcome that scholars from all four approaches work together on interesting topics and that we should definitely look for and be open to such co-operation.

The methodological differences are probably also not larger between the four approaches than within the approaches. The big difference is that the second approach is the one most likely to ask and engage with philosophical, ethical, political and theoretical questions about power structures, a just society and a just media system, whereas the three others are more likely (of course to varying degrees and depending on contexts) to find such questions and engagements inappropriate, unnecessary, and to argue for value free research — that such questions, essentially, lie outside of academia. The question, however, is what do we want: Good analyses only? Or good analyses that help advance a more just society as context for media communication?

By focusing on the diversity of approaches, your classification risks to neglect the political economy of the Political Economies of Media, i.e. the power structures and power distribution that characterize this field and limit its diversity. Radical and Marxist scholarship is bound up with the second approach. What does it mean to be a Marxist/critical scholar today (especially for younger scholars; I do think we have to stress and take into account that career opportunities and academic work conditions are in many countries today much more precarious than twenty or thirty years ago; and let’s assume that by critical we here do not mean Popper’s understanding of the term, but the more political notion of the critique of society)?

It means that you are less likely to get your papers accepted in established mainstream journals, that you will have a more difficult time getting funding for your research, for attaining tenure or finding a permanent position; that you are more likely of having to face prejudices, negative prejudgements and demonizations of your work, that you are more likely to loose your job and to be a precarious academic worker; that you are likely to have to engage in permanent discussions about what Marx actually wrote and what others claim he wrote and stands for, etc.

Being a Marxist scholar is the best guarantee for a difficult academic life. Marxists likely have to work more and harder, to be more witty and creative than representatives of the other three approaches and of having to exploit themselves more intensively in order to be recognized, to establish themselves and to be successful academics. The notion of a diverse field obscures the internal power structures of Media and Communication Studies and Political Economy and of what it means to be a critical scholar today. It is luring and structurally feasible to stop (or never start) being critical and to follow mainstream administrative research in order to avoid the stony academic way that critical scholars frequently have to go. Another strategy is to think that one conducts administrative research first and critical research later once one is established and tenured. The problem of this strategy is that the more one becomes part of institutionalized administrative research, the more difficult it becomes to do something different.

Media and Communication Studies and Political Economies of Media are NOT diverse fields, they are fields shaped by power structures – liberal diversity turns in reality out to be not so liberal at all. And yet going the stony way and conducting critical research as part of the second paradigm is the only way for intellectuals to work towards a truly participatory, democratic, commons-based and public media system and for a just society. Therefore it is politically necessary and academically perfectly feasible to go the stony way and to be critical. One may have to go more difficult ways, but these ways and their outcomes are more meaningful. Networks of critical scholars that can give mutual support are quite important and a power in itself on this way.

What distinguishes the second approach from the other three is the connection of theory and empirical research to normative judgements that are critiques of asymmetric power structures and to the struggle for a just society and a just media system. Under neoliberal capitalism, we are not only facing the privatization and commodification of large parts of the media and rising inequality, it is for various reasons also difficult and a challenge to be critical. The intensification of different inequalities and neoliberal hegemony require a specific focus on the Critical Political Economy/Critique of the Political Economy of Media. The second approach you identify has special relevance today. It needs to be especially nourished and supported, more than all other approaches in your typology.

Neoliberalism has brought about a deep-seated institutional and structural discrimination of scholars, who find Marx’s analyses inspiring and use them for formulating contemporary critiques. The 1960s and 1970s were decades that resulted in a relative institutionalization of scholars who were critical of capitalism. The rise of neoliberalism brought a reversal. Not only was it no longer en-vogue to talk about class and capitalism, doing so has — in the era of neoliberalism — not been conducive for an academic career, to say the least. Academics out of fear to loose their jobs or not being promoted adapted to the new neoliberal mainstream and this also impacted the topics and methods of research, the way universities and departments are organized and that especially brought heavy pressures for younger scholars, who have to a large degree been facing precarious employment relations.

Being critical in a neoliberal environment is structurally difficult. Neoliberalism limits the degree and possibilities of being critical by university reforms, cutting of budgets, centralization of bureaucracy, coupling of university to industry, downsizing or elimination of departments and fields that are not considered as being in line with economic interests, etc. So how to be critical in 21^st century academia? My take is that critical thinking has been marginalized and discriminated for too long and that we have to demand our rights to be heard, to be present, to have resources. And for doing so, we have to challenge the neoliberal mainstream. The project of Political Economies that you suggest must take power relations of the field into account, not bracket out the questions of power and neoliberalism for the sake of being on good terms with scholars from other traditions, and must especially work for strengthening resource allocation (as a form of affirmative action) for critical scholarship and overcome structural discrimination. It needs a true diversity, not a pseudo-diversity. And this question of diversity of a field is crucial and complicated in a largely neoliberal context that shapes academia. To talk about Political Economies of Media must mean to talk at the same time about the political economy of the Political Economies of Media.

The interest in Marx is returning today due to the explosion of inequality and the capitalist crisis. It is a historical moment that needs to be seized and embraced as opportunity. There is a new legitimacy crisis of capitalism, there is a tendency that the tide is turning – increasingly you no longer have to explain why you are critical of capitalism and why you talk about class, the need of justification and explanation tends to lie today rather on the side of those, who are not critical of capitalism and who refuse to talk about class. It is of crucial importance today to conduct research that is connected to the struggle for a just society.

There is much confusion about how to name the second approach in your typology. Terms that have been used by scholars who share the critical approach for naming their field have for example been Political Economy of Communication, Political Economy of Communications, Political Economy of Culture, Political Economy of Information, Political Economy of Mass Communication, or Political Economy of the Media. “Political Economy” is not necessarily critical. This is also an implication of your mapping of Political Economies of Media. Marx’s book was not called “Capital. A Political Economy”, but “Capital. A Critique of Political Economy” because he was critical of the classical political economy of Malthus, Mill, Petty, Ricardo, Say, Smith, Ure, etc.

Just like Marx, I think we should engage with the contemporary mainstream of political economy (of the media) – neoliberal political economy – in order to criticize and establish a critique of this political economy and an alternative/critical political economy. I am worried about the circumstance that scholars tend to speak of “Political Economy of X” and not of “Critique of the Political Economy of X/Critical Political Economy of X” when the actually mean the latter. There is also a Neoliberal Political Economy of X. The imprecise usage of terms can easily result in a lack of differentiation and a confusion of Critical Political Economy with Neoliberal Political Economy. In order to avoid confusion and be more precise, I suggest to either use the term Critical Political Economy of Communication/Culture/Information/Internet/Media or the term Critique of the Political Economy of Communication/Culture/Information/Internet/Media. I think that your differentiation of four approaches helps making such distinctions clearer as they sometimes appear. At the same time, I disagree with your stress on a diverse field because what we have is a stratified field characterized by power asymmetries.

One thing we can learn from Marx for Critical Media is his mode of dialectical thinking, which allows looking for the contradictions of media communication in capitalism. I think dialectical philosophy is very worthwhile for our field because it allows us to think beyond gaps, beyond techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, beyond structure and agency, etc and to analyze media communication in contemporary society as complex, dynamic and contradictory (I stress this especially in my book “Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies”). But one can apply dialectical thinking also for understanding what (critical) political economy of the media is all about. Dialectics is not only thinking in terms of negations and contradictions, but it is also a mode of thinking and practice oriented on Aufhebung (the bad English translation of this Hegelian concept is “sublation”), a German word that has a simultaneous threefold meaning and therefore signifies the threefold process of preservation (1), elimination (2) and uplifting (3).

Marx deeply engaged with Classical Political Economy. As a result, he preserved (1) the best elements of it in his approach, so his approach was also (classical) political economy. The thorough engagement with Classical Political Economy allowed Marx to formulate a Critique of Political Economy, he showed the mistakes and ideological naturalizations of the political economists. This critique was the attempt to eliminate (2) the dominance of classical political economy and to replace its dominance by a new quality of political economy (3) in society and thought. It is this third level of Aufhebung, where Marx not only engaged with political economy and established a critique of it, but worked out an alternative/critical political economy that was based on the concepts of surplus value and class.

So Marxian political economy is a) engagement with traditional political economy, b) critique of traditional political economy, c) alternative/critical political economy. What is true for a Marxist political economy in general is just as true for a Marxian political economy of the media specifically. This is a thoroughly dialectical process. I think we need to be primarily dialectical and critical today when conducting Political Economy of the Media.