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Lecture notes Property I
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Lecture notes of 4 pages for the course Property I at LSE (Networked Economy)
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W7 – DATA OWNERSHIP AND SOCIAL MEDIADallas Smythe and the ‘blindspot’
• The functions of the ‘consciousness industry’
• Ideology vs audience commodification
• Content as ‘bait’: ‘The information, entertainment and "educational"
material transmitted to the audience is an inducement (gift, bribe or "free
lunch") to recruit potential members of the audience and to maintain their
loyal attention. The appropriateness of the analogy to the free lunch in the
old-time saloon or cocktail bar is manifest : the free lunch consists of
materials which whet the prospective audience members' appetites and
thus (1) attract and keep them attending to the programme, newspaper or
magazine, and (2) cultivate a mood conducive to favourable reaction to
the explicit and implicit advertisers' messages’ (Smythe, ‘Blindspot’).
The demographics
• ‘As collectivities these audiences are commodities. As commodities they
are dealt with in markets by producers and buyers (the latter being
advertisers).Such markets establish prices in the familiar mode of
monopoly capitalism. Both these markets and the audience commodities
traded in are specialized. The audience commodities bear specifications
known in the business as "the demographics" .The specifications for the
audience commodities include age, sex, income level, family com-
position, urban or rural location, ethnic character, ownership of home,
automobile, credit card status, social class and, in the case of hobby and
fan magazines, a dedication to photography, model electric trains, sports
cars, philately, do-it-yourself crafts, foreign travel, kinky sex, etc’ (Smythe,
‘Blindspot’).
Leisure time as marketing labour
• [I]n 1960 (but not in 1850) there was a vast array of branded consumer
goods pressed on the workers through advertising, point-of-sale displays,
and peer group influence… In-house time must now be devoted to
deciding whether or not to buy and then to use (by whom, where, under
what conditions, and why) an endless proliferation of goods for personal
care, household furnishing, clothing, music reproduction equipment, etc.
Guiding the worker today in all income and time expenditures are the
mass-media – through the blend of advertisements and programme
content’.
Marketing branded commodities
• ‘The realistic process of audience-members’ work can be best understood
in terms of the ever-increasing number of decisions faced by him/her by
“new” commodities by their related advertising’.
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