Media, Information and Technoculture 2153A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Web 2.0, Media Consumption, Media Studies
10 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Traditionally, marxist analysis has located the media"s role within capitalism as an. Media frames discourse, conditions thought, establishes the coordinates of reality . Media doesn"t tell you what to think, but rather what to think about. Smythe sees this as idealist and subjective and not in line with other historical materialist approaches that characterize other elements of marxist critique. Thus, communications is a blindspot, meaning confined to a conditioning role and not seen in an economic light as a producer of value within capitalism. Smythe"s project is to ask what economic function for capital does mass communication serve? . He attempts to answer this by approaching mass communication through the labour theory of value and the production of commodities by the mass media. His answer: the economic function of the mass media is to produce the audience commodity, more specifically, to valourize audience labour power . When they engage in consuming mass media, they are essentially working.
