Valuing audience passions: From Smythe to Tarde - Apeiron - Iulm

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ECS0010.1177/1367549414563297European Journal of Cultural StudiesArvidsson and Bonini

european journal of

Article

Valuing audience passions: From Smythe to Tarde

European Journal of Cultural Studies 1 –16 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1367549414563297 ecs.sagepub.com

Adam Arvidsson

University of Milano, Italy

Tiziano Bonini

IULM University of Milano, Italy

Abstract Audience research is undergoing substantial transformation. The old ‘eyeballs’ paradigm has been losing adequacy since, at least, the 1980s. At the same time, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide data that allow a far deeper and more intrusive view into the everyday life of media consumers. As a result, many companies are now developing systems based on social media data in order to represent, measure and value audience dynamics in new ways. This transformation of audience research has been paralleled by the rise of concepts like influence, clout or passion as a way of conceiving of audience value. But how are such affective values created? And how can the new semantics of value as passion be critiqued? In this article, we will address that question by thinking through two theoretical models of audience value. Dallas Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity and Gabriel Tarde’s theory of public value. We will suggest that present developments in the media economy make Tarde’s model more relevant for understanding the value of contemporary audience activity. We suggest that this might lead to a redirection of critical theories of audience value toward a focus on constructing the kinds of devices that are able to represent audience value in ways that take a broader range of interests into consideration.

Keywords Affect, attention economy, audience, broadcast, reputation economy, Smythe, social media, Tarde

Corresponding author: Tiziano Bonini, Arts and Media Department, IULM University of Milano, via Carlo Bo 4, 20143 Milano, Italy. Email: [email protected]

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European Journal of Cultural Studies

Audience research is undergoing substantial change. The old paradigm of ‘eyeballs’: counting the number of viewers paying attention to a particular program or media product has been losing adequacy since, at least, the 1980s. At the same time, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook provide data that allow a far deeper and more intrusive view into the everyday life of media consumers. As a result, many companies are now developing systems based on social media data in order to represent, measure and value audience dynamics in new ways. This transformation of audience research has been paralleled by the rise of a semantics of value (cf. Luhmann, 1993) centered around passions and affects. In the era of Fordist mass consumption, the value of audiences was mainly talked about and conceptualized in terms of the number and social class of people paying attention. Today, value is also understood in terms that go beyond attention to instead emphasize influence, engagement, ‘clout’, or, in marketing, loyalty, experience or even passion. In simple terms, it is considered valuable not only to have many viewers to a television show, but also to have passionate and engaged viewers who are able to influence others. However, while it was quite clear where the value of ‘eyeballs’ came from, it is less clear where the value of newly cherished audience passions lies. How do audience members create value with their passionate engagement or the clout they can have in a certain public or community? In this article, we will address that question by thinking through two theoretical models of audience value. We will depart from Dallas Smythe’s (1981) theory of the audience commodity. Smythe’s Marxian theory of audience work, and in particular Jhally and Livant’s (1986) elaboration of it, has received a certain renaissance in recent years. The arrival of a participatory media culture, where consumers co-produce content, and in particular the affirmation of companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that are able to capitalize on such co-production have led scholars like Fuchs (2010) to propose that audiences participation can be understood as a form of labor that is exploited by capital. Audience members make ‘stuff’ – videos, selfies and Facebook updates – which is subsequently sold back to them as a consumable experience. While this perspective is coherent with Smythe’s model, we will propose a different reading of Smythe that focuses not primarily on audience production as a source of value, but on the ability to situate audiences so that their desires and preferences – their passions – can be rendered predictable. To Smythe, an audience commodity became valuable precisely by being situated ‘in front of the television screen’ so to say, so that it could be relied on to reproduce a particular consumption norm with calculable predictability. We will suggest that with the post-War transformation of the media economy, the ability of broadcasting institutions to successfully situate audiences has declined. Drawing on Gabriel Tarde’s theory of public value creation, we will then go on to suggest that it is precisely the ability of audiences to ‘situate themselves’ – to give (however temporary) directions to their desires so that these can be rendered calculable – that the contemporary semantics of passions refers to. And it is this ability that contemporary instruments that measure audience passions have as their object. To simplify, collective passions have become valuable and interesting as an object of measurement because they refer to the ability of an audience to make its actions and desires predictable. We will suggest that such predictability operates within a financial regime of


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accumulation, where the source of value is not primarily the stuff – music videos, Facebook updates – that audiences produce, but the ability to render their life courses susceptible to financialization. In the ‘Conclusion’ section, we will go on to suggest what such a different perspective on the value of participatory culture implies for critical media and cultural theory.

Situating audiences: Dallas Smythe Dallas Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity and its work is arguably the central reference for critical theories of audience value. Writing in the late 1970s, Smythe suggested that the media industries were based on the transformation of viewership into ‘audience commodities’ that could be sold on to advertisers. To Smythe, audiences become a valuable commodity by transforming people watching into predictable expressions of what he called ‘audience power’. Just like Marx’s concept of ‘labor power’ denotes the abstract potential of human beings to create use values, Smythe’s (1981) concept of ‘audience power’ refers to the potential of audience members to ‘buy goods and spend their income accordingly’ (p. 39). For Marx (1939 [1973]), ‘labor power’ only becomes valuable to the capitalist accumulation process when it is situated in such a way that it actively contributes to that process, to the point that the productive power of labor can be ‘absorbed’ into capital and appear as one of its attributes (p. 301). In a similar way, Smythe’s audience power becomes productive when it has been situated in such a way as to render it predictable. What advertisers buy are ‘the services of audiences with predictable specifications which will pay attention in predictable numbers and at particular times to particular means of communication […] in particular market areas’ (Smythe, 1981: 26). This situatedness ensures that audience members will reproduce the consumption norms proposed by advertising in a statistically predictable way and turns them in effect into elements of the institutional edifice of consumer society (just like the worker becomes an element to the production process, once situated on the factory floor). To Smythe (1981), the contribution of media companies toward the capitalist valorization of audience activity rests in the disciplinary act of situating audiences in such a way that their ‘audience work’, that is, their human potential to pay attention to and interpret messages will produce the kind of ‘audience power’ (predictable attention and demand) that can be sold on to advertisers for a profit (p. 25). Audience members are exploited in the process, not only because they are generally not paid for their work (disregarding the use value they can derive from the programming in which advertisements are embedded, Jhally and Livant, 1986), but also because they tend to assume the lions share of the investments necessary for them to perform their work in ways such that it becomes a valuable commodity (i.e. the purchase and maintenance of a television set). This ability to situate audiences was a precondition for the eyeballs-based paradigm of audience valuation that Smythe criticized. And precisely, this ability to situate audiences in front of a media device and render their attention predictable has been reduced by the transformation of the media system in the post-War years. Just like disciplining human labor power so that it could be absorbed into capital was problematic for early industrialists (Thompson, 1963), so disciplining audience work so that it paid attention to and reproduced the right kind of consumption norms was a major


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problem for early advertising and marketing professionals. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the necessity to instill a modern rational consumption style and to transform immigrants into rational American consumers was a major preoccupation of the advertising and marketing professions (Ewen, 1976; Marchand, 1985). At the level of the market for audience commodities, this problem was addressed by the introduction of the ABCD typology as a way of classifying radio audiences in the 1930s (Beville, 1940). This typology, along with substantive market research – like the pantry checks that Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) performed to investigate the actual contents of their listeners’ cupboards – allowed radio broadcasters to market their audiences as exponents of distinct demographic categories associated with predictable consumption styles (Converse, 1987). During the 1950s, this demographic typology became a fundamental component to the whole edifice of consumer society, allowing the construction of an institutional nexus of mass media, packaging, branding, supermarkets and suburbia that allowed for the predictable programming of consumer demand, differentiated into demographic segments (Aglietta, 1978).

New data and the rise of passions However, already in the 1960s, advertising professionals began to regard the problem of disciplining people into predictable consumers as solved. To the American advertising and marketing profession, class, ethnicity or other non-consumerist affiliations were understood to matter less as Americans were perceived to become ever more ‘middle class’ and began to regard consumption as a natural way to fulfill their wants and desires (Cohen, 2004). According to advertising professionals, with their more or less complete inclusion within consumer society also came a newfound freedom. The American ‘middle classes’ were understood to care less about appropriate consumption patterns and instead use consumer goods to creatively build their own identities and lifestyles in relative independence from what television advertising told them to do. But there was a difference: if their parents had been resisting consumer culture in the name of traditional consumption patterns, the ‘new middle classes’ of the 1960s were instead understood to elaborate and deploy consumer culture in articulating their own individual style. A new generation of marketing professionals like Pierre Martineau, Ernest Dichter, Burleigh Gardner and Sydney Levy began to argue that the valuable contribution of advertising and marketing was no longer to convince people to consume (they were already convinced of that) but to teach them to differentiate between otherwise functionally equivalent brands. And the way to do that was to promote engagement with commodities that would render them valuable as part of identity-building experiences (Dichter, 1960; Gardner and Levy, 1955). This new notion of consumers as searching for engaging, identity-building experiences within a social context where consumption had already become a natural way of life led to a new breed of market research: psychographics. Combining the relevance of qualitative data on consumer identities and ‘values’ with the reliability of large data sets, psychographic segmentation situated consumers into clusters made up of data on ‘Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles’ (Wells and Tigert, 1971). This new segmentation method was also made possible by the availability of computers able to process the large data sets required – some psychographic surveys generated up to 300 variables (Sheth, 1970). The methodological procedure was thus very different from what had been the case in the



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ABCD system. There, consumers had been segmented according to one variable (or one set of variables) denoting class position. Now, segments were no longer defined a priori, but rather deduced from the rich data material generated by extensive questioners. This meant that the overall picture that was generated was no longer determined and static, but rather mobile as the make-up of the specific clusters could change from one yearly survey to another (Arvidsson, 2003). This way, psychographics served to provide an evolving picture of a mobile and transforming consumer culture that had lost its ‘natural’ connection to an underlying socio-demographic structure, where consumers could transit from one segment to the next (depending on their momentary interest) and where the very segments themselves were understood to be generated, from below, by consumer activity. As William D. Wells recognized in his foreword to the American Marketing Association’s 1974 volume on ‘Lifestyle and Psychographics’, this dynamic approach had developed as a response to a social environment that was perceived to be increasingly dynamic and marked by ‘rapidly changing values’ (Wells, 1974: v). Increasingly, consumers were conceived of as less captivated by their media system and more inclined to situate themselves as particular lifestyle clusters. As psychographics combined with the arrival of new media technologies, like cable, video home system (VHS) and satellite television, the result was a greater diversification of the media system as print media and TV programming began to cater to specific psychographically defined lifestyle segments. What counted was not simply eyeballs watching, but the ability of a specific program to create engagement in or influence the selected target group (cf. Turow, 1997). In marketing, a similar transformation took place as the salience of brand management emphasized the importance of creating strong ties of loyalty and engagement between consumers and brands as the key to market success (Arvidsson, 2006). Enabled by new kinds of information coming from the ‘mining’ of data from credit cards and bar code scans, the search for engagement was enacted through customer relationship management (CRM) programs like loyalty cards and customer clubs adapted among others by supermarket and airlines (Weiss, 1989). The notion that engagement was more valuable than ‘eyeballs’ was further reinforced by the popular notion of new and highly mobile Generation X consumers. Accustomed to a rapidly changing media environment and to cross-media consumption patterns, these ‘X’ers had a short attention span and were very difficult to tie down to any particular advertising message. Creating meaningful forms of engagement, by building communities around brands, for example, could counteract this by generating the necessary forms of ‘stickiness’ (Ritchie, 1995). Indeed, driven in part by the rapidly rising importance of brands as intangible financial assets, marketing scholars began to argue that the most important dimension of brand value was the ability of brands to generate engagement with consumers, rather than their ability to directly drive sales. In audience research, a similar rise in the relevance of ‘passions’ was strengthened by the new availability of data that psychographics along with new forms of data mining made possible. These data now addressed a dimension of audience value that had hitherto been hidden. In his article on the audience commodity and its work, Smythe recognizes that the creation of audience power builds on or ‘subsumes’ (to use a Marxist term) the whole life course of consumers. ‘People in audiences, we should remember have a rich history of education for their work as audience members’. Throughout their life


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course, they have been schooled in paying attention and attributing importance to brands and consumer goods, and that schooling is reproduced and reinforced throughout a multitude of everyday instances. Much work will have been spent in discussing the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ features of brands and commodities in hundreds of contexts. A constant process of direct experience with commodities goes on and blends into all aspects of people’s life all of the time. (Smythe, 1981: 39)

In short, the valorization of audience work as audience power builds on the direct appropriation of a ‘general intellect’ of commonly available knowledge about consumption and consumer goods, to which audience members have access as a natural part of their life process, as ‘social individuals’ to use Marx’s (1939 [1973]) terms (p. 705). But it is only in the situation where audience attention can be directly measured that this huge amount of work is rendered valuable as it becomes predictable through measurement. In short, the work of the audience goes on in silence and only emits data as it is situated in front of the television screen and becomes part of the population that can be reliably represented by a sample of Nielsen’s audiometers. The broadcast audience is invisible. It is made up of individuals who are not linked in a network and who can only listen, without taking part in the conversation; they cannot publicly manifest their emotions or opinions to the speaker or the radio show. As Walter Benjamin (1931 [1999]) underlined, ‘publics can do nothing but switch off the radio (p. 544)’. However, as the audience has become more active and mobile, it has also become noisier and begun to emit data on a range of widely diverse aspects of its life in a number of widely diverse situations. Concomitantly, a growing interest in capturing the data noisiness of audience members as they move about in the media landscape has become an important driver behind the development of the technological and institutional infrastructure of audience research. During the 1990s, Arbitron implemented the portable people meter as an attempt to track media consumption habits outside of the situated context in front of the family screen. This was a response to the proliferation of multi-screen households, portable radio devices and the general media saturation of everyday life (televisions in shopping malls, airports and public transport). In the preceding decade, supermarkets, airlines and credit card companies had begun to mine consumer data originating from a multitude of points of measurement outside of the home. With the popular spread of the Internet in the late 1990s, a number of companies began to track online habits, generating audience profiles from Internet ‘surfing’ patterns that would include a number of diverse pursuits, not necessarily related to entertainment or media consumption. In short, since the time of Smythe’s writing, audiences have begun to give off data in a wide variety of contexts, and those data are increasingly deployed to valorize its ‘audience power’. Social media, and in particular the integration between social media, mobile platforms and geolocalization services, constitute an additional step in this movement toward the constitution of audience members as ‘data noisy’. Social media, and in particular mobile social media, become increasingly interesting as advertising channels in themselves and advertising budgets have moved steadily from ‘old’ to ‘new’ (and in particular mobile) media in the last years (Bradshaw, 2012).1,2



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However, the movement of ad-spend from old to new media does not simply represent the replacement of one outlet by the other, but also a growing integration of the two. Indeed, the recent Pew Internet and American Life Research Report on ‘Connected viewers’ argues that ‘half (or more precisely, 52 per cent) of all adult cell phone owners now incorporate their mobile devices into their television watching experiences’ (Smith and Boyles, 2012) Similarly, 25 percent of US Twitter users routinely tweet about their television viewership, generating roughly 300 million television-related tweets per day. In the United Kingdom, 40 percent of all Twitter traffic at peak TV-viewing time is about TV, and 60 percent of all Twitter users use Twitter while watching TV (Carmody, 2013). And the top 30 TV series in terms of volume of tweets account for 50 percent of all measured UK Twitter TV activity (Kantar Media, 2014). The same is happening in radio, as it merges with social media and gives rise to what Bonini (2015) calls the ‘networked listener’. This has made social media particularly attractive for marketers as a window onto the ordinary life of viewers that traditional audience metrics has been unable to capture. According to industry professionals, this has rendered Twitter an extension of the television experience, a sort of ‘second screen’, and has positioned the audience very differently in relation both to programming and to advertising content (Delo, 2012; Graver, 2012; Kantar Media, 2014). This way, social media function as a perspective on the everyday dynamics of audience activity – the ‘constant process of direct experience with commodities [that] blends into all aspects of people’s life all of the time’ that to Smythe remained invisible and silent now acquires an objective reality as social media data to be mined. This situation has led to a development of tools and instruments that make use of social media data in measuring and defining ‘old media’ audiences. Trendrr, for example, measures specific TV show activity (mentions, likes and check ins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue, Viggle and Miso and publishes a daily and weekly chart of the most ‘social’ TV shows, meaning those shows that have been able to generate most conversations and buzz (Buck, 2012). To quote Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertising solutions at Nielsen, ‘As a media-measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data’ (Nielsen Press Room, 2012). Kantar Media launched in 2014 its Twitter TV Ratings service in the United Kingdom, allowing broadcasters and media agencies to better understand and value the relationship between Twitter and television. Both Twitter and Nielsen are presently developing tools for the evaluation of social media audiences for old media products. At the end of 2012, Nielsen acquired SocialGuide, a small social analytics company, and at the beginning of 2013 Twitter bought Bluefin Labs (Shontell, 2013). Priced at US$100 million Bluefin was originally created as a rival to Nielsen. It aims at telling programmers and marketers what people are saying about them when they watch TV. Facebook has been approaching networks to help them extend the conversation about TV into the social realms, and startups like GetGlue and Viggle offer ways for viewers to check into shows. The integration of social media data into audience measurement has given renewed urgency to the need to redefine industry semantics of audience value. Some industry professionals and academics go as far to say that the established ratings system based


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on ‘eyeballs’ is now becoming obsolete. The American radio and television industries underlined the change of environment in 2008, when their annual Radio and Television Business Report Intelligence Brief opened with the bold title ‘Why Ratings No Longer Matter’ (Pilotta, 2008 cf. Harris and Chasin, 2006: 3, for an academic argument, see Napoli, 2008). Instead, the value of audience activity is increasingly conceptualized in terms of a semantics of passion. For example, Twitter has recently struck an agreement with Nielsen to create a ‘Nielsen Twitter TV Rating’ that will measure the total audience for TV-related conversations on Twitter, including both people who comment and people who are exposed to their comments. The system will enable advertisers to rank the value of users according to their ability to create attention and engagement on the part of others. In parallel, a number of applications like Hootsuite, TweetDeck (bought by Twitter in 2011 for 40 million dollars), Sprout Social, VerticalResponse, Sendible, Postling or Visual Revenue enable brand managers to explore the network of the followers/fans of the social profiles they manage. They provide brand managers with data about these networks polarized around the profiles that they manage: Once again, the success of communication strategies are evaluated according to shifts in the reach of each follower/fan, the average Klout score of the network, the most commented/liked/shared Facebook posts, the most clicked and re-tweeted tweets and the most important cities from which the clicks came. Startups like SocialGuide Intelligence, Viggle, TweetTv or GetGlue are offering ratings and audience valuations based on social media traffic or data derived from smartphone apps, and established actors, like Nielsen are offering similar services, collaborating with Twitter and Facebook and mining these social media giants for data on television audience behavior (Briget, 2012). Once again, the main category for the valuation of social media presence remains the influence of the communication networks thus generated. In other words, underneath vague terms like ‘clout’, ‘engagement’ or ‘influence’, there is a shift in the focus of value measurement from the number of people pertaining to a certain social category watching, to the ability of people watching to affect or create engagement on the part of others. This brief overview of the transformation of audience research in the post-War years suggests two things. First, as audiences have become more mobile, the ability of media institutions to successfully situate audience members and render them predictable has declined. This has led to a decline in advertising investments in ‘old media’ outlets, as well as a perceived decline in the ‘ratings’ paradigm overall. Second, a new semantics of passion has developed, starting in the 1980s, as a way to conceptualize the value of audiences. This semantics of passion has developed in parallel with new inductive techniques of audience measurement like, first psychographics and then the mining of Internet and social media data. The value added of these techniques of measurements lies in their ability to unearth the meta-stable links between variables that emerged from a complex ‘data cloud’. In this sense, passion refers, empirically, to the ability to create such meta-stable associations in a complex material. In order to better understand how this relates to value, we need to turn to Gabriel Tarde, who wrote about audience value in a comparable situation: before the modern media system had been ‘stabilized’ by the institutional nexus of Fordist consumer society.



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Creating publics: Gabriel Tarde Tarde was the first social thinker to take the economic role of publics seriously. Already in his Psychologie économique (Tarde, 1902), he underlined how publics played a crucial role in modern consumer society. Where people increasingly consumed goods that found no place in traditional structures of needs, the ability to define their value through public communication became crucial to commercial success. Indeed, the public sets the ‘truth, beauty and utility’ of such modern non-traditional goods, thereby establishing a qualitative basis for their market price. (Indeed, Tarde did not think that this role of publics was restricted to the consumer economy, he argued that also the price of labor – in the traditional sense of paid work – was set by labor unions influencing public opinion.) Already at this point, we can notice fundamental differences between Tarde’s approach and Smythe’s Marx-inspired theory of the audience commodity. While Smythe presupposes an audience who is essentially passive, reproducing consumption norms in front of the television set in the manner of a Fordist assembly line worker acting out his job description, Tarde emphasizes the active, constructive role of the public. People who belong to a public create values, commercial as well as ethical and aesthetic. A second important difference is that Smythe views audiences from the institutional perspective of the media industries. For him, the problem of the constitution of the audience had already been solved by the techno-institutional nexus of, for example, television broadcasting. Tarde, however, is interested in the formation of publics. Indeed, he sees publics as one special case of the basic dynamic of imitation that he understands to stand at the basis of all social phenomena (Borch, 2012). Publics are formed as processes of imitation are driven by discharges of affective energy or ‘passion’. This is true for crowds too; they are given a direction and organization as a discharge of passion ‘electrifies’ as it spreads through bodies that are physically co-present (Tarde, 1968 [1912]: 323). A public, similarly, is formed as a ‘simultaneous conviction or passion’ travels through the mediation of, in Tarde’s cases, printed media (Tarde, 1969, as cited in Borch, 2012: 59). So while Smythe regards the formation of publics as an institutionally given ‘social fact’, Tarde sees the formation of publics as occurring through dynamic processes in which a singular ‘passion’ is diffused through a mediated assembly of individuals. Consequently, he considers the valuecreating potential of publics as an effect of their capacity for self-constitution. In a later passage from his Psychologie économique, Tarde (1902) defines the substance of public value: truth, beauty and utility as determined by ‘ the greater or smaller number, the greater or lesser social importance (by which we mean:consideration in the eyes of others, recognized competence) of the people who agree to support it and the greater or lesser intensity of their beliefs in it’ (p. 62). This definition is further operationalized in his call for a hypothetical gloriometer – technically impossible at the time of his writing – whereby the value-creating potential of members of a public, their worth, could be calculated A man’s glory, like his credibility and wealth […] is therefore a kind of social quantity. It would be interesting if, by means of some ingenious statistics, we could get an approximate measure of this singular quantity for each species of celebrity. The need for a gloriometer is felt with particular sharpness given how fame of every color has multiplied, how suddenly it comes and how fleeting it is, and how, despite its usual transience, it always goes together with formidable power, being a good for the person who possesses it while for the society it is an illumination


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and source of faith. […] Fame is one component of glory; it can readily be measured by number of individuals who have heard of a man or one of his acts. But admiration, a no less essential component, is a more complex matter to measure. We would have to count the number of admirers, to calculate the intensity of their admiration and also – here’s the rub – take into account [the admirers’] sharply unequal social value.

(Tarde, 1902: 70–71). To Tarde, the value of audience activity consists not in its ability to reproduce a pregiven consumption norm, but rather in its ability to form a public, that is, a temporary association of strangers held together by a common passion and importantly by a common commitment to particular values or a particular ethos (Arvidsson, 2013). It is the ability of this ethos to support a public definition of ‘truth, beauty and utility’ or, in more contemporary terms, a value convention that enables the formation of monetary prices around ‘ephemeral’ goods like audience attention or brand values. Tarde’s perspective thus opens up for a different interpretation of the position of audiences in the political economy of the media system. First, from a Tardian perspective, the value-creating ability of publics does not primarily rest with its ability to reproduce a consumption norm, but with its ability to produce a consumption norm: to create and sustain a particular way of interpreting the meaning and value of an object. By forming a public, the audience situates itself, so to say. It endows itself with a set of values, or perhaps better an ethos that renders its behavior, taste and preferences predictable. Already Smythe underlined how the value of audiences rests on such predictability. But the problematic of predictability has become ever more urgent in a situation where the tastes of the audience no longer follow the consumption norms imposed by the Fordist media system and where their data noisiness generates unprecedented amounts of information on the mundane details of their everyday life. In such a situation of complexity and data overload, it becomes increasingly valuable to construct the kind of directionality that allows for interpretation and prediction. This is precisely the principle behind contemporary brand management. The growing importance of brands as marketing devices that has occurred since the 1980s has in no small part been a response to the problem of creating predictable consumer demand in a situation where such predictability can no longer be guaranteed by the institutional nexus of the media system (Arvidsson, 2006). It is when the formation of consumer tastes escapes the overall control of the media industries that the brand develops as a vehicle for the creation and sustenance of publics that allow for a certain forward control of consumption. Apple, for example, can successfully predict how many iPhones will be sold, and above all what features the next version of the iPhone should have in order to be accepted, because the public formed around the iPhone brand allows for such predictability (Qiu et al., 2014). Crucially, the value of a brand, its ‘brand equity’ is understood to be based not only on the number of people who care about it, but also on the passion it is able to generate in the people who care, as this passion is what keeps the brand-public together. Second, the creation of publics is crucial to maintaining value conventions. Once again to brand has come to mean to create and maintain a convention that supports the idea that one product is different from another, functionally and aesthetically similar one. (Audi and Skoda are similar cars built on the same technical platform, yet the



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meaning and value of their brands are widely different; Apple and Samsung use the similar technical solutions but are perceived as different phones, etc.) With the rise of a contemporary participatory culture the responsibility for creating and sustaining such value conventions has come to rest ever more on the ability of consumer publics to create and support what in marketing parlance is known as ‘customer-based brand equity’. This way the ability of the audience to form a public becomes integrated as a valuable step in the brand-centered commodity chain. But brands do not simply operate on consumer markets. Rather brands are principally financial resources that serve to justify financial valuations of companies that far exceed book value measurements. This financial function of brands is particularly clear in the culture industries. Indeed, Michael Szalay’s work suggests that the content and programming strategy of HBO can to a large extent be understood as directed at creating brand equity for financial investors, and not simply for consumers (Szalay, 2014). This scenario is consistent with contemporary intepretations of financial markets that point at the conventional nature of value formation (Marazzi, 2008). From this perspective, the ability of an audience to form a public has been integrated not simply in the value chains of the commodity economy but, importantly, as a crucial element of value creation in an ever more financialized bio-economy (Fumagalli, 2011) where the crucial nexus between financial markets and the passions and affects of life itself. Just like, in the world that Smythe described, the institutional system of television broadcasting organized passions into disciplined labor power, the ability to form publics, organize those passions into the kinds of ordered value conventions that operate in today’s media economy. Indeed, as Morozov (2014) has suggested, present spectacular valuations of social media companies like Facebook or Twitter can possibly be explained by their potential to act as mediators for a further extension of financialization into everyday life. Facebook is able to provide data on a wide range of aspects of everyday behavior and communication. The company is presently extending this ‘connectivity’ to emerging economies in Asia and Africa, thus turning a new multitude of life forms into observable data. With the addition of wearable computing, ‘smart city’ technologies, bio sensors like Apple’s ‘Health’ App, the material at their disposition will ever more include data on basic life processes like blood pressure or heart rate. This will enable Facebook and other social media companies to provide the data for the securitization of the life conduct of a wide range of individuals. Health insurance premiums can be calculated in real time in relation to behavioral patterns and credit worthiness for things like student loans can be calculated on the basis of data on preferences and thoughts derived from websites visited and the topics and sentiment of postings on Twitter and more. In short, the ability to create a public is valuable because it allows for predictability in a situation of complexity and data overload, and it allows for the creation and sustenance of value conventions in a financial economy where value is often beyond conventional measure (Arvidsson and Peitersen, 2013; Negri, 1999). Drawing on Tarde we can suggest that what creates and sustains such valuable publics is the ability to create and sustain the interpersonal passions that keep publics together. This was what Tarde intended his ‘gloriometer’ to measure, and this is what contemporary methods of audience valuation actually focus on when they claim to measure ‘passionate’ entities like engagement or clout.


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For example, Facebook’s ‘Edgerank’ algorithm estimates the value of user’s feeds by a combination of ‘Affinity’ (a measure of the density of interactions), Weight (a measure of the quality of engagements: a comment is more engaging than a like, for example) and Time decay (giving priority to recent interactions over older ones), thus effectively valuing users according to their ability to engage with other users and make them endorse and re-transmit their communications: Edgerank is a measure of the potential of a particular user’s feed to achieve ‘spreadability’ by affecting others (Jenkins et al., 2013). Similarly, Twitter’s advertising service has launched a service that puts monetary value on tweets allocated in users’ streams according to the ability of these users to spread messages in their networks (Carmody, 2013). Most importantly, Klout (along with similar measures like Kred and PeerIndex) gives value to users according to an algorithm that estimates their ability to enable messages to spread and circulate. Although Klout itself defines ‘influence’ as ‘the ability to drive action’, this is not really what the instrument measures. Even though the exact make-up of the algorithm that generates the Klout score is secret, its main parameters are well known. These are: how many interactions users are exposed to (True Reach); the ability to generate response in their networks (Amplification) and the quality of networks of responding contacts in terms of the Klout scores of their members. These parameters more or less exactly mirror Tarde’s (1902) parameters of public value cited above: ‘the greater or smaller number, the greater or lesser social importance (by which we mean:consideration in the eyes of others, recognized competence) of the people who agree to support it, and the greater or lesser intensity of their belief in it’ (p. 62).

Conclusion While the Smythian definition of value as ‘eyeballs’ is still operational within the market for audience attention, another paradigm based on value as passion has been affirming itself at an accelerated pace since the 1980s. The passion paradigm has developed as a result of audience fragmentation, on the one hand, and the availability of new and more detailed data on the other. Social media and their ability to provide almost constant surveillance of audience members’ daily activities have been particularly important in furthering this development. Along with Smythe and Tarde, we can understand the value of passions to consist in the ability of an audience to form a public, that is, a group of individuals that are united by a common ethos or a common project. In transforming crowds into publics, passions are valuable because they enable the predictability of demand and action, thus reintegrating a mobile and active audience within the institutional apparatus of consumer capitalism. What is more, such search for predictability fits well with the dynamics of a financialized ‘bio-economy’ where the ability to transform the Knightian insecurity of de-traditionalized behavior into calculable risks that, in turn can be securitized, provides a major source of financial expansion. Recent critiques of participatory culture and of social media companies in particular have relied on Smythe’s analysis to propose a model of exploitation based on the Marxian labor theory of value. It is true that producing the passions that are able to generate the social bond which transforms an aggregation of individuals into a public can entail a substantial amount of ‘affective labour’ (Wissinger, 2007). However, from the point of view of capitalist media companies, the value of that ‘labor’ is no longer related to the



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number of ‘watching workers’ and the time they spend in watching, as it was in Smythe’s time. This means that his critical approach needs to be developed. And a stepping stone for that development is an understanding of the value form by which passions are actually subsumed under the contemporary media economy. Indeed, the drive to measure and commodify passions represents yet a step in the process of capitalist subsumption of life (Dean, 2009). Not only the time passed in front of the television set, but the whole affective web of social life is now effectively positioned as source of value-creating ‘labor’ (Illouz, 2007). This is a valid point, but it only captures one side of the story. Two additional observations can be made. First, a similar semantics of passion is also employed within the ‘self-productivisation’ of users’ activity (Schwarz, 2012), their voluntary objectification not only as a source of monetary audience value but also as an ingredient in a number of reflexive valuation practices that follow a wide range of different value horizons (Stark, 2011). Measurements of passions like influence, or Klout operate not only within corporate practices of audience or brand valuation, but also within a wide range of autonomous networks of wealth creation, be these social enterprise scenes or peer-to-peer production systems. This way passion-asvalue is not only emerging as a semantics for new forms of corporate exploitation of audience labor, but also potentially for the self-valorization of the kinds of autonomous productive circuits that are affirming themselves all across the information economy. This entails that a critique of passion needs to not only focus on its potential as a device for the capitalist subsumption of life, but also on its potential as a device for the selforganization of productive life as it ‘comes out on the other side’, so to say, of the subsumption processes enacted by contemporary media culture. Second, measurements of passion are examples of what Celia Lury (2009) would call topological measures. Unlike attention time, the value of passion is not measured according to some external fixed point – like time spent in front of the screen – but rather according to the strength and make-up of the internal affective ties that make up a particular – however temporary – public. This means that a semantics of passion can render comparable value that is generated according to a wide range of different value horizons. In this context, the definition of passion depends not on any a priori value sets, but on the algocratic (Aneesh, 2009) make-up of the measurement devices themselves. This means that a critique could center on the make-up of the devices that measure passion in various ways and that a valid strategy for critical theory could be to examine and criticize existing devices. (Klout, for example, lacks transparency and is easily manipulated by bots; something profound might also be wrong with a measure that claims that Justin Bieber is the most valuable person in the world!) Importantly, critique could become practical by focusing on how to build such devices that embody different definitions of the value of passion, which might be more sensitive to a range of considerations that go beyond those contained in the present neoliberal self-branding paradigm that Klout represents. In this sense, a traditional critique of value could be supplanted by a politics of standards, a Dingpolitik, to use a Bruno Latour’s (2005) term, whereby activist intervention takes the form of building and propagating alternative measurement devices that are better able to reflect ethical and political concerns presently not included in Klout and its competitors. In other words, the material construction of a new public sphere in which passions can become politicized in different ways, constitutes the really interesting horizon for contemporary critical medium theory.


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Funding Research for this article was partially financed by the project P2PValue, funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7): grant agreement no. 610961.

Notes 1. 2.

PR Newswire http://www.biakelsey.com/Company/Press-Releases/120515-U.S.-Social-MediaAd-Spending-to-Reach-$9.8-Billion-by-2016.asp (accessed 24 December 2012). See Data Dive: US online ad spend per user: http://www.marketingcharts.com/.

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Biographical notes Adam Arvidsson is Associate Professor of sociology at the State University of Milan, where he directs the Centre for Digital Ethnography. His research interests concern new forms of value creation in the information economy. His most recent book, ‘The Ethical Economy. Rebuilding Value after the Crisis’ (co-authored with Nicolai Peitersen) was published by Columbia University press in 2013. Tiziano Bonini is lecturer in media studies at the IULM University of Milan, where he teaches Radio production and Radio history. PhD in Media, Communication and Public Sphere (University of Siena). His main research interests are the intersection between radio and new media (he wrote a book on the history and aesthetics of web radio in 2006), creative industries, networked publics and radio audiences, participatory media cultures. He works as a freelance radio producer for national public and private radio since 2006. He recently co-edited a book entitled ‘Radio Audiences and Participation in the age of Network society’ (ECREA Series, Routledge, 2014).
