Commodity Fetish and Reification in the Blogosphere

If the immediacy and simultaneity with which production, exchange and consumption occur in cyberspace render it difficult to examine, in economic terms, the value of the bloggers who labor for a wage, then this blurring makes it even more difficult to assess accurately the value of the labor exerted by the millions of bloggers who spend hours of their “free-time” per week surfing the web, gathering information, and formulating the narrative in which they communicate this information to their readers (Harmon, 2005). Let’s return to the framework of Marx’s labor theory of value for a moment, which describes the product of labor as belonging to the capitalist who profits when the value of the product exceeds the investment of capital (including wages paid) in that product (Bottomore, p. 472). If the labor of representation bloggers engage in is, as Bourdieu claims, like any other labor: “a socio-historically conditioned process, the value of which is also established through and within socially and historically conditioned contexts, through the institutionally contextualized process by which ‘symbolic power’ is enacted, realized and recognized as such,” then the objective bearers of knowledge are more valued the more legitimate their knowledge is perceived to be (in Graham, p. 144). The more reputable the blog, the more esteem it maintains in the sphere in which it operates, and therefore the more value it maintains in the capitalist economic system. Consider Christopher’s explanation of how bloggers perceive their own value: Since bloggers share consumption, we usually do memory work instead of actual labor. We make connections and research past events. We also value wit. "Value" comes in getting people to come to your site. In order to generate revenue, you either have to charge for access or sell ad space, in which case, you can approach a corporate net ad agency or an independent agency (like indieclick.com). There really is no such thing as a "knowledge monopoly" because we cross link, rely on respected names, and fine writing.
Underlying his explanation is the process by which social and economic relations determine the collective consciousness and its modes of representation, in other words “the psychology of lived experience under capitalism” (Wayne, p. 184). Another Marxist critic, Georg Lukàs, characterized this process as the socio-economic dynamics of commodity production affecting “the total inner and outer life of society,” or what Marx calls the superstructure (1923).
It is in this sphere that the logics of capitalism are internalized, where the exchange-value of a commodity is alienated from its use-value through the process of fetishization. In addition to valuing any given commodity according to the labor time invested in the production of that commodity, its “value,” this commodity may also be valued for its utility, “its use-value,” or expressed in the amount other producers of commodities are willing to exchange for it, its “exchange-value.” Commodities are thus potentially both use-values and exchange-values. Fetishization is the process by which producers are alienated from the product of their labor: they begin to the see the commodities they produce existing outside themselves (Marx, 1972, p. 304). In his analysis, Graham, a linguist, suggests one manifestation of this process in new media:
The point at which language, thought and technology converge in their mass and immediacy, at the same time being collectively deployed in controlling technological, physical and social systems, is also the point at which knowledge about these systems becomes the most valuable knowledge of all. In such conditions, an individual’s mind takes on the qualities of the commodity-fetish (p. 150).
In blogging, these use-values are assigned according to the perceived credibility of the blog, the quality of the mind of the blogger, as determined not only by the number of visitors (or sets of eyeballs, in contemporary media terms) to the site, but by the number of links to that site from other blogs (Rosen, 2005). It is not what a blogger knows, but how they know it and with whom they share it: in this case, the means of the production of the commodity produced determines the value of that commodity in exchange. At a conference held recently at Harvard on the relationship between blogging and journalism, Judith Donath of MIT Media Lab presented an interpretation of blogging through social theory, investigating what motivated people to be honest on the internet. She concluded that, the more “costly the signal” the more credible or “honest” the sender is perceived to be (2005). She continue that the implications are that bloggers need to reveal more about their personal lives to build credibility than traditional media who “can afford to give off costly signals.” The blogger’s personal identity is commodified to reinforce the exchange-value of her product; in addition to producing the content of the blog, she must also produce that which constitutes her identity.
Rather than subverting traditional media, I would suggest, bloggers, in fact, support the dominant ideas of the neoliberal economics espoused currently by capital. From Marx and Engels in The German Ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production…. The division of labor…manifests itself as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class…while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves (p. 172).
Corporate media, and by extension the capitalist system it reifies, is not threatened by blogging. Blogging is part of the Culture Industry Horkheimer and Adorno describe, but with a twist: rather than acting as passive receptors for a capitalist media product, like movies and television, bloggers (keeping company with reality show “participants”) actively engage in the production of the product they consume, thereby reducing production costs invested by capitalists and increasing the surplus value they are able to extract from labor. Through their resistance to “infotainment,” which bloggers attempt to circumvent by linking around the messages mainstream media sends out (Weinberger in Rosen, 2005), bloggers actually provide an essential service of that was once the purview of the media: disseminating information that ensures the masses internalize the hegemonic ideology of capitalism. The abstract valuations of blogs according to their perceived credibility is a product of the capitalist system, but also a concrete reification of it: the symbolic weight these blogs demonstrate through in-links and “hits” (both of which theoretically represent audience size) directly correlates to the advertising rates these blogs may charge. Bloggers, for the most part, operate within the boundaries of corporate competition and exchange value (Wayne, p. 49).
This “for the most part” is the crux, though, of the dialectic of the blogging. Although blogging, like most dissent in contemporary culture, has been commodified and co-opted by corporations—the most potent producers among whom no longer appear to be GM and Westinghouse but Google and Microsoft—the seeds of revolution remain within it. Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia and intellectual property rights activist describes in his “dotCommunist Manifesto,” the most poignant aspect of the marxian dialectic in which the instruments of capital are turned against itself. He sees the infinite possibilities of digital reproduction serving the class struggle by uniting the knowledge workers, the new proletariats, with communication tools necessary to organize and revolt (2002, p.3). He self-published the manifesto on his blog Freedom Now. .
For every Moglen, there are in infinite number of entities capitalizing on blogging’s digital spin-doctoring potentials as PR tools that are inexpensive to build and maintain (as the blogger-for-hire’s experiences above suggest). Rodrigo A. Sepulveda Schultz is a European venture capitalist who blogs in order to “test ideas, get feedback, ask for advice, ask for information." He uses his blog to network, advertise, and conduct research on products and influence public opinion about his company and the service he provides (Allchorne, 2005, p. 4). Both he and Moglen utilize open source software available for free download from the internet . Access to knowledge, then, is not limited by software, which digital reproduction makes readily available and difficult to control, but by access to hardware, the computers that power and host the blogs.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s report which identifies the “mainstreaming of online life,” claims that on a typical day, 70 million American adults log onto the internet each day, up 37% from 2000 when the study began. They also suggest that the “for the most part, the online world mirrors the offline world” (p. 58), yet their demographic data suggests that although three-quarters of the American population aged 18-49 use the internet, only 25% of those over 65 do. Likewise, internet users are primarily white, upper-middle class ($50-75,000 annual household income) men with at least some college education (p. 63). The study states that 32 million Americans have read blogs, yet 62% of American internet users are not sure what a blog is (p. 65). The online world, then does not mirror the world as it is, but as capital would have the working classes believe it is. This is exactly the situation a marxian critic would expect to see resulting from emergent communications technologies like the internet and blogging: despite the revolutionary potential embedded within them—the ability to transcend class and geographic boundaries, the free-exchange of information, the possibility of identification among a class of information workers, the participation of the subject in her own cultural education—there is the monopoly of information, freely traded among those in power but highly restricted for all others, and the exploitation of labor—both through the objectification of their products as commodities and the extension of productive work into all aspects of their life—all in the name of limitless capital accumulation. Bloggers are simply one of the many groups exploited through the extraction of surplus value from labor and placated through the mechanisms capitalism ingeniously conceives to offset the class struggle implicit within this exploitation. In this case, it is “employtainment,” that Christopher, the blogger for Suicide Girls, embodies:
[T]he closest thing that I would see to exploitation is that I'm on the computer all the freaking time, I have three of them (as back ups and mobility), and that I keep late hours.… I want to make it clear, though, that I enjoy blogging. There's no other job I'd rather do. I mean, Wil Wheaton from Star Trek, the lead singer for the Mr. T Experience, and a sex writer all work for me.