Christian Fuchs

Bio

Christian Fuchs holds a venia docendi in the research field of ICTs and society. His main research interests are critical social theory, general social theory, media and society, critical political economy, critique of the political economy of the media and information, and information society studies. He is author of more than 100 academic publications, including the monograph “Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age” (Routledge 2008).

Abstract

Class and Exploitation on the Internet: Theoretical Foundations and the Example of Social Networking Sites

In this paper, I argue that class is a central concept for understanding the economic processes of informational capitalism. The category of class is conceived based on Marxian theory as a process of exploitation. It is not confined to capital as the exploiting class and wage labour as the exploited class, but rather an expanded notion of the exploited class is advanced. The relationship of class and knowledge labour is outlined and implications for new media are discussed. The paper also discusses how useful categories such as the multitude by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, reproductive labour by Marxist feminism, and audience commodity by Dallas Smythe, are for a concept of class in informational capitalism. The contemporary proletariat constantly creates and recreates spaces of common experience, such as the Internet, educational institutions, knowledge spaces, culture, etc through their practices. These spaces and experiences are appropriated and thereby expropriated and exploited by capital in order to accumulate capital. The notion of the Internet prosumer commodity is introduced as theoretical category that describes contemporary Internet-based capital accumulation strategies.

Social networking sites (SNS) such as MySpace, Facebook, or studiVZ are Internet-based integrated forms of communication and community-building. As they are huge collections of personal data, they need to be further. Based on this theoretical foundations, a case study of social networking sites usage by students is presented. Students are a primary user group of SNS. An online survey that was based on a questionnaire consisting of 35 (single and multiple) choice questions, 3 open-ended questions, and 5 interval-scaled questions, was carried out (N=674). The respondents were asked about the major perceived advantages and disadvantages of SNS. The results show that public information and discussion about surveillance and social networking platforms is important for activating critical information behaviour. The results also allow the conclusion that there are no easy solutions to economic and political surveillance on SNS in an age of surveillance and new imperialism and that the topic should be analyzed critically by framing it within the context of larger societal issues.