Course:LIBR559A/Cockayne, D.G. (2016)

Citation

Cockayne, D.G. (2016). Affect and value in critical examinations of the production and ‘prosumption’ of Big Data. Big Data & Society 3(2), p. 1-11.

Annotation

In this paper, Cockayne examines and expands the concept of value as it relates to social media “prosumer” data. He argues that explanations of social media use must account for affective factors (e.g., emotion, attention, and motivation) (5). He criticises Fuchs’ (2010) emphasis on economic exchange-value and his focus on a handful of high-profile social media platforms (2). He observes that many social media companies harvest data but don’t sell it to advertisers, which suggests that the value of data is not simply economic.

The author interviews employees of small social media startups to learn what types of data they collect and whether their data collection is profitable. He concludes that, for these companies, data has value because it demonstrates users’ engagement with the platform. This “command over attention, sentiment, attachment, and feeling” allows companies to attract investors, but because the data do not directly generate revenue they are not commodities in the Marxist sense (5).

Like Zajc (2015), Cockayne believes that social media normalizes a new form of labour through both economic and affective means (2). He argues that user engagement metrics demonstrate a platform’s ability “to command, direct, and retain user attention, and to get users to work in a particular way,” and that this function is more important than their economic value (8). He observes that the commodification of user data is only possible when companies have control over users’ attention and behaviour. He introduces the concept of “attentional value,” which he views as distinct from economic, ethical, and epistemological value (2). He concludes that social media platforms are primarily an “apparatus of affective attention-capture” that encourage particular types of behaviour (2).

The author criticizes Marx’s labour theory of value from a post-Marxist perspective. He draws on the work of Laclau and Mouffe, who were interested in how capitalists compel workers to produce and saw the process of “extracting labour” as distinct from the purchase of labour-power (8). The study also makes use of the principle of symmetry associated with Actor-Network theory in its examination of “not-yet-successful, failing, or failed” social media companies (7).

For privacy reasons, the author provides minimal information about the companies and individuals included in the study. This makes it difficult to evaluate the generalizability of his findings. Additionally, he does not specify his interview methodology, so it’s difficult to know how his questions may have influenced the respondents.

Social media use is a form of everyday information behaviour that has wide-reaching impacts for individuals and society. As information professionals, librarians need to be aware of the economic and social forces that drive user behaviour. This article presents concepts that are useful for understanding how companies use consumer data and how users behave online.

Areas / Topics / Keywords

Social media, digital labour, Big Data, prosumption, value, attention, affect, Marxism

Page Author: Allison Hill