Fisher, E. (2015). Class struggles in the digital frontier: Audience labour theory and social media users. Information, Communication & Society, 18(9), 1108-1122. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1018300

According to Fisher, traditionally, there have been two dominant, and competing, perspectives within Marxist media studies. One involves the idea that the mass media peddles ideological content in order to reinforce the existing power structures and social order. The second suggests that the“the political economy of communication” is based on the monopolization of corporate media and “links between the government and media” (p. 1111). An emergent perspective, however, is the audience labour theory which “constructs the media as a dynamic site of struggle between the audience (labour) and media providers (capital)” (p.1112). The suggestion here is that the main form of exploitation used by media, including social media, comes in the form of advertising which the audience passively consumes. This creates surplus value, created by the audience, which, in Marx's terms, is a form of exploitation. As an example, Fisher discusses Facebook's now defunct Sponsored Stories, and the class action lawsuit that followed. A Sponsored Story was created as a result of a number of different Facebook actions, including liking a page or a product, checking in at a specific commercial location, and sharing a commercial website. Once this occurred, the action could then be rendered into an advertisement with the name of the user attached to it in the form of an involuntary endorsement. During the class action lawsuit, the plaintiff argued that Facebook, through Sponsored Stories, was creating an unpaid workforce of millions, and the court agreed.

The significance of this is that “it shows that audience labour theory is not merely an abstract framework to understand social reality, but informs real social agents and thus has a concrete political significance” (p. 1119). From the perspective of librarians, as information professionals, it is important to note that information can be used, and manipulated, without the knowledge of the user, and how that can impact a patron's experience with interacting with information mediums.