Old theories, new methodologies: Investigating the political economy of Web 2.0

Fisher, E. (2011). Old theories, new methodologies: Investigating the political economy of Web 2.0 . Zagreb conference: "New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research". 7-9 April 2011.

Abstract: ocial networks, such as Facebook, pose a conundrum: on the one hand, they offer a virtual social space where people socialize, connect, befriend, and lead much of their lives in contemporary society. On the other hand, this social space – managed and used almost exclusively by its audience – is reported to have a market value of $50 billion. How are we to study this nexus of money and sociability? More theoretically, how are we to study the political economy of new media forms, which are characterized by sociability? I would like to suggest that investigating these new practices and the audiences which they involve requires a dual methodology: such investigation should be both theoretically-grounded and incorporate new, Web 2.0 methodologies. I exemplify this through an outline for a study on Facebook. First, my contention is that new technological modalities should be studied first and foremost with established theoretical categories which make explicit their link to social relations. Thus I borrow the old theoretical toolkit of Marxism (immaterial labor, surplus value, exploitation, objectification, etc.) in order to investigate a new phenomenon. Second, to look at Facebook not merely as a social space but as a “factory”, where “labor” is done by the audience, and where “value” is created (particularly through the production of sociability and community) requires that we turn our attention from the symbolic and interpretational analysis of users’ texts and images, to other, quantitative measures of the process by which value is created by audience, and extracted by Facebook. To do that I introduce web 2.0 methodologies which help us register the amount of time being spent by users, the intensity of connections for each user, and the strength of particular social networks. These measures are then interpreted in terms of their contribution to the economic value of Facebook.