Audience Labor and Alienation

In iSPY: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era, Mark Andrejevic introduces the idea of the digital enclosure, which he says is the "creation of an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself." He connects this term to the land enclosure movement that took place with the move from feudalism to capitalism - which is to say, he connects it to the creation of private property which communist theories have so derided. This is because, as Andrejevic notes, "the enclosure movement leads to the formation of distinct classes: those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor for access to these means . . ."

This idea has led some critical theorists, writes Andrejevic, to assert that "watching advertising might be considered a form of audience labor - value-generating work that is compensated for by access to "free" program content." He describes two forms of consumer labor, that of the work of watching as well as the work of being watched. The language he uses is also markedly Marxist, as he writes about an "ongoing struggle" and the efficiency of work done by "consumers" - the new proletariat.

This can, in my view, further exacerbate the alienation and tensions that Marx was so concerned with. Marx attributed this alienation to both the fact that the laborer saw extremely little money for his/her labor as well as the absence of the enjoyment gleaned from making use of the product. In the case of consumer labor, not only do we not see any money from this labor, but we actually pay the companies to engage in this interactivity. The product - the gained information about our preferences - is one we are similarly distanced from. It seems to me, then, that this is not an increasing "democraticization" of the process of production, but is instead a form of increasing the alienation and subjugation of the consumer-proletariat by the corporations at the top of the capitalist hierarchy.