Book Review: The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media, edited by Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle

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The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media. Lee McGuigan and Vincent Manzerolle, eds. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 328 pp. $169.95 hbk. $40.95 pbk.Lee McGuigan, a doctoral student at Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania, and Vincent Manzerolle, a lecturer in Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario, have done a masterful job in combining historically important publications from mid-1970s with reflections from scholars who were actively engaged in debates that these foundational texts stimulated. They didn't stop there, however. They acquired additional contributions from scholars who have been carrying on those debates in context of a substantial renewal of interest in critical media theory.From beginning to end of this quite substantial text, contributions to this continuing debate about nature of media as a commodity all pay homage to legacy of Dallas Smythe and his pursuit of a critical theory of communications. McGuigan's introductory chapter helps to place Smythe's contribution within a historical moment, as well as within a stream of scholarship that brought cultural studies, political economy, and study of media institutions into conflict over nature and role of audience within capitalism. McGuigan and many of authors who follow his introduction underscore importance of Marxist and institutionalist approaches to making sense of media as both a commodity, and as a productive force.Smythe's seminal contribution to what has come to be known as the blindspot debate, was published in 1977, and was intended as a critical engagement with what Smythe saw as limitations in approach being taken by western Marxists to understand, and critically engage with nature of mass media systems under capitalism. His criticism was focused on what he saw as a misguided emphasis on media's ideological role, an emphasis that leftthose theorists incapable of understanding media as a force within an exploitative economic system. Smythe suggested that materialist answer to problem of media was to be found through engagement with nature of work that media audiences were doing during what was supposed to be their time off(when they were supposed to be reproducing their labor power). As ensuing debates would clearly show, this was no easy task, but Smythe's initial contribution pointed out a good many of issues that would continue to resonate throughout literature.Graham Murdock, an active participant in early debates, contributes an introduction to his own response to Smythe's article, as well as a contemporary, and highly personalized assessment of how critical media theory has come to achieve its present level of development. Because Murdock's 1978 article was focused more specifically on Smythe's problematic treatment of North American media systems as only forms worthy of critical engagement, he is able to call attention to both economic and ideological role of governments in Europe that managed public broadcasting networks of that time. He emphasizes importance of media's ideological role then, and now, although his more recent contribution was designed to bring our attention to bear on role of cultural environment in shaping our behavior in political realm as citizens as well as consumers.Murdock's assessments of commodity mesh well with reflections of Sut Jhally, and classic contribution of Jhally and Bill Livant. Perhaps more than many, these two scholars engaged more directly with Smythe's challenge regarding process through which audiences who are engaged in watching as working actually produce something with an identifiable economic value. Special attention is paid to narrowcasting, and an increased emphasis on demographics as a way of understanding how specific segments of might be watching extra as a contribution to increased efficiency in their production of surplus value for broadcaster. …