Abstract

This MRP will attempt to explain social media today by applying Smythe’s (2006) research on audience commodity and free labour regarding television and broadcast to hashtag campaigns on Instagram, such as Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke, and Calvin Klein’s #MyCalvins. This MRP will support literature pertaining to audience commodity and free labour, the monetization of user-generated content via social media marketing, and the nature of the audience. Through a mixed methods approach, the campaigns will be analyzed in hopes of discovering how social media has revolutionized the role of the audience, which has shifted drastically due to the participatory nature of the Internet—thus, demonstrating the transformation of the audience as users to producers to advertisers of user-generated content created for hashtag campaigns on Instagram. Ultimately, this MRP will seek to demonstrate that this transformation has resulted in exploitation of users, and have revolutionized the model of free labour and commodity as outline by Smythe (2006).

Highlights

  • The topics I wish to explore for my MRP are the notions of audience commodity and free labour in today’s digital age, through the use of the hashtag (#) on Instagram and its implications in relation to user-generated content.These concepts were originally introduced by Smythe (2006), who specialized in the study of television broadcast

  • Since Smythe’s (2006) research mainly focused on television broadcast, the goal of this MRP will be to determine the implications of Smythe’s theory of audience commodity and free labour in relation to Instagram, which is being used as a space for free labour by promoting products and, “producing culture for the digital economy” (Terranova, 2000)

  • The purpose of this research paper is to discover whether the audience is engaging in a form of free labour when propagating data through user-generated content (UGC) on Instagram by participating in hashtag campaigns implemented by various brands

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Summary

Introduction

The topics I wish to explore for my MRP are the notions of audience commodity and free labour in today’s digital age, through the use of the hashtag (#) on Instagram and its implications in relation to user-generated content.These concepts were originally introduced by Smythe (2006), who specialized in the study of television broadcast. This MRP will attempt to explain social media today by applying Smythe’s (2006) research on audience commodity and free labour regarding television and broadcast to hashtag campaigns on Instagram, such as Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke, and Calvin Klein’s #MyCalvins.

Results
Conclusion

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