The innovative use of social media platforms by brands shows an expansion of traditional marketing strategies affecting also people’s daily online behaviours. In fact, the development of social media marketing as a strategy employed by brands to engage with users/potential customers is a clear example of this progression. This discourse is further complicated by political economy that is applied in this chapter to understand the dynamics of power and control that companies lay on users/potential customers’ use of social media.
Defining the theoretical concept of the political economy and its connection with the complex environment of new media is helpful to illuminate the analysis of social media. Political economy, according to Herman and Chomsky, is mainly interested in tracing the routes by which money and power are able to leave out, filter and marginalise dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message across to the public. Although this theorisation was originally related to mass media, the idea of extended power and control over information and communication is also applicable to social media. Moving the focus on market and regulatory issues of platforms helps to comprehend the implications of the use of social media. Internet users’ expectations of data protection, fairness and transparency in the use of social media are some of the pertinent concerns.
In their active participation as producers and consumers, Internet users generate huge profits for large corporations like Google, News Corp. (which owns MySpace) or Yahoo! (which owns Flickr) and many others through tangles of customised advertising. This mechanism is actually made possible because these corporations observe, store and assess users’ activities through the use of computers and databases. In this, the real-time surveillance of users’ activities is achieved through the privacy agreements (named terms of use) that generate personalised advertising. Privacy agreements are statements that disclose the ways a party gathers, shares and manages clients’ data, which in this case are the Internet users. These are, in fact, legal documents under the exclusive control of Internet service providerswhich, in order to provide the free use of their online services, manage users’ information, data and metadata.
The political economy of media also captured the interest of European scholars that verged their theorisation towards a significant debate on the unbalanced fluxes of communication. Regarding this, in his article ‘On the Political Economy of Communications’, Dallas Smythe defined the main interest of the political economy of communications as ‘the effects of communication agencies in terms of the policies by which they are organised and operated [together with the analysis of] the structure and policies of these communication agencies in their social setting’. Quoting Garnham and Smythe, Fuchs moved the attention of political economy from ideological insights towards the analysis of the ‘economic role’ in surplus value generation and advertising, emphasising the fact that the main problem in discussing the political economy of social media is that users’ presence (data, metadata and personal information) and contribution (UGC) are exploited and sold to third parties (e.g. advertisers).
Perpetual Presence of Religious Minorities in Muslim Persia's Political Scene
