TY - JOUR
AU1 - Murdock, Graham
AB - Abstract The infrastructures and assemblies of machines that constitute the digital communications environment are constructed from a range of resources, which are transformed into artefacts through chains of production, maintenance, and disposal. These background conditions of everyday use, however, remain a blind spot for much mainstream communications inquiry. This paper asks why, and argues that the increasing centrality of digital technologies to the organization of advanced capitalism, coupled with the rapid expansion of the Internet of things and artificial intelligence, propels the materiality of media to the center of analysis, raising major ethical questions about their social and environmental costs that call for the development of a new moral economy of machines. Materialities: blindspot of communications research Theorizing and research in media and communication studies has built a distinctive field of inquiry around three main foci: (1) the development of media industries and institutions, and their interactions with economic dynamics and systems of government; (2) the central role of media in orchestrating the symbolic resources employed in understanding the world and formulating courses of action; and (3) the increasing integration of media into everyday routines, social relations, and projections of the self. These remain essential areas of study, but they have created an intellectual agenda that has largely overlooked the material bases of contemporary communication systems. I am using “material” here to refer to the raw materials and resources employed in the systems, the devices that support everyday communicative activity, and the chains of labor entailed in constructing and maintaining these infrastructures and machines. Acknowledging these materialities and placing them at the center of media inquiry, however, raises difficult questions about the environmental and social costs of present and projected communication systems and the ethical choices they present. Addressing these choices requires us to develop a moral economy of machines. But before we explore this further we need to ask how we got to where we are. Why the blindspot? Digital delusions: all that is solid has not melted The publication of the first “Ferment” collection in 1983 coincided with agreement on the domain name system, one of the essential building blocks of the Internet and a key step in the construction of a generally accessible public digital network. Since then, investigating the transformative potential of digitalization for every aspect of media organization and use has become a major preoccupation for communications scholarship. With the increasing ubiquity of “always there/always on” smartphones and tablets as preferred media portals, it is tempting to believe all that was solid media has melted into air. No more shelves of battered paperbacks. No more racks of CDs. No more photo albums. The media now present themselves as immaterial: an endless flow of digital streams. This assumption is supported by the wider argument that digital systems are central to the shift from “industrial capitalism … to cognitive capitalism … founded on the accumulation of immaterial capital” (Boutang, 2011, p. 50) These visions of “weightlessness” push the routine labor of material production, maintenance, and disposal to the edge of attention. This neglect has been compounded by the corporate push to cut costs by moving production offshore to low-wage economies in emerging nations. Like the illusionist who saws the lady in half, leaving the head in one box and the body in another, conception and control has remained in the northwestern hemisphere while routine functions have migrated to the global south and east. But unlike the magician, who reassembles the boxes in full view of the audience, the global circuits binding finished commodities to resource extraction and manufacture have remained largely out of sight. Marketization and the rise of digital media Offshoring is one element in a portfolio of measures developed in response to the crisis of capitalist profitability of the mid-1970s that opened spaces for advocates of neo-liberal solutions to press for policies that gave corporations maximum freedom to operate with the minimum of government regulation. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, this market fundamentalist template for change was translated into a raft of practical policies. Public assets were sold to private investors. Monopoly and protected markets were opened to competition. Public interest regulations were relaxed or abolished. Labor rights were whittled away. Taxes on corporations and high earners were reduced. Funding for public welfare and cultural provision was cut. This marketized vision of renewed growth was pursued with particular zeal in the heartlands of the Anglo-American variant of capitalism, but elements were widely adopted by the European Union and in emerging economies, sometimes voluntarily and more often as a condition of bailouts from the International Monetary Fund. The collapse of Soviet communism and China’s post-Mao turn to the market integrated the two major economies that had remained outside capitalist circuits into a marketized global economic system pivoted on the World Trade Organization, launched in 1995, which included services and intellectual property within its remit for the first time. This is the essential context in which we need to situate the rise of digital media. Core telecommunications networks that were previously publicly owned or strongly regulated utilities ceded control to private corporations due to marketization polices. In Britain, the first shares in British Telecom were sold in 1984. In the United States, the regulated monopoly of AT&T was dismantled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Scarce spectrum capacity was auctioned off to the highest bidder rather than allocated by agencies informed by public interest criteria. Internet firms, led by Google and Facebook, were allowed to establish their own private networks based on arrays of balloons, gliders, and low earth orbit satellites. The absence of effective regulatory oversight, coupled with network effects as people converge on sites with the largest numbers of other users, has produced the most concentrated sector within advanced capitalism, with a popular Internet commanded by a handful of companies: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple. These companies not only dominate everyday digital activity, but are major players in the emerging global economy. In 2016, three of these entities—Apple, Google’s holding company (Alphabet), and Microsoft—led the list of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization, with Amazon in sixth place and Facebook in seventh (The Economist, 2016, p. 5). This pattern is repeated in China—the only significant challenger to the U.S.-based digital majors—with the increasing consolidation of Internet usage around TenCent, Alibaba, and Baidu. In the West, the major Internet companies are also in the forefront of installing cloud computing facilities and developing the robotics and artificial intelligence applications that will have profound consequences for the organization of labor. We will return to this presently, but for the moment we need to underline the central role that the digital majors have played in re-gearing consumption. Digital media and hyper-consumption Boosting consumption was central to the recovery of corporate profitability. It required consumers to buy more goods more often, to discard them more rapidly, and to see possession and display as primary spaces of personal expression (Streeck, 2016, pp. 95–112) Securing these goals entailed a significant increase in the amount and ubiquity of advertising and product promotion and new, more intimate, connections between commodities, lifestyles, and individual identities. The Internet offered the ideal arena in which to pursue these aims. Firstly, with the business models employed by the most widely used sites based on selling both advertising space and data on users that allowed product appeals to be targeted more precisely, it opened up a huge new space for personalized commercial speech. Secondly, the absence of effective policing of the online boundaries between editorial oversight and promotion saw a rapid expansion in “native” advertising, designed to integrate marketing into the flow of cultural forms and social interaction through sponsored video clips, product placements, advergames, and other devices that positioned brands as fun, cool, and friendly. Thirdly, corporations rapidly became adept at mobilizing the Internet’s interactivity to enlist consumers as unpaid or minimally-paid research and development workers and “brand ambassadors.” Users were encouraged to donate time, energy, and expertise to developing new products, modifying existing ones, and promoting their favorite brands to friends, both on- and offline. Fourthly, integrating “frictionless” payment systems into smartphones boosted final purchases by reducing the time available for reconsideration and encouraging immediate, impulse buying (McGuigan & Murdock, 2015). Environmental costs The research evidence linking the escalation of climate change to the expansion of capitalism is now incontrovertible, with recent work demonstrating that human influence has been most evident in the years since 1970 (Gaffney & Steffen, 2017, p. 4), coinciding with the pursuit of marketization, a process in which, as we have noted, digital technologies play three key roles. Firstly, as just noted, they provide the primary platforms for the product promotion that sustains a general culture of hyper-consumption and waste. Secondly, as the recent history of access to music demonstrates, their new centrality in organizing cultural consumption has led the way in installing a regime of accelerated “change, obsolescence and replacement,” as in how the Walkman was rapidly replaced by the iPod and then by streaming (see Hesmondhalgh & Meier, 2017, p. 12). Thirdly, the infrastructures that support digital interconnection make increasing demands on scarce minerals, materials, and energy in their production and use. The transition from personal file storage to cloud computing has significantly increased the energy and water needed to power and cool the extensive server installations where data is archived and processed. The cumulative consequence of multiplying the number of digital media machines in circulation and use, accelerating their disposal, and employing them as the central agency for promoting hyper-consumption has been to significantly escalate problems of resource depletion, energy use, pollution, and waste. Research on the environmental costs of digital technologies has recently gathered increasing momentum, posing a major challenge to the blind spot of immaterality (see Brevini & Murdock, 2017; Gabrys, 2013; Maxwell & Miller, 2012), but it is not yet integrated into the mainstream as an obligatory dimension of investigation and debate. Environmental communications is a thriving subfield within communications studies, but most of its practitioners continue to focus on the production and impact of media representations and overlook the central roles that communications infrastructures and appliances play in accelerating climate change. These very material contributions to the worsening climate crisis raise major issues of ethics. They suggest that it is not enough to devise alternative and oppositional uses of digital technologies. As Sean Cubitt has argued, user-generated content, based on reciprocity and non-commercial exchange, cannot become a truly alternative “popular platform for innovation so long as the infrastructure that would permit it is founded in the integral waste of finite resources” (Cubitt, 2017, p. 168). But as mentioned at the outset, the material bases of media are never simply a matter of finite resources. They are produced and reproduced through the labor involved in the transformation of raw materials and energy supplies into usable facilities and machines. Communications labor: promoted and concealed Over the last two decades, the creative and high tech industries have been widely promoted in policy circles as key drivers of a post-industrial capitalism. Research, however, has revealed that they have tended to follow the general principles of reorganization of labor established by marketization, with career routes within stable organizations increasingly displaced by self-employment, freelancing, and casualization. Explorations of the changing conditions of cultural and media work, while a welcome consolidation and extension of research attention, have tended to exclude sustained consideration of the wider labor processes that support them. Recent production studies have thrown valuable light on the continuing transformations of journalism and other media occupations, but have seldom asked questions about the manufacture and maintenance of the machines media workers use and the infrastructures they rely on. This relative neglect has been extensively addressed by writers working within traditions of critical inquiry that draw on wider sources within the social sciences, but coexists somewhat uneasily with the professionalized mainstream of communications research and its segmentation into largely self-contained subareas. This work needs to be brought into the mainstream of communications research as an indispensable dimension of analysis. Recent years have seen a concerted revival of interest in Marx as a theorist of labor. He famously begins the first volume of Capital with a chapter on commodity and then traveled backwards, through the “hidden abodes” of production concealed from view by the focus of attention on finished goods and the promised pleasures and conveniences they will deliver when purchased. Critical commentary on the Internet has followed Marx to uncover the hidden chains of digital production. As Ursula Huws has argued: Apparently dematerialised labour … is dependent on a highly material basis of physical infrastructure and manufactured commodities, most of which are produced out of sight, in the mines of Africa and Latin America, the sweatshops of China and other places in the developing world. Without [them] … the Internet could not be accessed by anyone. (Huws, 2014, p. 86) These journeys into the new hearts of darkness have uncovered the networks of labor exploitation that underpin the finished digital appliances offered for sale (Fuchs, 2014). The contrast between the celebrated stylishness of Apple’s smartphones and the coercive sweatshop conditions of the Foxconn factories where they are assembled is a particularly stark example. This work confirms that the pleasures and conveniences offered by digital objects rest on a largely concealed trail of social exploitation and environmental despoliation. The transition now underway from the social Internet to the Internet of things and the growing centrality of digital technologies in reorganizing labor brings a new urgency to the moral questions raised by these processes. The advent of intelligent machines So far this discussion has focused on already-familiar digital technologies and the version of the Internet we use every day. That landscape is now changing with the advent of innovations promoting new applications of computing and network architectures. Some of these developments—cloud computing, the Internet of things, artificial intelligence, and robotics—are already in use. Others, notably quantum computing, are still in development. Added to which, commentators increasingly see new intersections between advances in information and communication technologies and innovations in materials science, nanotechnology, and biotechnologies (see Schwab, 2017). We are witnessing the advent of intelligent objects that can learn from experience and become self-directing. Communication is migrating from interactions between people to interconnections between machines, but the issues around the resources and labor entailed in constructing, maintaining, and controlling the necessary infrastructures and apparatuses remain. The arrival of the Internet of things and self-driving vehicles that relay information about their owners and users without their intervention adds a significant new element to the apparatus of surveillance capitalism. This is a vital area of inquiry and debate but, arguably, the more far-reaching impacts of artificial intelligence and robotics will be on the general organization of work and environmental resources. Estimates of the number and type of jobs that are likely to be displaced by the next generation of automation vary, but there is general agreement that the impact will extend into professional occupations, particularly those like accountancy that rely on data collection and processing. Media production is less susceptible but not immune. Algorithms are already employed to produce routine reportage and determine the news stories fed onto users’ Facebook pages. Most creative media work, however, will remain the province of people, as will managing and negotiating that relies on trust built on the basis of interpersonal relations. As one recent report noted, “deals will still be made between people in the future, even though the facts may be gathered beforehand by software” (Wisskirchen et al., 2017, p. 20) . At the same time, researchers have unanimously endorsed the conclusions of Frey and Osborne’s (2013) path-breaking study in predicting that the greatest impact of the next wave of automation will fall on those doing unskilled, repetitive manual, clerical, and service work. This development is of central concern to scholars of communications and media for two reasons. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, the leading Internet companies are playing a central role in constructing the new computing, network, and artificial intelligence architectures. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are currently the leading cloud computing operators (Patrizio, 2017). Microsoft, Google, and Apple regularly feature in the leading six Internet of things companies. Google’s Deep Mind division is emerging as a significant force in developing artificial intelligence. Communications research needs to match the scope and ambition of these companies and expand the range of areas and applications it addresses. Secondly, although the majority of media production jobs may resist automation, the onwards march of robotics will alter the lives of substantial numbers of users in fundamental ways, including their relations to media. Those with the least education and on the lowest incomes will be most severely affected. Many are already excluded from effective, self-determining use of the full range of opportunities for participation, collaboration, and creativity that the present Internet offers. Permanent displacement from regular paid work would reinforce this marginality. Optimistic observers argue that new jobs will be created as old ones disappear and that, given opportunities for retraining, workers will find a niche in the new economy. Others argue that the solution to technologically-induced structural unemployment lies with the introduction of a universal basic income that will enable recipients to live with dignity, uncoupled from wage labor and free to pursue projects oriented to self-development and social participation, including collaborative cultural production. These are important debates, and ones that communication scholars need to be involved in. The available scope and organization of our multiple engagements with expressive forms and communicative opportunities will remain a central concern, but as I have argued, under present and emerging conditions we need to broaden our conception of mediation to include the material structures that underpin our communicative encounters, confront their wider social and environmental consequences and costs, and bring this analysis to bear on thinking through the possibilities for change. This agenda presents major challenges to our current frameworks of conceptualization and inquiry, and will require communication scholars to reach out beyond accepted comfort zones and collaborate with researchers in unfamiliar areas. Effective intervention in debates around emerging communication machines and networks will necessarily involve knowledge of the properties of new materials and the operation of quantum computing, together with evaluations of their environmental impacts and social consequences. Deciding between alternatives, however, is never simply a matter of analysis. It is always also an ethical choice. For a moral economy of machines Interrogating these choices has been integral to debates within critical political economy from its origins, and has recently received renewed emphasis with the revival of interest in the idea of moral economies (see eg Hesmondhalgh, 2017) and the injunction it imposes on us to explore “the moral justifications of basic features of economic organisation” (Sayer, 2015, p. 19). As I have argued elsewhere, economies are always also moral economies in the sense that all economic transactions involve us in chains of connection to social and environmental relations that confront us with moral choices (Murdock, 2011). When we buy a smartphone we are linked to locations where resources are extracted and enter the lives of the invisible workers who have labored to produce it, who operate the infrastructures that sustain its use, and who will deal with it when we discard it, and to the impacts of these interventions on the natural world. Recent debates on ethics have centered on the core principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity, announced in the French Revolution, focusing on how best to define these terms and balance their potentially competing claims. The Internet has become a key site where this competition is fought out on a daily basis, with the dominant corporations’ insistent celebration of consumer choice and personal expression countered by interventions based on alternative visions of self-realization through collaborative activity. These choices are not abstract. They are central to political deliberations over how to organize digital technologies and manage their consequences for the organization of labor, social life, and environmental integrity. Present discussions in communications policy focus on the ways prevailing technologies are owned, operated, and deployed, with key tenets of market fundamentalism being challenged by a broadly-based agenda of alternative proposals. These include reconstituting digital networks as public utilities; limiting concentration and ownership; raising corporate taxes to fund non-commercial communication initiatives; and guaranteeing users access to and control over their personal data. These remain central issues, but acknowledging the material bases of digital media requires us to reconnect proposals for media ownership, regulation, and reform to wider debates around the organization of the production chains that manufacture communications infrastructures and devices and the resource, energy, and consumption preconditions for environmental sustainability and justice. We will need to intervene in debates around communication technologies in the formative stages of conception and design, asking questions about the materials they are made of, the energy they will consume, the uses they allow and deny, and the social and environmental costs of their production and disposal. As machines become increasingly autonomous, self -directing, and inter-connected, we will also need to consider where responsibility lies. Grappling effectively with these issues requires a moral economy of media machines anchored in an awareness that the communications systems we employ, as workers and users, are inextricably tied to transformations in the general organization of labor and the natural environment. With conversations between machines eclipsing interactions between media and people, critical communications inquiry is needed more than ever. Its insistence that information and representation are never reducible to data but are always socially and culturally constructed and embedded in general relations between economies, technologies, and ecologies offers unique and indispensable resources for understanding the present and shaping the future. References Boutang, Y. M. ( 2011). Cognitive capitalism . Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Brevini, B., & Murdock, G. ( 2017). 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For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Media Materialties: For A Moral Economy of Machines
JF - Journal of Communication
DO - 10.1093/joc/jqx023
DA - 2018-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/media-materialties-for-a-moral-economy-of-machines-etzxXDoEna
SP - 359
EP - 368
VL - 68
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -