Veblen has been claimed and rejected both by sociologists and economists as being one of theirs. He enriched and attacked both disciplines, as he did so many others: philosophy, history, social psychology, politics, and linguistics. Because he took all knowledge as necessary and relevant to adequate understanding, Veblen was a holistic analyst of the social process. First published in 1904, this classic analysis of the U.S. economy has enduring value today. In it, Veblen posited a theory of business fluctuations and economic growth which included chronic depression and inflation. He predicted the socioeconomic changes that would occur as a result: militarism, imperialism, fascism, consumerism, and the development of the mass media as well as the corporate bureaucracy. Douglas Dowd's introduction places the volume within the traditions of both macroeconomics and microeconomics, tracing Veblen's place among social thinkers, and the place of this volume in the body of his work.

Theory of business enterprise

Nationality: American Education: Ph.D. in Sociology and Personality... Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology â€¦ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8694125-alone-together Start by marking â€œAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Otherâ€ as Want to Read: ... Unfortunately I am no closer to telling you why we expect more from technology & less from each other than I was before I read this book. One of the main things that bothered me about this book was that, even though I was really interested in these â€¦

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

* Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. James W Carey. New York and London: Routledge, 2009. 205 pp. James W. Carey collected essays he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s into a volume titled Communication as Culture, originally published in 1989. Carey died in May 2006 after a long and influential academic career. This re-publication as a "revised edition" comes with a bibliography of Carey's lifetime production of 170 or so essays and book reviews, compiled by his son Daniel, and an insightful forward by G. Stuart Adam, a journalism scholarship fellow at The Poynter Institute. Shortly after Communication as Culture first appeared twenty years ago, as Adam points out, American Journalism devoted an issue to scholars' commentaries on Carey's essays. In the year he died, a book of essays by scholars, titled Thinking with James Carey, examined his life's work. So perhaps there's not much left to review and learn from a new reading of the work of a prodigious intellect whose ideas have already received a thorough engagement by his academic peers. What follows, therefore, is not so much a review in the classic sense as the reflection of one who practiced newspaper and magazine journalism for twenty-five years before spending a decade in a university working at the intersection of public policy, politics, and journalism. As media companies struggle with difficult challenges posed by technological change and severe economic shocks, publishers and editors, as well as journalism critics, teachers, and students, would find no better guide to thoughtful analysis of the future than Carey's case study of the telegraph and how it transformed not simply "communication" but society itself. Indeed, Carey's central insight is profound in its simplicity: that communication is both "a structure of human action" and a "structuring set of social relations." Thus, he argues, people inhabit the culture they create by and through their communication with one another. This leads to an important lesson for professionals and would-be journalists: They cannot see themselves solely as observers somehow apart from the dynamics they report and analyze, because the act of communicating itself shapes the community in which they live and work. One of the strengths of Carey's work is that it emerged from a moral core. He drew comfortably from religious intellectual traditions and applied lessons to today's secular issues. Fundamentally, Carey sought through his thinking and writing to contribute to building a good society. A second strength, related to the first, is Carey's devotion to democracy. In this devotion, he comes across as an idealist; he recognizes the factionalism and disagreements of a continental democracy, but he tends to celebrate person-to-person conversation that creates common ground for decision making. Though no provincial American, Carey clearly had in mind the shaping of democratic conversation in the United States. Still, it is important that in developing a theoretical construct for understanding communication, he seemed to have as a goal the building of a good, democratic society. Carey's approach to the news in a democratic society led him to delve into the intellectual conflict of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. …

Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society

This article explores how the political economy of the cultural industries changes through platformization: the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the w...

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The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity:

This paper re-examines the work of Dallas Smythe in light of the popularization of Internet-enabled mobile devices (IMD). In an era of ubiquitous connectivity Smythe’s prescient analysis of audience ‘work’ offers a historical continuum in which to understand the proliferation of IMDs in everyday life. Following Smythe’s line of analysis, this paper argues that the expansion of waged and unwaged digital labour facilitated by these devices contributes to the overall mobilization of communicative, cognitive and co-operative capacities – capacities central to the accumulation strategies of ‘informational capitalism’. As such, the rapid uptake of these devices globally is an integral component in this mobilization and subsumption. In the case of Smythe’s provocative (and somewhat controversial) concept of the audience commodity the work of the audience is materially embedded in the capitalist application of communication technologies. Consonant with Smythe’s emphasis on the centrality of communication and related technologies in the critical analysis of contemporary political economies, this paper elaborates upon the concept of digital labour by rethinking Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity as a central principle organizing the technical and social evolution of IMDs.

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Mobilizing the audience commodity: Digital labour in a wireless world

This paper argues that the systemic nature of contemporary consumer surveillance undermines the most fundamental principle of free market economics: consumer sovereignty. Specifically, this paper argues that the rise of an ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ society in conjunction with neoliberal capitalism has entrenched routine forms of surveillance within commercial strategies by employing networked databases as a primary medium for the articulation of consumer sovereignty (choice/demand). The communicative relationship between consumers and producers within the market involves effectively ‘listening’ (and then responding) to consumer needs and wants in a timely manner. Surveillance is therefore not only necessary for the operation of globalized consumer capitalism, it is also the primary means by which consumer communicate their sovereignty within the marketplace. By turning to the work of Harold Innis and the intellectual tradition known as medium theory, this paper will theorize how in linking the actions of individual consumers to the decision-making capacities of trans-national corporations (TNC), the prevalence of consumer databases violates the fundamental neutrality of the market, and thus sovereignty, of individual consumers. In sum, by treating the database as a distinct communication medium, this paper will highlight how the commercial mediation of identity under neoliberalism can conceal the potential for the uneven geographic development, the marginalization of ‘less valuable’ consumer segments, and the exploitation of individual vulnerabilities through behavior and profile modeling.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/download/4167/4169

Consumer Databases, Neoliberalism, and the Commercial Mediation of Identity: A Medium Theory Analysis

This paper argues that questions concerning the circulation of capital are central to the study of contemporary and future media under capitalism Moreover, it argues that such questions have been central to Marx’s analysis of the reproduction of capital vis-a-vis the realization of value and the reduction of circulation time Marx’s concepts of both the circuit and circulation of capital implies a theory of communication Thus the purpose of our paper is to outline the logistical mechanisms that underlie a Marxist theory of media and communication and thereby foregrounding the role new media plays in reducing circulation time We argue that the necessity of theorizing communication from a circuit and circulation-centric point of view stems from the emergence of a number of new technological phenomena that intensify, but sometimes undermine, the capitalist logic of acceleration For the purposes of understanding the evolution of digital technologies, ostensibly employed to accelerate the circulation of capital—or put differently, to reduce circulation time—we need to pay attention to volume 2 of Capital , and key sections in the Grundrisse 

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The Communication of Capital: Digital Media and the Logic of Acceleration

Ubiquitous connectivity to networked information-communication technologies increasingly mediates social experiences of markets and retail environments. These conditions lead some marketing scholars to conclude that digital media are reaching their inevitable culmination: an omnipresent marketplace. They call this “ubiquitous commerce” (u-commerce). U-commerce annihilates constraints over markets; borders, cultural differences, and geography cease to impose friction on exchange. As part of a broader understanding of new media and marketing, u-commerce deserves attention from critical communication studies. In foregrounding concerns of space, time, and consciousness, u-commerce exemplifies a commercial theory of media and invites critique at the nexus of medium theory and political economy. The work of Harold Innis is uniquely suited to this task. This article contextualizes and identifies biases in the conceptual systems and infrastructures of u-commerce.

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“All the world’s a shopping cart”: Theorizing the political economy of ubiquitous media and markets

This article examines the roles of platform-based distribution and user data in the digital music economy. Drawing on trade press, newspaper coverage, and a consumer privacy complaint, we offer a critical analysis of tech-music partnerships forged between Samsung and Jay-Z (2013), Apple iTunes Store and U2 (2014), Tidal and Kanye West (2016), and Apple Music and Drake (2017). In these cases, information technology (IT) companies supported album releases, and music was used to generate user data and attention: logics of data and attention capture were interwoven. The IT and music industries have adapted their business strategies to what we conceptualize as platform-based capital accumulation or ‘platform accumulation’, and models centred on controlling access and extracting rent have enabled the emergence of new monopolies and IT gatekeepers.

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Vincent Manzerolle

Papers

Mobilizing the audience commodity: Digital labour in a wireless world

Consumer Databases, Neoliberalism, and the Commercial Mediation of Identity: A Medium Theory Analysis

The Communication of Capital: Digital Media and the Logic of Acceleration

“All the world’s a shopping cart”: Theorizing the political economy of ubiquitous media and markets

Rising tides? Data capture, platform accumulation, and new monopolies in the digital music economy