| Description |
One of the most pressing questions facing television studies is how to understand the migration of media production and consumption onto web applications which depend on user-generated content. Scholars inspired by the political economy of communication (PEC) tradition have focused on how the accumulation strategies of firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this article argues that this focus on commercial enclosure has often led PEC scholars to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory?namely, that users, under certain conditions, can appropriate these networks and applications to contest relations of exploitation. This article offers a case analysis of Blog Cabin 2008, a DIY Network home improvement show, in order to explore this tension between the autonomy and enclosure of users. The findings of this case analysis suggest that producers indeed used the show?s blog to exploit fans? free labor. At the same time, fans also used the blog to constitute themselves as a community, to press demands on the show?s producers, and to explore connections between the class politics of the show and the wider political economy. A concluding section explores the theoretical and political significance of such unanticipated uses of the show?s blog. |
