Why Your Feed Looks the Way it Does
Have you ever wondered what the concept of the culture industry means? This concept came from Adorno and Horkheimer In this case, the culture industry is where mass media produce homogeneous entertainment for viewers’ consumption over time. The authors say that instead of giving creators freedom to create the content they produce, the industry prioritises their economic goals by standardising songs and other forms of entertainment. The trend now also seems to have changed, as there are creators who publish on their own, consumers who view the content, and algorithms that define personalised feeds. A recent Hootsuite article also explains how TikTok’s algorithm promotes creators’ content.
In my personal opinion, I think there are changes that capitalism has made to achieve its main purpose of making profits. My thinking is also alike with other concepts developed by earlier thinkers. This change is where capitalism has led to “Fordism,” meaning mass production of standardised content to “post-Fordism,” where experiences are being used to make profits, as explained by Lash and Urry. In my view, the change means that the economy itself has become a commodity because technology companies are making profits just by storing content and monetising people’s attention in platforms such as YouTube.
Creativity vs. Machine Rules
Today, we have what we call “platform capitalism,” where companies like Meta and TikTok are making a profit through controlling systems, not owning them. Content creators carry the biggest burden because they create, while companies just harvest the end product and use viewers’ attention to sell the same content. Unlike in the past, where the internet was decentralised, now it has become a market where a few international companies control access and pricing of content.
The playlist that claims to “know your taste” could simply be a computerisation of conformity; the playlist editor of the radio has been automated and replaced by a predictive algorithm.
Media platforms control what appears on their feed
Source: Shah
Think about today’s media economy. You can see that it has one main difference: there is no visible boundary between producers and consumers. Users who are not professionals also produce, distribute, and commercialise content; the viewers have become consumers. But, Nieborg and Poell assert that the cultural production cannot be necessarily democratised due to “platformisation of cultural production”. Instead, it reorganises cultural labour into maximising systems of profits, where such measures as engagement going viral define success.
The substitution of the industrial culture by platform capitalism has not nullified the concerns of those early media theorists; they have reorganised them. The factory remains, only this time it operates on servers and not on assembly lines, and the raw material is our attention and behaviour, as well as data. The flexibility of capitalism makes sure that it survives. Once resistance has increased, capitalism absorbs it and reinvents it as a commodity.
Today’s platforms say that they are empowering, but if this is not accompanied by ownership, then there is a problem. Posting a song to Spotify or publishing an article in Medium puts a musician or a writer into a system that monetises their idea more than it rewards their work. Transparency rhetoric hides that same chain of command Adorno and Horkheimer criticised, in which the economic principles dominate the culture.
The question is not whether capitalism has changed media but whether media can be created outside capitalism. According to Carah, meaning is now created in factories utilising the structure of platforms that manage participation. While the twentieth century created consent using broadcasting, the twenty-first century has done the same using engagement metrics and algorithmic feeds. The forms have changed, yet the logic is the same: profit first, culture later.