The contemporary dynamics of mass communication necessitate a reassessment of the received notions of audience labor. To that end this article revisits Dallas Smythe’s seminal audience commodity theory through the lens of a two-sided class analysis. A number of his key conceptualizations are critiqued including audience power, audience measurement, media content as a free lunch, audiences as a non-durable producer’s good, the disappearance of labor power, and the revisionist history of capitalist development . At each point in the critique the contributions of various political economists who have revised and extended Smythe’s work are highlighted. The critique serves to underscore the contributions and limitations of the theory as its extension into the new media landscape is reconsidered.

This article examines a recent bizarre phenomenon on China’s Internet – the enormous popularity of a scatological Chinese neologism called diaosi, which literally translates as ‘dick string’. Seeing the diaosi phenomenon as a case of ‘infrapolitics’, a space of nuanced discursive practices mediating overt online politics and benign online entertainment, we analyse the ways in which an infrapolitical practice such as the diaosi phenomenon fuses political critique, cultural processes of identity construction and meaning-making as well as cyber ritual communion. Specifically, we interpret the infrapolitics of diaosi as simultaneously an instantiation of a prevalent scatological online culture that defies hypernormalization, a collective identity-making that seeks to create critical social solidarity and a practice and politics of cultural intimacy.

The internet is widely seen to have facilitated social movement organizations (SMOs) by providing them with alternative media. In the western context, some authors suggest that additionally SMOs use the internet tactically as a tool to gain access to traditional news media. This usage is seen to reaffirm and reinforce the centrality of print and electronic news media. This article shifts the focus to China and examines the interaction between the internet and the traditional mass media in the unfolding of three internet incidents. It reveals that via the expression of public opinion on the internet ordinary people are able to collectively shape and even direct conventional news agendas. In China, where the role of the media is to ‘direct’ public opinion rather than to reflect it, this suggests that the interaction between the two forms of communication serves to challenge state control over the traditional media.

This article describes changes associated with increased bureaucratisation and surveillance in the regulation and management of the 21st century shipping industry. Drawing upon 303 ‘real-life’ vignette-based interviews, it describes how these transformations are experienced by contemporary navigating officers, and engineers, working on commercial cargo vessels. The article draws attention to the dysfunctional effects of distrust in organisations, describing how lost trust and associated fears impact on the decision-making process of officers thereby inducing a degree of organisational paralysis. This finding may be of particular significance to employers who have introduced punishment-centred bureaucratisation in order to improve organisational efficiency and who are concurrently undermining it.

Past studies on print and TV satire have revealed that satire can be seen as a site of resistance to power. In light of this, interesting questions can be raised regarding Internet satire: what does the Internet contribute to the resistance and what kind of power relation is played out on this site? Using an example from China, this paper reveals that like its print and TV counterparts, Internet satire reflects a widespread feeling of powerlessness, rather than offering the general public any political power. However, the Internet helps to push the symbolic power of satire to a higher level. This is because it makes satire a tool for the grassroots which facilitates the creation and spread of satirical ideas, and also helps to release and stimulate the enormous reserve of public wit and wisdom. As a result, satire on the Internet has the potential to generate a chain of related satirical work, which can create a satire movement and subject power to sustained shame and ridicule.