ABSTRACT
In The Codes of Advertising, Sut Jhally (1987) uses a Marxist inspired analysis to argue that watching television is a form of work or labor. Similarly today, the more time we spend online, the more we are delivered “algorithmically” to corporate advertisers in this age. Digital technology represents the spirit of capitalist entrepreneurship and creative innovation. Yet in an ironic and troublesome way, our digital age also raises the fundamental issues of human life and dignity and individual privacy-for they have been violated and compromised to a great extent in a physically expanding world of surveillance and a metaphorically shrinking world of sociability in which media ownership gets further consolidated and power becomes privatized. The old denition of the global information society has morphed into a new one that has to be much more expansive, especially if “we live in a multimedia age where the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources and more typically from highly constructed visual images, complex sound arrangements, and multiple media formats” (Kellner & Share, 2007, p. 3).
