Call for Papers:

New Blindspots: The Audience Commodity, Audience Labour, and Dallas Smythe 50 Years On

A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication

Edited by: Benjamin Anderson, Paul Geyer, Kylie Jarrett and James Steinhoff

Fifty years ago, in 1977, Canadian political economist Dallas Smythe published what would become perhaps his most influential article: “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism.” Smythe’s suggestion that Marxist analysis generally failed to offer a political economic account of the role of media and communication provoked a pitched scholarly discussion, referred to contemporaneously as the “blindspot debate” (Livant, 1979). In addition to the top-level critique about Western Marxism’s neglect of communication, the debate concerned the provocative suggestion that the mainstream media do not, in fact, sell advertising air time but aggregated audiences. Smythe referred to these as the audience commodity, arguing that audience members were exploited as their viewership served as a form of labour imparting value to the aggregated audience commodity. Contentious as this assertion was and continues to be, it offered a new angle for understanding valorisation in broadcast media.

The essay’s central concepts, the audience commodity and audience labour, enjoyed a brief but intense resurgence in the second decade of the 21st century, with scholars testing their suitability for examining the political economy of social media (Terranova 2000; Manzerolle 2010; McGuigan, 2012; Fuchs, 2014; Nixon, 2014; Dolber, 2016; Fuchs, 2016). Social media, many of these scholars argued, presented an intensification of audience exploitation, with user activity generating data and thus constituting a form of hyperexploited labour. This free labour or digital labour, it was argued, was becoming the basis for new forms of value extraction, while at the same time enabling new means of precision-targeted advertising. The blindspot debate thus became the digital labour debate.

Indeed, the digital labour debate turned attention to the algorithmic sorting of audiences and the extraction of audience data while also questioning the underlying valorisation processes of social media. However, many scholars, as in the original blindspot debate, questioned the degree to which unwaged audience activity could be considered labour at all, with some suggesting that user data was more akin to a resource than the product of labour (Srnicek, 2017).

The issues addressed in the digital labour debate have not receded. With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and other forms of generative AI (genAI) which are created from massive scale scraping of data from the internet, concerns over online user activity, the provenance of cultural artefacts and the labour that went into their production have reached a fever pitch. Indeed, the question of labour sits at the heart of many critical understandings of artificial intelligence, and many scholars have set out to reveal the hidden work that fuels these emerging technologies - suggesting that labour is the new blindspot when it comes to understanding AI (Altenried, 2020; Steinhoff, 2021; Muldoon et al., 2025; Pasquinelli 2024). Some scholars have started to weigh the utility of applying Smythe’s concepts to generative AI, particularly in terms of how LLMs are generated both through user generated content and more directly commercial informational commodities (Casilli, 2025; Monje & Caballero, 2023). While others have rehabilitated and complicated the connections between digital labour and advertising (Sørensen 2024).

Recognising the legacy and continued influence of Dallas Smythe’s work, this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) commemorates the 50th anniversary of the blindspot debate while theorising the contemporary suitability of the idea of the audience commodity for understanding communication and technology today.

We welcome proposals for original articles reflecting on Smythe’s legacy or applying his ideas to contemporary communicative phenomena. Potential themes may include:

• Audience labour in the age of LLMs/AI
• The production of data
• Mass production versus niche production of audiences
• Big tech and the manufacture of consciousness
• The audience commodity and the history of political economy of communication
• Audience labour versus data extraction in platform capitalism
• A paying audience commodity? Subscriptions in platform capitalism
• User-generated content, influencers, and audience labour
• The audience commodity in technofeudalism
• The ideological critique and the (re)production of users

Anticipated Timeline:

• Circulation of CFP and commentary invites: August 15, 2026
• Proposals due: September 30, 2026
• Decisions on proposals: October 15, 2026
• First drafts due: February 1, 2027
• Reviewer decisions: June 15, 2027
• Revised drafts and resubmissions due: September 15, 2027
• Second round decisions: October 15, 2027
• Second round revisions due: January 15, 2028
• Special issue published: September 2028

We welcome abstract submissions on these and other themes relating to the blindspot debate today. Proposals for both peer reviewed articles (3,500 to 5,000 words) and editor reviewed commentaries (1,500-2,500 words) should be approximately 250-350 words and should be submitted directly to the issue editors at [email protected]. Please clearly indicate if your submission is for an article or commentary.