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<td style="color: #FF0000;">[△EXTERNAL]</td>
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<div><span style="font-size:14.666667px">Hello all,</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">With apologies for crossposting, I just wanted to remind anyone who is interested that the deadline for this CFP for papers on Dallas Smythe, audience labour and the audience commodity is coming up on 30 September. We are
accepting statements of interest for articles and commentaries considering the legacy and continued utility of Dallas Smythe's ideas from Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism, originally published almost 50 years ago in 1977. I have pasted the CFP
below (also available <a href="https://cjc.utppublishing.com/cjc/call-for-papers-new-blindspots">
here</a>), but just to highlight, we'd be very interested in submissions connecting Smythe's ideas to recent developments in digital capitalism, particularly the rise of GenAI, new subscription and advertising models, and the like. Please feel free to submit
250-350 word abstracts directly to me at</span><span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space" style="font-size:14.666667px"> </span><a href="mailto:benjamin.anderson@ucd.ie" target="_blank" style="font-size:14.666667px">benjamin.anderson@ucd.ie</a><span style="font-size:14.666667px">.
Abstracts are due 30 September 2026. Thanks in advance.</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">All the best,</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Benjamin Anderson</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">University College Dublin</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Call for Papers:</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">New Blindspots: The Audience Commodity, Audience Labour, and Dallas Smythe 50 Years On</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Edited by: Benjamin Anderson, Paul Geyer, Kylie Jarrett and James Steinhoff</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">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.</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">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.</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">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).</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">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).</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">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.</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">We welcome proposals for original articles reflecting on Smythe’s legacy or applying his ideas to contemporary communicative phenomena. Potential themes may include:</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● Audience labour in the age of LLMs/AI</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● The production of data</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● Mass production versus niche production of audiences</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● Big tech and the manufacture of consciousness</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● The audience commodity and the history of political economy of communication</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● Audience labour versus data extraction in platform capitalism</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● A paying audience commodity? Subscriptions in platform capitalism</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● User-generated content, influencers, and audience labour</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● The audience commodity in technofeudalism</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">● The ideological critique and the (re)production of users</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Anticipated Timeline:</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Circulation of CFP and commentary invites: August 15, 2026</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Proposals due: September 30, 2026</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Decisions on proposals: October 15, 2026</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">First drafts due: February 1, 2027</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Reviewer decisions: June 15, 2027</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Revised drafts and resubmissions due: September 15, 2027</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Second round decisions: October 15, 2027</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Second round revisions due: January 15, 2028</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">Special issue published: September 2028</span><br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<br style="font-size:14.666667px">
<span style="font-size:14.666667px">We welcome abstract submissions on these and other themes relating to the blindspot debate today. Proposals for both peer reviewed articles and editor reviewed commentaries should be approximately 250-350 words and should
be submitted directly to the issue editors at<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="mailto:benjamin.anderson@ucd.ie" target="_blank" style="font-size:14.666667px">benjamin.anderson@ucd.ie</a><span style="font-size:14.666667px"><span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>.
Please clearly indicate if your submission is for an article or commentary.</span><br clear="all">
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<span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br>
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<div>Benjamin Anderson</div>
Assistant Professor
<div>Creative and Cultural Industries
<div>School of Art History & Cultural Policy</div>
<div>University College Dublin</div>
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