DOES BIG BROTHER EXIST? COMMUNICATION, POWER, MEANINGS, AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION

Over fifteen years ago, Ien Ang (1994) – while was criticizing theoretical positions in which were emphasized «uncertainty, ambiguity, the chaos that emanates from institutionalization of infinite semiosis» – asked: «how are power relations organized in a global village where everybody is free and yet bounded?». To answer this question, this paper is focused on the “mode of production” of meanings by audiences, in which the individuals are in a sort of double bind: everybody is free to making sense in media products interpretive cooperation, but bound to convert himself into a commodity by acceptance of a communicative contract in which «a third party pays to participate» (Andersons, 2009). In the industrialized cultural production era, in fact, we stay in a communicative dynamic in which most of messages are designed and manufactured as commodities (the co-production of meanings of which is also creation of their use value and exchange value) and conceived to sell goods (advertising). Moreover, the most of communication systems are envisaged to aggregate/segment «audience commodity» (Smythe, 1977) and/or «prosumer/produser commodity» (Fuchs, 2009). In these relations of productions, meanings production is also value production. So, as human beings, we can’t live without communicate but, in the economic media system, each and everyone of us while free communicates he devotes a part of his freedom to somebody else profit: more he works in freeing sense, more value as commodity he adds himself.