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"This book argues that, as industrial capitalism enters a period of prolonged crisis, a new paradigm of "industrious modernity" is emerging. Based on small-scale, commons-based and market-oriented entrepreneurship, this industrious modernity is being pioneered by the many outcasts that no longer find a place within a crumbling industrial modernity"--

In Marketing Modernity, Adam Arvidsson traces the development of Italy's postmodern consumer culture from the 1920s to the present day. In so doing, Arvidsson argues that the culture of consumption we see in Italy today has its direct roots in the social vision articulated by the advertising industry in the years following the First World War. He then goes on to discuss how that vision was further elaborated by advertising's interaction with subsequent big discourses in Twentieth Century Italy: fascism, post-war mass political parties and the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on a

This article will make one argument and one suggestion. The first part will argue that practices of customer co-production raise a serious challenge to established theories of value. The second part will suggest that these new practices, although widely disparate in nature, do move according to a common logic of value, and that this new value logic can be fruitfully organized around the concept of 'ethics'. Let me clarify already here that I intend 'ethics' in the sense of the ability to create the values that 'make a multitude into a community' (Marazzi, 2008: 66). As I will further elaborate below, this concept of ethics is closer to the original Aristotelian sense of that term, than to the Kantian ethics that has been central to modern, enlightenment discourse. My use of 'ethics', in this, Aristotelian sense, is not taken out of the blue. Rather, I propose that a notion of value based on ethics is already emerging within a range of cutting-edge economic practices involving aspects of customer co-production — from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to Open Source production and brand valuation. In other words, I am not proposing a new notion of value as I would like it to be, but I am pointing at actually existing trends and developments. However, since these developments are emergent they cannot be grasped as fully formed facts. My ambition in the second part of this paper is thus limited to suggesting a theoretical framework within which these emergent tendencies can be read in a novel way; and from which a more definite shape can be discerned.

Der Autor untersucht die kulturelle Wertschöpfung der sozialen Verbrauchernetze hinsichtlich ihrer spezifischen Logik bei der Wertproduktion. Im Anschluss an Marx' Konzept des General Intellect, der auf das Anwachsen nicht monopolisierbaren Wissens im Zuge der gesellschaftlichen Produktivkraftentwicklung abstellt, hebt der Autor die Dialektik der Macht hervor, die mit der ökonomischen Bedeutungszunahme immaterieller Wissens- und Zeichenproduktion einhergeht. Dabei folgen die autonomen Verbraucher-Communities einer Logik der sozialen Anerkennung, die in erster Linie ethisches Kapital anhäuft und in den Währungen der Netzwerkbildung und des Respekts weiterer Verwertung zugänglich macht. (ICB2)

Social production has risen on the agenda of the social sciences. Ye t most observers have been reluctant to confront the question of the value of these practices. Instead they have mostly been characterised as 'free', 'common' or beyond value. This article argues that far from being free, social production abides to a particular value logic, an 'ethical economy' where value is related not to the input of labour time, but to the ability to give productive organisation to a diffuse connectivity or, which is the same thing, to transform weak ties into affectively significant strong ones. The article concludes that progressive politics should work with this new emerging value logic.

This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative and affective capacities of internet users to work in ways so that this produces economically valuable content. This is primarily achieved through branding, which as a technique of governance that seeks to work 'from below' and 'empower' users to deploy their freedom in certain particular, pre-programmed ways. The argument is that online dating provides a good illustration of how the information economy actively subsumes communicative action as a form of immaterial labour.

Whoever arrives inNewYork and walks up "Old Broadway" will immediately find himself blinded by the royal splendour of an endless row of neon signs that silently speak of an infinity of products: from gramophones to silk stockings, from show polish to the latest theatre show. If later, before going to sleep, he decides to browse through an illustrated magazine, he will marvel at the beauty of its illustrations, at the influence that advertising has on its content; at the riches, the abundance, the importance that advertising possesses in this curious and fascinating country.