The product of network television was not the program – the product was the audience – the people that watched the program. He called that product “The audience commodity“. The customer of network television is not the viewer – the customer is the advertiser. The actual business model of network television is selling the audience to the advertiser. And the word he had for the advertiser was “the consciousness industry“. By this he meant advertising agencies, political lobbies, people that want to control your behavior. So essentially the business model television is a business model of behavior and control.
In the dot.com era the internet was totally wild. The capitalism where surprised – they had no idea what was coming. They had their own online services investment in Compuserve and AOL – they were envisioning a whole different online world. The internet came out of nowhere and the capitalists responded the only way capitalist can respond by bying everything. And than they owned everything and they had this network but they had no idea hoe they will gonna make a business model based upon P2P relations. So they want back to the business model they knew which was the network television business model.
So this is what Facebook is – the internet re-emagined through the imagination of network television capitalism.
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