The mechanism of commodification involves platforms transforming online and…
2022
The mechanism of commodification involves platforms transforming online and offline objects, activities, emotions and ideas into tradable commodities. These commodities are valued through four different types of currency: attention, data, users and money. Commodification is intensified by mechanisms of datafication as the massive amount of user data is collected and processed by online platforms.
This provides insight into users' interests, preferences and needs at particular moments in time. It also ties into mechanisms of selection as these users are connected with personalized services and advertisements. Commodification includes, but does not equal, business models of singular platforms. Rather, the mechanism plays out in the multi-sided markets created through the platform ecosystem, which connects the infrastructural core with sectoral platforms.
Commodification mechanisms are simultaneously empowering and disempowering to users. The connector platforms allow individual users to market their personal assets or experiences online - be it their apartments, rides, eyewitness reports or videos. They help commodify users' activity, enabling users to become entrepreneurs in their own right. On the other hand, the same platform mechanisms of commodification involve the exploitation of cultural labour, labour of users and on-demand service workers. Furthermore, these mechanisms lead to a concentration of economic power in the hands of a few platform owners and operators who act as aggregators and gatekeeping mediators.
When ideas and emotions are converted into tradable commodities, it is a form of
Answer: C. Commodification — ConceptCommodification is the process by which objects, activities, ideas, emotions, or relationships are converted into exchangeable units and assigned…
- A.
Transformational trade
- B.
User preference
- C.
Commodification
- D.
Currency manipulation
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
Concept
Commodification is the process by which objects, activities, ideas, emotions, or relationships are converted into exchangeable units and assigned market or platform value.
In a platform ecosystem, datafication collects and processes user data, while selection connects users with personalized services and advertisements. These mechanisms help platforms assign and realize value through attention, data, users, and money.
Application
The passage explicitly describes platforms converting ideas and emotions into tradable commodities. That description applies the general process of assigning exchange value to previously non-market things.
Contrast
Transformational trade concerns a change in how exchange is conducted, not the category defined by converting ideas or emotions into commodities.
User preference is a person’s relative liking or choice; the passage treats it as information inferred from data, not as the conversion process itself.
Currency manipulation concerns deliberate influence over the value or exchange rate of money, whereas the passage discusses creating tradable units from activities, ideas, and emotions.
Result
Therefore, the conversion described in the passage is commodification.