Digital Capitalism: Meaning, Concepts, Dimensions and Issues
While the ideas of communism and socialism as propagated by great thinkers like Karl Marx, Mao, Friedrich Engels and others did shape thinking of the world, capitalism has always remained an inevitable fact. No one can deny the fact that private property, socio-economic gap have clung on to every society irrespective of the fact whether it has allowed ideas like equality, political representation etc. to spread in the economic and political sphere. In every society it has manifested itself in one or the other form. One of its recent manifestations is in the form of ‘digital capitalism’.
Digital Capitalism-What can it Refer to?
In simple words, digital capitalism refers to capitalism through the internet. The concept of cyberspace was initially developed by the State organs like the government agencies, educational institutions, military contractors etc. But it has now come to be used primarily by corporate users. Earlier digital information that was primarily being used for social activity also includes economic activity as a major share of it. Some of the services like reading of news, listening to music, interacting with peers, sharing codes, purchasing items etc. have heavily grown through digitization.
The Google Story
Google is a burning example of digital capitalism. It is a private company that has grown solely based on digitization. It has almost monopolized the Search interface across the world with 90% of all search queries being done on Google. It has left behind Daimler, Yahoo and others to become the leading company in search interface. This story is also a reflection of how competition is working in this industry too with capitalists competing closely on the heels to capture one of the biggest digital based industries.
Thus, digitalism can be basically inferred as the effort to develop a network economy wide in order to support the ever-growing thirst of intercorporate and intracorporate business process (the objectives of capitalism).
Digital Capitalism-Its Development
Due to a lack of common understanding on the term, there is no single theory of development of digital capitalism, which crept in almost quietly across the 1990s without giving any hint of growing influence on human lives. But the most viable explanation of its development can be given through reference of two stages:
Fordism
Henry Ford, the first car manufacturer during the industrial revolution, introduced one of the biggest means of promotion of capitalism. He introduced the assembly line of manufacturing that allowed large scale mass production in a mechanized manner, within a short period of time and with less labour requirement. It became predominant in the 20th century in developed countries but caused a serious crisis in the later stages. A similar line of mechanized production has been followed when the Mikroelektronische Revolution (introduction of computers) occurred. When they began to be used in both consumer and industrial world, need for labour fell sharply.
World Wide Web
This programming was developed by Time Berner Lee. It played the main role in turning the internet into a global network. This shaped the way for global economy and hence capitalism.
Major Issues Involving Digital Capitalism
Digital capitalism has now become an acceptable means of global economy. The consumers are heavily dependent on it and see it at time as their only source of entertainment and information. While this trend may not be harmful per se, what has come to haunt the digital world is the rapid spread of fake news, hate messages in the form of memes etc. In fact, these have come to occupy a major chunk of content on the internet. The problem here lies with the ease and speed of dissemination that has been allowed by the digital giants. For example, Facebook does not earn anything by consumers reading a good post on it. But it earns mostly when they scroll, like, react or comment on the posts. Thus, more the posts go viral, the more is the chance of receiving posts on it, comments and reactions. The opening of the whole world of memes has allowed people to express their creative ideas through it, irrespective of whether it is defamatory to a particular person. The same goes with the media houses. More posting of viral news on their walls attract viewership and search engines also gain through more number of searches through it.
The other quite old issue has been that related to privacy. There have been major complaints that these digital giants either do not have a strong privacy mechanism in place or ignore the mechanism altogether. Privacy issues have been mostly hovering around social networking site like Facebook, Twitter etc. Even after so much of debate on it, the policies still do not seem to be in place.
Conclusion
Digital capitalism cannot be thrown away as an irrelevant and notorious concept like the propagators of communism or socialism. This is because it is largely a way of life of every person, promoting competition and efficiency, only now through a different medium. It is important both for the producer and consumer. But the negative impact of its growth has to be checked to prevent cross-border criminal activities like terrorism. There needs to be developed some mechanisms to filter only the good part of it to reach the public.
