parasitic reversal

Med that's really a good q. Twenty-seven is by far the smallest number of responses…..

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+%22parasitic+reversal%22

Isn't commodification a declaration of ownership of something not subject to ownership?
Like claiming ownership of air? . . . water? . . . news?
With that understanding, all attempts at commodification are essentially parasitic actions.

I'm glad you explained that, neo. I had no idea what "commodification" means. I type it out here and I get a Spell-check underline. Hence, "parasitic reversal" is also a meaningless phrase to me.

Parasitic reversal is a new one for me, too

I think commodification happens when something that was not previously a marketable product becomes one. I'd love to have more context to work with, but here's what I think is happening:

"the kind of commodification which typifies broadcast." The key word is "broadcast," which is contrasted with "network media."

First, broadcast media are commodified.
Then network media are commodified in an unspecified way that feeds off of broadcast media's commercial successes.
It seems that the passage is suggesting that the order of events through which broadcast media are commodified is reversed when network media become commodified.

That's about the best I can do without more context. Hope that helps.

Hi again to everyone thanks for your consideration

FBM your point of view really makes sense in fact I virtually got what is written there and really appreciate your effort on this. It might be the case that you might take a look at whole context so I am sending it.

The economic interrelationship
A fourth continuity between the broadcast and network architectures is
the way their economic logics presuppose each other. Economically, network
media are accompanied by a form of commodification which, as we
shall see, constitutes a parasitic reversal of the kind of commodification
which typifies broadcast. The form of commodification which is peculiar
to a first media age is intertwined with the ever-expanding dimensions of
advertising.6 As Smythe (1981) shows, television, and any kind of broadcast
media, do not so much sell products as sell the concentration spans
of audiences to advertisers. In this relationship the circulation of the sign
becomes fused with the circulation of commodities:
1 Advertisers sell material commodities to the consumer.
2 Broadcasters sell audiences (consumer consciousness) to advertisers
(measured by ratings).
3 Television programming is marketed by broadcasters to consumers.
4 Consumers are also workers who sell their labour-power to corporations
in return for the means to purchase commodities.
5 The cost of advertising is reflected in the price of the commodity.
For step 2 to occur, broadcasters have to be able to offer high numbers
of media consumers and high-quality ‘concentration’, which is achieved
during ‘prime time’ when higher prices for advertisements are charged.7
This simply cannot be achieved in any medium other than broadcast,
which is why, as I have outlined elsewhere (Holmes, 1997), advertising
will never be successful, in a ‘stand-alone’ way, on the Internet as it is in mass media. One of the reasons for the crash in dot.com stocks in 1999
was the failure of advertising on the Net as a revenue-generating exercise
(see Cassidy, 2002; Kuo, 2001). On the Internet, there is no mass, because
a mass is entirely constituted by broadcast media. Broadcast audiences
are built up over time, but they need to be reasonably synchronous with
regular visibility for advertisers to have any success.8
The interactive sub-media of the Internet, like the World Wide Web,
cannot deliver a ready-made ‘mass’ to advertisers, and even when websites
are used in a companion role, their effectiveness is questionable.
Gauntlett (2000) points out that ‘modestly sized but inescapable adverts’
still appear on the World Wide Web and these ads can be personalized to
particular sites, but the solvency of web directories is overwhelmingly
derived from the promise of stock values, not from advertising revenue (7).
Chan-Olmsted (2000) observes that ‘the Internet is the most cluttered
medium in the world. To succeed in marketing an online brand, a marketer
most likely will need distribution of communication messages via mass
media to create broad awareness of the product or service’ (98). Direct
marketing ads are nearly always duplications of advertising ‘that has
come from channels outside the Internet, such as TV spots and infomercials’
(98). Internet sub-media that allow consumers to personalize information
they want will only ever be a ‘valuable extension’ of traditional
media’ (100).
Thus, broadcast advertisements often include a World Wide Web
address, so that ‘the consumer can continue a brand relationship initiated
in an ad in an established medium and extend it to a closer relationship
on the Net’ (100). The fact that such sites might get a large number of
visits is already driven by mass marketing. However, web proprietors
(portal providers and search engine companies) have vigorously tried to
aggregate web advertising in terms of portal loyalty strategies. In what
has been called a game of ‘portalopoly’, ‘Internet companies are racing to
build sites (known as portals) that serve as hubs or gateways to the larger
internet’ (Buzzard, 2003: 205). Portals function like the mass circulation
magazines or TV networks: ‘They are sites that meta-aggregate content
and offer a range of services in order to be the home page for as many
users as possible, thereby attracting more advertising revenue’ (Buzzard,
2003: 205). However, as we shall see below, contra Buzzard (2003: 206),
these hubs, lacking liveness, performativity and specular visibility, fail to
provide a mechanism for audience constitution.
On the Internet, the technical nature of its sub-media means it is not
possible to be a broadcaster in the same way as it is with mass media. Yet,
it is on the basis of a deception, or at least a sociologically uninformed
view, that broadcasters in the USA are lobbying to have ownership and
control laws relaxed in the wake of the Internet (cf. McChesney, 2000).
Because anyone can publish content on the World Wide Web, they argue
that media monopolies have been rendered ineffectual and so restrictions Media of interactive communication, however, tend to be scarce in
advertising and rest on the time-charging of a communicative event, renting
of telephone lines, renting of computer servers and storage space.
Conversely, the more broadcast media are provided ‘free-to-air’, the more
they feature advertising. Viewers are relatively tolerant of such advertising,
but the same does not obtain for forms of broadcast that require payper-
view, such as cable TV and cinema. Consumers of pay-television and
time-charged pay-per-view media resent advertising in these contexts.
Cinema-goers arrive late at films in order to avoid lead advertisements,
whilst cable TV must promote itself as advertisement-free.9 An example of
the indignation at receiving advertisements via a pay-per-use service
surfaced in Australia in August 2001, when the largest phone company,
Telstra, was investigated over charging customers for ‘spam’ messages.
The Australian Consumers Association demanded that all customers
should get a refund. A spokesperson for the Association, Charles Britain,
said: ‘I think it’s a bit rich. It’s a characteristic of spam and email that
people have to pay to receive what are essentially advertisements. We
don’t approve of that in the electronic mail domain and I don’t think it’s
a good idea with message bank or SMS [texting].’
However, as long as the commodity circuits of the two kinds of
medium are kept separate, consumers are generally content to participate
in both forms of commodification. In the context of the metro-nucleation
wrought by the culture industry, it is easy for Internet Service Providers
(ISP) to appeal to consumers concerning their interest in exploring an
expanded range of horizontal communication mediums. For a timecharged
fee, the ISP will electronically remove the cellular architecture
which divides individuals from others locked into the same system of
‘widely dispersed consumption points’. And of course the promise is that
it will do so more comprehensively than a telephone company can and
with much greater bandwidth. It is this feature which prompted Howard
Rheingold (1994) to speculate as to whether the Internet would be the
‘next technology commodity’ (60–1). Certainly, an inspection of those
dot.com stocks before the crash in the late 1990s would have had most of
us being readily convinced by Mr Rheingold.

Thanks for that. I think I can stand by my first assessment. Knowing the details seems to confirm it.