In Chapter 4 I have argued that film production is in essence affective film prosumption. Chapter 5 has also associated the practice of blog film marketing with affective investment, and concluded that the audience and the film industry have, via the mediation of the Internet, collaborated on film value production. In this chapter, I will discuss further the execution of film marketing in relation to online activities, so as to clarify how and what ‘value’ has exactly been produced as the relationship between the film industry and the audience transmutes through the prosumption that has prevailed. This enquiry has been conducted in order to answer the related questions of consumer exploitation and capitalist domination. Acknowledging the inevitable power dynamics, I aim to address the issue as to whether participatory communication has dragged film audiences into deeper submission to industrial manipulation.

As the chapter unfolds, I will argue with regard to film marketing in twenty-first-century Taiwan that labour within or without the film industry has undermined the late capitalist control by being ambiguously conducive to capital reproduction. This is because both late capitalism and labour have, in the late capitalist economy, become dubious factors of indeterminacy. Only when determinable and thence determined will they prove productive to the overall economy.

This argument developed in the summer of 2010, when during an interview with Cimage's executive director Helen Chen, I happened to witness an incident marked by such indeterminacy. It was a usual weekday morning in Cimage's undersized office. The film distributor who had marketed Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière (2004) and the well-received documentary film Let It Be (Yan Lanquan and Zhuang Yizeng 2005) was then busy selling a high-school-targeted curatorial package of recent Taiwan films. Its small group of employees started off the day's work by checking the results from an online audience survey conducted by Yahoo! Taiwan. Designed like a fun quiz, the survey was intended to indicate ‘the most anticipated locally made films [and] the most attractive local actors’ of the summer. With local pop idols starring in them, it was expected that romantic comedies such as Close to You (Cheng Hsiao-tse), In Case of Love (Lin Hsiao Chien), Love You 10000 Years (Toyo Kitamura), and Love in Disguise (Leehom Wang) would top the ‘most anticipated film’ list.