Our fascist copyright law
Two weeks ago we read the “Culture Industry,” which basically posited that we are all controlled by a pop culture hegemony that homogenizes us and makes us into unthinking automatons. I argued, and argued a lot, that the argument basically boiled down to a weird media determinism that acted like the consumers had no control over the producers whatsoever. It pissed me off. In this week’s readings, Jenkins takes a much more sane approach to the culture industry, “refusing to see media consumers as either totally autonomous from or totally vulnerable to the culture industry”(136). His argument makes a lot of sense to me. While people do tend to consume whatever they are given, they do have agency in the matter. They can respond; they can choose to consume something else that doesn’t homogenize them.
Jenkins goes on to discuss fandom and how it is changing with the WWW and digital media. His discussions on fandom focus on how fans have now become more active and can now actually produce new material, which points to a problem that I’m going to dwell on: our government and law interve to crush innovation. In the digital age, I think the way our government chooses to respond to digital innovation is one of the key issues shaping new media. So far, I am disheartened by our response. Our government (don’t even get me started on Europe, which is wayyyyyyyy worse) has responded to digital media by strengthening copyright to protect the old against the new. The attempt to stem the tide of innovation is a losing battle, but it’s a battle that, while it will never control the tide, can slow the tide.
The issue of IP (intellectual property) and digital media brings me back, as so many things do, to one of Ayn Rand’s arguments: we don’t have a capitalist economy, we have a mixed economy. Our economy is somewhere between socialism and true capitalism, and when it comes to IP, we take the worst of both worlds. Capitalism fosters competition; competition breeds a desire for powerful conglomerates to form powerful monopolies. Monopolies are bad. In the age of digital media, when an 18 year old on a computer in Nebraska can take Star Wars clips and make wonderful new things out of the clips, we have the potential to fight the monopolistic push of conglomerates. If competition were really what we desired, people would actually be able to compete with the conglomerates by co-opting material and making something new. Instead, we assume the worst aspects of capitalism, the push to monopolize, and then back it up with the worst aspects of big, market controlling government. In what we claim is a move to protect the common good, we develop draconian IP laws that stifle creativity and competition.
So yeah, let’s either do this or not do this. Let’s either foster competition or let’s have government control. We can’t keep letting people compete until one gets huge and then uses government intervention to keep it huge. It’s ridiculous, and it’s a true danger to the potential impact of new media. We have the potential to have true grassroots art; we have the potential to have distribution channels that allow the masses to bypass the hegemony of the conglomerates. Instead, we are missing our chance to create something wonderful and new by increasing the scope of copyright to ungodly levels, by passing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that bastardizes the Constitution, and by responding to every innovation with fear and a tendency to legislate rather than let the market play itself out.
All this ties into Jenkins discussion of interactive audience. He actually addresses the issue in more depth in his book Convergence Culture, but one of the problems facing new fan communities is the bizarre intricacy of copyright law. These fans love the product, and they express that by creating new products such as fan fiction or remediated Star Wars footage. You would think the creators of the original material would embrace this, but too often they have threatened legal action out of fear.
That ridiculousness brings me to my final point. I said earlier that we are just delaying the inevitable with our overreaching IP laws. Eventually digital media and new distribution forms and channels will win out. The corporations that will be left standing will be the corporations that recognize the potential of these innovations. Rather than reacting like the RIAA, which basically sued everyone and everything it could find once Napster opened the floodgates, the smart businesspeople will find new ways to make money off digital potential. Take NBC for example. TV shows are pirated all the time, so NBC decided to make its shows available in high quality form online. They head off piracy and still make some money off advertising. Or take ESPN and fantasy football. When fantasy football got big, sites charged people to play. ESPN realized there were other, better ways to make money off fantasy football, so it provided the service for free. These corporation will learn or they will perish. We’ll see which ones do what 20 years from now when we have an entirely different corporate landscape with dead dinosaurs littering the ground.
On to Jenkins’ two other articles. The blogging article was interesting but a little old. What he was writing in 2002 has almost risen to the level of assumption by now. I wrote a paper once on blogging though, and I found that it is a medium that has dissapointed a lot of its early proponents. When blogging began, people had such high hopes, and they haven’t been realized. I read all these people talking about how blogging might end political polarization, and now, 8 years later, we have Michelle Malkin and Daily Kos. Good call on that one. Jenkins doesn’t make those claims though, and what he does say is spot on. Blogging has become a nice way to start grassroots movements, and more importantly, it has taken news stories from traditional news sources and reframed them.
Jenkins ‘pop culture article was good as well. I had a weird thought when I was reading it: is the situation he was describing a little like Castells’ network society? America used to be the center of the pop culture universe, but now that universe has been decentered into a system of nodes (Hollywood, anime, bollywood, etc.). It would take a lot of space for me to explain myself more, and I’m not sure I even could, but it was a thought that interested me.
Now, on to the Hardey article. I loved the discussion of how the virtual spaces of the WWW change our physical spaces. I know some of you are really interested in things like second life, but the discussions about retreating from the physical into the virtual don’t appeal to me. For one, I don’t think many people actually do it. For another, I personally don’t think divorcing the virtual from the physical would be desirable. The idea of how the virtual changes the physical interests me much more. Hardey’s article does a good job of explaining how users utilize the potentials of the WWW to change the physical space of London. By developing interactive maps and locating virtual bloggers in physical parts of the city, people combine what we too often tend to separate in our discussions. Second Life might be sexier, but the kind of total immersion in virtual worlds scholars tend to focus on when they focus on Second Life is not how the vast, vast, vast majority of people use the Web. Instead, we use the virtual to shape our physical, even if it’s something as simple as using google maps to find a Thai restaurant or map an alternative route. As technologies continue to advance, we are going to see more and more ways the virtual shapes the physical, whether it be digital graffiti or locative media. Hardey’s article was a nice introduction to get me thinking about the subject.
Finally, Fagerjord. We already discussed this article in 702, so I’m not going to say much about it. I agree with pretty much everything he says, and one of the most interesting things about the WWW is how it combines different forms of media on the same page. Someone could write something interesting about Mcluhan’s idea that the content of each medium is a new medium. Anyway, the rhetorical convergence idea is a good one, and I think we can all agree that interdisciplinarily is going to be important when analyzing new media. As Comm. scholars or rhetoricians, it is not longer going to be enough to be able to analyze the text on a web page or understand how a video works. When analyzing the Web, we will have to analyze all the different rhetorics each form of old media brings to the table, and most importantly, we will have to analyze how they work together (converge) to persuade the audience.