Popular Communication, Piracy and Social Change

Jonas Andersson Schwarz, Patrick Burkart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367030056
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315469959
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creation of a global anti-piracy law and policy regime, and counter-movements such as the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. These trends provide starting points for a wide-ranging debate about the prospects for deep and lasting changes in social life enabled by piratical technology practices. This edited volume brings together contemporary scholarship in communication and media studies, addressing piracy as a recombinant feature of popular communication, technological innovation, and communication law and policy. An international collection of contributors highlights key debates about piracy, popular communication, and social change, and provides a lasting resource for global media studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Communication.

Mobility Through Piracy, or How Steven Seagal Got to Malawi

Jonathan Gray

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Malawi presents a fascinating case study for global media flows: a country full of American product, with much of it there because of an informal economy, and, conversely, little of it there because of any effort on Hollywood’s part to develop Malawi as a market. This article therefore draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Malawi during the summers of 2008 and 2010 to examine the circulation of foreign film and television and to detail a form of media mobility through piracy.

As the fight between Steven Seagal and his latest assailant rages on the 17-inch television screen, the blaring speakers outside attract some passersby. They peek their heads into the small room that already holds 20 young men, and some decide to come in, paying their money, parking their bikes at the front of the room, and quickly finding a spot to sit. The owner of this establishment in Liwonde, Malawi, assures me that Seagal is a local favorite, matched only by Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Wesley Snipes in popularity. Indeed, the “playbill” next to where he stands underscores the point, as the cover to the pirated DVD, held to the cardboard playbill by an elastic band, has clearly been worn down by time. This DVD was just as clearly an excellent investment. It contains not only the present movie, the 1990 Marked for Death, but also 13 other movies with Seagal, crammed in at a low resolution. Yet the owner bought the DVD for about two U.S. dollars two years ago in 2008, and he has been able to play it weekly since, charging about five U.S. cents to each viewer each time.

Such is the environment in which much Hollywood film is watched in Malawi, in “video shows” playing pirated material. Yet, lest one worry about Seagal’s or Twentieth Century Fox’s lost revenues, no original copy of Marked for Death nor of any other Hollywood film or television show can be bought in Malawi. American film and television abound, yet unless watched in one of the country’s two cinemas or on the pan-African DStv satellite service, this film and television is watched on pirated DVDs. As such, Malawi presents a fascinating case study for global media flows, a country full of American product, yet with much of it there because of an informal economy, and, conversely, little of it there because of any effort on Hollywood’s part to develop Malawi as a market. This article will draw from fieldwork conducted in Malawi during the summers of 2008 and 2010 when I was based in the Southern town of Liwonde yet conducting research in other Southern towns and cities including Blantyre, Limbe, Balaka, and Zomba. There, I interviewed or talked casually with more than 40 video store or stall owners, and I interviewed 22 video show owners and 50 patrons (though this article examines only the owners’ responses). I examine this case further in the hopes of detailing a form of media mobility through piracy that while pervasive is discussed too rarely in global media studies.

CHANNELS OF FLOW: HOW MEDIA MOVES GLOBALLY

Analyses of global media flows are commonly structured as entailing an epic battle between media multinationals and local consumers. The multinational creates media, then uses its international holdings and exploits its economy of scale advantages to distribute the media globally, and audiences from Albania to Zimbabwe are left to deal with the results. As embedded in the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) and ensuing UNESCO MacBride Report discussions of the 1970s and 1980s (see Thussu 2000, pp. 43–50) and as alleged by Herbert Schiller (1976) and Armand Mattelart (1983), many earlier versions of this tale attributed significant or almost complete power to the multinational producer in this equation, thereby giving birth to concerns of cultural imperialism and Americanization. Many recent accounts of global media flows have significantly nuanced this story, though, whether through noting the agency of international audiences in domesticating and repurposing Hollywood (see Katz & Liebes, 1990; Murphy & Kraidy, 2003; Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1997; Tomlinson, 1997), discussing “contra-flows” not simply originating from the West (Thussu, 2007), discussing the variable strengths and weaknesses of identity encoding in the media that moves (Gray, 2008; Iwabuchi, 2002), observing the deviousness by which cultural imperialism can work with local partners or “compradors” (Harindranath, 2003), or noting the “New International Division of Cultural Labor” whereby Hollywood can maintain power just as effectively through co-production deals and outsourcing as through obvious imperialism (Miller et al., 2005). As a result of such work, our understanding of how media move around the globe and with what effects has improved significantly. Along with this trend, more scholars have turned their attention to the markets by which Hollywood moves. Miller et al. (2005), for instance, note the bargain basement pricing of American television that ensures its free flow around the world; Timothy Havens (2000) examines the logics by which some shows or genres are sold and others are not; and Havens (2000, 2006), Steemers (2004), Straubhaar (2007), and Bielby and Harrington (2008) have all offered exacting reports on the specifics of the global media marketplace. Concurrently, if earlier work often assumed and ignored reception contexts, the growth in global ethnographies of production and reception has vastly improved our collective knowledge of what obstacles and competition international media face as they arrive in any given country.

But what of media’s unofficial markets and of the ever-mushrooming informal economy in media sales? Though a survey of Hollywood’s global holdings may justifiably worry many, Hollywood’s marketing and sales teams are by no means responsible for all media flows around the globe. To begin, Hollywood simply does not care about some markets. Herman and McChesney note, for example, that when the Financial Times printed a map of MTV’s expansion, the entire continent of Africa was removed and replaced by a list of European countries with MTV channels (1997, p. 65). Much is made of Rupert Murdoch and his colleagues’ scramble to capture the Chinese or Indian markets so that as they grow, the power of a few companies grows with them. But beyond the wealthy nations of Europe and East Asia, the developing BRIC giants, and a few select others, Hollywood can and does regard many countries of the world as too poor to bother with. American film and television may move around the world and may still be popular in the markets that Hollywood shuns, but Hollywood does not control all of this movement. Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) estimates on revenues lost due to piracy should be regarded skeptically, as personally interested and as strategically inflated (see Yar, 2005). However, even if we steeply discount the organization’s estimate of $514 billion of lost revenues due to intellectual property theft (McDonald, 2007, p. 187), we still must realize the major force that piracy and the informal economy of Hollywood play in global media flows. China alone is estimated to produce nearly five billion pirated optical discs per year (McDonald, 2007, p. 203). Importantly, too, while MPAA talk of “lost revenues” often depicts a scenario in which pirated discs are purchased instead of a legitimate, fully legal product, given Hollywood’s lack of interest and official involvement in numerous world markets we should expect that pirated discs may be the only available option in many cases (see Mattelart, 2009). Hollywood stars may be everywhere, in other words, but they are not necessarily there because of any sales effort on the part of MPAA members.

Global media studies is thus left with a relative gap, as too little work examines the multiple other means by which media move. As Tristan Mattelart notes, as significant as much work on transnational media movements is, “these studies deal essentially with the ‘official’ structures, actors and flows of the media economy, ignoring on the whole the shadowy structures, the actors in media piracy and the clandestine flows through which a large part of the distribution of cultural products in the South and the East is organized” (2009, p. 311). Global film and television piracy has received nothing like the rich academic detailing that the official media marketplace enjoys.¹ Even “piracy” is a clumsy term, not only because of its pejorative connotations that invoke “stolen” revenues in situations in which no revenue was sought, but also because it encompasses and conflates too wide a range of practices and players. The world’s many unofficial and informal media markets significantly complicate how we can make sense of the business and meanings of media. After all, the frames through which we are presented any text or message become a vital part of that text or message. “American film” and “American television” are entities whose meanings and values will change depending on the venue in which they are presented. Therefore, while political economists and cultural studies scholars may argue over the relative importance of production and reception in the cultural placement of American media globally, we must not lose sight of distribution in these discussions and debates. It is with this in mind that I turn to Malawi, a country with next to no official Hollywood presence and yet one whose citizens regularly watch American film and television. How did Steven Seagal and Marked for Death get to a town in Southern Malawi, and how might this matter in our understanding of global media flows?

AMERICAN FILM AND TELEVISION IN MALAWI

Malawi has only two cinemas (a third has questionable status at time of writing), one each for the main cities Blantyre and Lilongwe. The vast majority of Malawians have never been into a traditional cinema, instead watching films either on television or at video shows. The former outlet, however, is limited to a small elite. The country has had a single public broadcasting station since 1999, TVM, but programming is restricted mostly to parliamentary proceedings, soccer matches, sermons, and music videos, with no movies. Based in South Africa and launched in 1995, satellite service provider DStv can provide a television owner with up to 100 extra video channels (though sometimes as few as 17), approximately 30 of which play movies (though only a few exclusively), and also numerous audio channels. Satellite dishes have been on the rise, but most informants guessed that at most 20% of Malawians living in urban areas have satellite, with much fewer, if any, in most rural areas. At a cost of 10,000 kwacha per month (about US$67) and with a national GDP per capita of $900, satellite is unattainable to a significant majority of Malawians. The satellite audience expands somewhat through sharing, as satellite owning households will often host neighbors, but such a service is most commonly reserved for soccer matches or other special events, not for movies or American television shows. One could also go to a bar or restaurant with satellite, though these are by no means common outside of Blantyre and Lilongwe, with only a handful if that in most towns, and their public setting makes them appropriate mostly for soccer, sermons, music videos, news, and soaps, with few if any movies or television shows other than soaps on exhibition.

For many Malawians, then, movies are watched in video shows such as the one described at the top of this article. Video shows abound, with four or five in most towns. Patrons pay between 5 and 20 kwacha (3–12 US cents) to enter a small, dark room that holds anywhere from 20 people on the low end to 50 or 60 on the high end. A television, DVD player, and sound system sit at the front, and rows of benches are made of simple planks of wood over slabs of concrete or upturned buckets (see Figure 1). In all the 40 or so video shows I saw or attended, the televisions were small tubes, meaning the picture is at times hard to see. Video show etiquette was correspondingly impressive, with most patrons leaning forward low to allow those behind them to see, and rarely engaging in much chatter with one another. Video show owners have a simple board outside, onto which they affix the DVD cover of whatever is playing, and of what is scheduled for the rest of the day, usually with estimated times attached (see Figure 2). Patrons, though, can stay inside for as long as they want for a single fare, and local snack and drink sellers occasionally come through to provide food and drink to those who pay for them.

No hard and fast taboos exist agains...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Piracy and Social Change
• 1. Mobility Through Piracy, or How Steven Seagal Got to Malawi
• 2. “Honorable Piracy” and Chile’s Digital Transition
• 3. Piracy, Geoblocking, and Australian Access to Niche Independent Cinema
• 4. Anti-Market Research: Piracy, New Media Metrics, and Commodity Communities
• 5. The Piratical Ethos in Streams of Language
• 6. The Media Archaeology of File Sharing: Broadcasting Computer Code to Swedish Homes
• 7. Anonymous and the Political Ethos of Hacktivism
• Index