Amateur Media

Social, cultural and legal perspectives

Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson, Julian Thomas, Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson, Julian Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136280795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto dei media e dell'intrattenimento

The rise of Web 2.0 has pushed the amateur to the forefront of public discourse, public policy and media scholarship. Typically non-salaried, non-specialist and untrained in media production, amateur producers are now seen as key drivers of the creative economy. But how do the activities of citizen journalists, fan fiction writers and bedroom musicians connect with longer traditions of extra-institutional media production?

This edited collection provides a much-needed interdisciplinary contextualisation of amateur media before and after Web 2.0. Surveying the institutional, economic and legal construction of the amateur media producer via a series of case studies, it features contributions from experts in the fields of law, economics andmedia studies based in the UK, Europe and Singapore. Each section of the book contains a detailed case study on a selected topic, followed by two further pieces providing additional analysis and commentary. Using an extraordinary array of case studies and examples, from YouTube to online games, from subtitling communities to reality TV, the book is neither a celebration of amateur production nor a denunciation of the demise of professional media industries. Rather, this book presents a critical dialogue across law and the humanities, exploring the dynamic tensions and interdependencies between amateur and professional creative production. This book will appeal to both academics and students of intellectual property and media law, as well as to scholars and students of economics, media, cultural and internet studies.

Part I Economic histories

1 Histories of user-generated content

Between formal and informal media economies

Ramon Lobato, Thomas Julian and Dan Hunter

DOI: 10.4324/9780203112021-2

Introduction

Founded in 1665, the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society are early examples of what we would today call ‘user-generated content’ (‘UGC’). The articles published in these journals took the form of letters announcing a discovery or a scientific observation.¹ But although these journals are seminal examples of scientific UGC, processes of scholarly exchange existed much earlier, usually in the form of private correspondence between scientists (which is why scholarly journals to this day sometimes still have the word ‘Letters’ in their name). Publication of these letters in a journal was, of course, a more efficient way of spreading the news of scientific discovery and delineating claims over first discovery, but initially it wasn’t the invention of a new form; it was the evolution of older, less organised, practices of content creation. Other examples of this process are well known: newspapers and periodicals began printing letters to the editor as early as the eighteenth century;² more recently, the apparently casual observations that once would have passed as workplace gossip or dinner-party conversation have migrated onto the internet in the form of blogs and short messages; amusing family moments are uploaded to YouTube; lullabies that once were passed down orally through generations are recorded and sold. The dynamic at work here is one of making small-scale cultural production more visible, more regulated, more commercial and more institutional. But although recent scholarship recognises this dynamic, UGC remains a category typically defined in relation to its normative opposites: the professionally produced content that is supported and sustained by commercial media businesses or public organisations, and the purportedly docile and passive modes of consumption associated with mass analog media.³ Contemporary UGC is often imagined as a disruptive, creative force, something spontaneously emerging from the creativity of individual users newly enabled as expressive agents by digital technologies. The analysis that derives from this is focused on the ostensibly revolutionary changes ushered in by UGC; putatively new forms of media subjectivity, such as the ‘pro-am’ or ‘prosumer’;⁴ or on how ‘old media’ businesses respond to the UGC ‘challenge’.

In this chapter, we see UGC not in opposition to ‘producer media’, or in hybridised forms of combination with them, but in relation to a concept that connects new media studies with wider social science: that of informality in media production, distribution and consumption. Following the anthropological and sociological literature on informal economies, we define informal media systems as those which fall largely or wholly outside the purview of state policy, regulation, taxation and measurement. The informal media economy encompasses an extremely diverse range of production activities along with an equally large range of distribution activities, from disc piracy and peer-to-peer file-sharing through to second-hand markets and the parallel importation of CDs, DVDs and games. Clearly, much UGC production and distribution occurs in the informal sector. However, as the example of the Philosophical Transactions reminds us, UGC appears also in formal media systems. Hence, the historical migration of scientific writing from informal letters to formal published journals is not the whole story.

We describe in this chapter how UGC moves back and forth between formality and informality over time, and how different components of particular UGC platforms and content exhibit differing degrees of formality at any one time. There are many varieties of UGC, from political blogs to fansubbing networks, which exhibit high levels of tacit or extra-institutional coordination, rationalisation and professional scrutiny, all qualities which are not usually associated with amateur media. The field of UGC is therefore not only internally heterogeneous but also engaged with, and reliant on, numerous industrial and institutional media systems and governmental forces.

The analytical framework outlined in this chapter provides a way to understand the inherent diversity of UGC and its historical and structural interfaces with other media systems. We begin with the broader frame of social-science scholarship of informal economies. We then outline a conceptual schematic – the spectrum of formality – and illustrate it with examples of UGC, including games, talkback radio and comics. The chapter concludes by considering the policy implications arising from a historically grounded understanding of UGC in relation to current debates over ownership, intellectual property and the appropriateness of certain forms of regulation.

The informality model

Informal economic activity is typically defined as that which escapes the regulatory gaze of the state, occurring outside conventional forms of measurement, governance and taxation. The concept came into widespread use after the publication of two papers in the early 1970s: an International Labour Organization report into unemployment in Kenya,⁵ and a study of urban labour markets in Ghana by the anthropologist Keith Hart.⁶ In different ways, and for different audiences, these papers proposed an alternative framework for analysing urban economies in the Third World, one which did not privilege formal salaried labour as the only meaningful form of productive work. The purpose of this intervention was to bring into view an array of informal activities – from hawking and street vending to urban agriculture and pawnbroking – and to understand them as income-generating activities at the core rather than the margins of the economy. The informality model subsequently gained momentum in other nations whose labour markets were poorly suited to the implicitly ethnocentric idea of ‘unemployment’, and has been particularly prominent in Latin American social science. Pioneering studies by Castells and Portes⁷ and Sassen⁸ extended the analysis to advanced economies, arguing that the informal economy is a constituent feature of neoliberal restructuring rather than the residue of a pre-industrial age.

Today, complex discussions about informality continue among anthropologists, sociologists, development economists and urbanists.⁹ There is ongoing debate about the size, nature and scale of the informal economy; whether it is a sector, a dynamic, a process or a mode of production; whether it is a problem to be addressed or a capacity to be harnessed. Although it is not possible to rehearse these arguments here, we feel that the utility of the informality approach for media and communications research lies in its ability to enlarge frames of reference and to reorganise existing categories of analysis. In the same way that the 1970s’ research demonstrated the shortcomings of a definition of ‘employment’ that was blind to the diverse ways in which people make ends meet outside salaried labour, there is a need for accounts of media industries which do not ignore informal media simply because it is not captured in the data. In other words, we must avoid conflating media economies (ecologies of exchange and production encompassing the formal and the informal) with industry sectors (visible spheres of regulated and statistically enumerated media enterprise). The history of the book is not the same thing as the history of the publishing industry, in the same way that broadcasters constitute only one part of the story of radio, and the music economy is not reducible to the record industry.

One way to represent ‘diverse economies’¹⁰ of media is to imagine a spectrum ranging from the formal to the informal. At one end of the spectrum are the consolidated and regulated industries scrutinised in political-economic and media policy analysis: entertainment conglomerates, satellite networks, publishing houses, public-service media, and so on. At the other end are innumerable small-scale, unmeasured and unevenly regulated media circuits which are barely captured in the statistics on industry output and trade and which rarely figure in media industry analysis. This is not to say, however, that informal circuits have been absent from the broader field of media and communications research, as there is a body of work in media anthropology,¹¹ in internet and convergence studies,¹² in studies of alternative media,¹³ in diasporic media studies,¹⁴ and elsewhere, which takes the informal mediascape seriously as a site for exchange and meaning-making. Studies such as these have revealed a great deal about the contours of informal circuits and production infrastructures and have attempted to do justice to their histories and to their cultural contexts.

The approach we propose in the next section builds on this work by exploring the interrelations between the formal and informal media sectors. As most accounts of the informal economy stress, there is a great deal of traffic between the formal and the informal. Economies, including media economies, are characterised by an intricate array of these cross-fertilisations and mutual dependencies. It is not always appropriate to view informal media as an exception, a novelty, a resistance or a leftover from a pre-industrial age, when it is in fact integrated into the mainstream in various ways. Perhaps the most important lesson of the 1970s’ research was that the informal economy ‘is not a marginal phenomenon for charitable social research, but a fundamental politico-economic process at the core of many societies’.¹⁵ For this reason, informal media systems should not be analytically ghettoised but brought into the mainstream of media and communications research as objects for comparative analysis. In the following section we take the example of UGC and tease out some of these interdependencies, tracking its oscillation between the formal and the informal via a conceptual schematic in three stages.

UGC and the spectrum of formality

The first step in analysing UGC through an informal economies framework is to develop a simple schematic which can represent the range of UGC in all its diversity, while also illuminating its interfaces with other media.

Figure 1.1 illustrates the degrees of formality and informality associated with various kinds of UGC. UGC appears at different places along this continuum, not only at the informal end. For example, UGC has a venerable if delimited presence in mainstream newspapers as published letters to the editor. While clearly a form of UGC, letters to the editor are typically professionally edited, framed by expensive display advertisements, conform to a strict set of guidelines regarding length, content and style, and bear many other hallmarks of formal media. Popular magazines too have long understood the value of reader contributions: one of Australia’s culturally and politically formative nineteenth-century magazines, The Bulletin, cherished for many years the tag line ‘half Australia writes it, all Australia reads it’.¹⁶ UGC also has an important role in highly regulated twentieth-century electronic media, notably in programming formats such as talkback radio¹⁷ as well as in open-access and community radio and television channels.¹⁸ More recently, websites seeking user content for the purposes of a commercial promotion – ‘Invent our new flavor!’, ’Caption this photo/cartoon’, and so on – generate carefully managed, legally controlled transactions soliciting user involvement in highly formalised environments.

Figure 1.1 UGC across the spectrum of formality

Of course, UGC also appears further towards the informal end of the spectrum, in forms that include amateur family photography, blogs and wikis. The most informal examples are produced by amateurs who produce for pleasure and allow permissive use of their content by others, typically through Creative Commons licences.¹⁹ But even here we can see that many of these forms come with various attributes of formality, most evidently some kind of contracted licence that derives from the mode of production or the host of the content. Amateur film – made possible first by small-gauge film cameras, then by new videotape formats in the 1970s, and in the new millennium by the proliferation of cheap digital video hardware and software – may be almost entirely informal but, when distributed on services such as YouTube or Vimeo, becomes subject to formal legal governance through end-user agreements, as are blogs on commercial hosting services like Typepad or Blogger (owned by Google).

So, although we may often associate UGC with informality, UGC is not entirely at the informal end of the spectrum: historically, it appears right across the range. The same point can be made about professionally produced media, which also appears at both ends of the spectrum of formality. It circulates through social networks in unregulated, unmetered flows, as well as in controlled markets; and of course not all such circuits infringe legal rights. However, an analysis of professionally produced content is beyond the scope of our discussion. The point we wish to foreground here is that approaching UGC economies through the lens of formality and informality renders claims about UGC’s antipathy to professionalism and its ‘disruptive’ nature problematic.²⁰

Our next step is to show how the spectrum of formality can be disaggregated into a series of constituent variables.

Figure 1.2 illustrates such a disaggregation, using the example of fansubbers (fans who create subtitles for their favourite TV shows and films and distribute them freely online). The elements of formality include various forms of state governance, which we can divide further into governmental technologies, such as taxation, measurement and regulation; and political-economic attributes, such as capital intensity, and level of institutionalisation. They refer to organisational logics which structure media production and distribution activities, as opposed to participants’ motivations or desires. We emphasise that this is not an exhaustive or definitive list of variables, but rather a sample of possible criteria for gauging the formality or informality of media. Note also that any one of these variables could be disaggregated further. For example, the category of regulation comprises a number of overlapping sub-categories: the regulation of content (classification, censorship), regulation of carriage (state licensing), labour regulation (unionisation of workforce), positive cultural policy (subsidy for cultural producers), negative cultural policy (public education and media literacy campaigns), self-regulation (professional organisations and associations), and so on. Our aim here is to provide a framework for comparative UGC analysis, one that can be refined and adapted to suit a variety of tasks and inputs.

Figure 1.2 Var...