Spreadable Media

Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814743904
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How sharing, linking, and liking have transformed the media and marketing industries Spreadable Media is a rare inside look at today’s ever-changing media landscape. The days of corporate control over media content and its distribution have been replaced by the age of what the digital media industries have called “user-generated content.” Spreadable Media maps these fundamental changes, and gives readers a comprehensive look into the rise of participatory culture, from internet memes to presidential tweets. The authors challenge our notions of what goes “viral” and how by examining factors such as the nature of audience engagement and the environment of participation, and by contrasting the concepts of “stickiness”—aggregating attention in centralized places—with “spreadability”—dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks. The former has often been the measure of media success in the online world, but the latter describes the actual ways content travels through social media. The book explores the internal tensions businesses face as they adapt to this new, spreadable, communication reality and argues for the need to shift from “hearing” to “listening” in corporate culture. Now with a new afterword addressing changes in the media industry, audience participation, and political reporting, and drawing on modern examples from online activism campaigns, film, music, television, advertising, and social media—from both the U.S. and around the world—the authors illustrate the contours of our current media environment. For all of us who actively create and share content, Spreadable Media provides a clear understanding of how people are spreading ideas and the implications these activities have for business, politics, and everyday life, both on- and offline.

1

WHERE WEB 2.0 WENT WRONG

In December 2009, Capitol Records filed a suit against online video-sharing site Vimeo, claiming the site “induces and encourages its users” to engage in copyright infringement (Lawler 2009). Capitol argued that Vimeo failed to take sufficient action to monitor infringing material that was uploaded to its servers. They also claimed that Vimeo staff actively participated in the production and promotion of videos infringing Capitol’s copyrights. In particular, the complaint targeted the site’s regular promotion of the “lip dub”—a form of high-concept music video featuring intricate lip-syncing and choreography. Lip dubs are regularly highlighted on the site’s front page, and Vimeo staff has produced its own (some of which have drawn substantial attention online).

As word of the suit spread, people responded with a mixture of cynicism about Capitol’s motives, defenses of the recording industry’s need to protect its business models, and a litany of frustrated barbs about the lack of innovation from major industry players. At TechDirt—a site covering online technology, policy, and legal issues—readers suggested that Capitol’s actions occurred at a time when parent company EMI was suffering from massive losses. (See comments at Masnick 2009.) Rolling Stone’s Daniel Kreps (2009) noted that the action against Vimeo came soon after EMI had signed licensing deals with start-up Vevo—a site developed by YouTube and supported by a number of major U.S. labels as a central, officially sanctioned depository for music videos online. At both collaborative news site Digg and online journal Ars Technica, some commenters pondered why Capitol’s suit was necessary, given that there was no proof lip dubs result in any harm. Many people contended that such videos constituted free advertising and publicity for recording artists (see comments at LeechesofKarma 2009 and N. Anderson 2009), an argument regularly mobilized by those who disagree with “antipiracy” lawsuits.¹

Conflicts between media rights holders and the platforms, such as Vimeo, which host that material have become increasingly common, particularly as the ideas behind Web 2.0 have led to a proliferation of start-ups looking to monetize and commodify user-generated content. These dramatic technological and economic shifts have disrupted normative practices but not yet produced a model satisfying any party. Throughout this chapter, we will map the varying conceptions about fair economic and social relations held by media companies and their audiences. As we do so, we will examine how value, worth, and trust are negotiated and legitimized in this shifting social-economic-technological context through a few crucial concepts—the idea of a “moral economy” derived from the work of historian E. P. Thompson and the relations between commodity and gift economies as envisioned most notably by philosopher Lewis Hyde. Both of these models suggest ways that economic relations are shaped, at least in part, by social and moral understandings between the participating parties, aspects which often get dropped out of popular representations of debates about who “owns” media content and who should be “paid” for creative “labor.”

What Is Web 2.0?

The idea of Web 2.0 was introduced at a 2004 conference of the O’Reilly Media Group. In Tim O’Reilly’s formulation, Web 2.0 companies rely on the Internet as the platform for promoting, distributing, and refining their products: treating software as a service designed to run across multiple devices, relying on data as the “killer app,” and harnessing the “collective intelligence” of a network of users (O’Reilly 2005). Since Web 2.0’s introduction, it has become the cultural logic for e-business—a set of corporate practices that seek to capture and exploit participatory culture.

More than “pasting a new user interface onto an old application” (Musser et al. 2006, 3), Web 2.0 represents a reorganization of the relations between producers and their audiences in a maturing Internet market, as well as a set of approaches adopted by companies seeking to harness mass creativity, collectivism, and peer production (Van Dijck and Nieborg 2009). The emerging business superstars in this category have promised users greater influence over the production and distribution of culture, and “users,” “consumers,” and “audiences” have been reimagined as “co-creators” (Banks and Humphreys 2008) of content and services. These co-creators are engaged as collaborators as they upload, tag, organize, and categorize content on YouTube, Flickr, and myriad other sites. Meanwhile, marketers have increasingly emphasized transmedia campaigns, interactive experiences, and participatory platforms encouraging such co-creation. The tenets of Web 2.0 entice audience members to join in the building and customizing of services and messages rather than to expect companies to present complete and fully formed experiences.

In theory, Web 2.0 companies relinquish a certain degree of control to users. What has been described as “putting the We in the Web” (Levy and Stone 2006), however, has brought with it contradictions, conflicts, and schisms, particularly around the imperfectly aligned interests of media producers and audiences.

As José Van Dijck and David Nieborg note in their critique of Web 2.0 management and business manifestos, many corporate practices effectively erode the line between “collective (non-market, public) and commercial (market, private) modes of production.” Such efforts “cleverly combine capital-intensive, profit-oriented industrial production with labor-intensive, non-profit-oriented peer production” (2009, 856). There is a considerable gap between the Web 2.0 rhetoric of happy collaboration and users’ actual experiences working with companies. On the one hand, the mechanisms of Web 2.0 provide the preconditions for spreadable media; many of the key tools and platforms through which material is spread operate according to Web 2.0 principles. On the other hand, conflicting expectations of what constitutes fair participation means that the actual spreading of media content remains a contested practice.

Taking the “You” Out of YouTube

Video-sharing platform YouTube has struggled since its inception to balance the activities of its users with the interests of large copyright holders. Founded in February 2005 and acquired by Google in October 2006, YouTube’s principal business strategy relies on advertising revenue from the attention drawn by the site’s wide range of videos (predominantly created and uploaded by users themselves). From its earliest days, YouTube has also signed revenue-sharing deals with corporate producers to distribute their videos—everything from the latest movie trailers to music videos—alongside user-created content and to provide licenses for some of the varied uses of these texts (Knowledge@Wharton 2006). YouTube has also sought to acquire, develop, implement, and refine digital fingerprinting technologies to identify texts belonging to major copyright holders and to automatically issue “takedown” notices to users presumed to have violated intellectual property law through the unauthorized uploading of videos.

Critics (Aufderheide and Jaszi 2008) have noted that automatic takedown notices fail to protect legitimate “fair use” claims, creating a “chilling effect” on a site where creative remixes of existing cultural materials have long been among the most visible and cherished contributions. However, the enforcement mechanisms and related revenue-sharing deals were developed to shield YouTube from accusations that their business rests primarily on directly or indirectly encouraging copyright infringement, a claim that Viacom leveled at the company in its 2007 legal action (Helft and Fabrikant 2007). Indeed, large media companies have sought compensation from YouTube since the site launched. (See Burgess and Green 2009; Driscoll 2007; Knowledge@Wharton 2006.) Holding users and rights holders in balance is especially difficult for YouTube given the scale of the site (as YouTube reports, more than 24 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute; see YouTube n.d.) and the diverse range of users—professional and amateur, market and nonmarket driven—who share content through it (Burgess and Green 2009).

On January 14, 2009, some YouTube uploaders found that the soundtracks to their videos had suddenly vanished. After a breakdown in licensing negotiations with Warner Music Group (WMG), YouTube had used an automatic tool to remove audio from videos featuring music from WMG artists. In a controversial post no longer available on the site’s blog, YouTube explained that removing audio shielded users whose videos would have otherwise faced an infringement claim: “Instead of automatically removing the video from YouTube, we give users the option to modify the video by removing the music subject to the copyright claim and post the new version, and many of them are taking that option” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009).

Unaware of the decision, many uploaders wondered whether they were encountering technical difficulties (Arrington 2009), while some were enraged over market forces intruding on their user-created content. One user wrote, “How does a song playing in the background of a slideshow about a colonial reenacting unit harm anyone—least of all Warner Music Group?” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009). Meanwhile, others mused that their use of the audio tracks added value for the music industry: “If we can use it then that would probably get more people to listen to the audio. It’s pretty much like us helping the artist, right?” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009).

While upsetting users, this strategy made business sense for YouTube. It provided the company a way to woo back Warner Music Group while minimizing the likelihood of further legal troubles. Indeed, as Michael Driscoll discusses, YouTube’s strategies for copyright management are generally focused on forging relationships with large copyright holders (2007, 566–567). Even though the site has expanded its “Partner Program” to “ordinary” users, promising them a cut of advertising revenues for videos that might suddenly “go viral” (Kincaid 2009), the company remains primarily focused on policing the copyrights held by large media companies for which the fingerprinting software is made available (Driscoll 2007, 566). Smaller professional and amateur producers who feel that their intellectual property has been infringed—those less likely to constitute a legal threat, to purchase significant ad inventory, or to provide licensed material—must still apply through formal channels to generate a takedown notice under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These various struggles to negotiate between YouTube as a platform for sharing and YouTube as a business model—which have taken place since the platform’s genesis—encapsulate the tensions that run throughout the Web 2.0 model. The rest of this chapter will explore those tensions in detail.

Toward a New Moral Economy

Having embraced rhetoric about enabling and empowering participants, YouTube should scarcely be surprised when users push back against shifts in the site’s policy and practice. Such shifts represent a unilateral reworking of the social contract between the company and its contributors and damage the “moral economy” on which the exchange of user-generated content rests.

The idea of a moral economy comes from E. P. Thompson (1971), who used the term to describe the social norms and mutual understandings that make it possible for two parties to conduct business. Thompson introduced the concept in his work on eighteenth-century food riots, arguing that when the indentured classes challenged landowners, their protests were typically shaped by some “legitimizing notion”: “The men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community” (1971, 78). The relations between landowners and peasants—or, for that matter, between contemporary media producers and audiences—reflect the perceived moral and social value of those transactions. All participants need to feel that the parties involved are behaving in a morally appropriate fashion. In many cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short-term self-interest in favor of decisions that preserve long-term social relations among participants. In a small-scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to “cheat” a customer because the dealer counts on continued trade with the customer (and, the dealer hopes, the customer’s friends) over an extended period and thus must maintain his or her reputation within the community.

Economic systems ideally align the perceived interests of all parties involved in a transaction in ways that are consistent, coherent, and fair. A dramatic shift in economic or technological infrastructure can create a crisis in the moral economy, diminishing the level of trust among participating parties and perhaps tarnishing the legitimacy of economic exchanges. This moral economy might empower corporations that feel their customers, employees, or partners have stepped outside the bounds of arrangements. Or it can motivate and empower individuals or communities when they feel a company has acted inappropriately. In these contexts, both producers and audiences make bids for legitimization, proposing alternative understandings of what constitute fair and meaningful interactions. “File sharing” and “piracy,” for instance, constitute two competing moral systems for characterizing the unauthorized circulation of media content: one put forth by audience members eager to legitimize the free exchange of material and the other by media companies eager to mark certain practices as damaging to their economic interests and morally suspect.

This sense that the moral economy was being violated motivated peasants in early modern Europe to push back against the feudal economy which had shackled them for hundreds of years, and it surely has and is motivating audience resistance in an era with much more pronounced rhetoric about audience sovereignty. Given how much the practices of participatory culture were marginalized throughout the broadcast era, many communities (particularly fan and activist groups) developed a strong sense of social solidarity and a deep understanding of their common interests and shared values, and they have carried these over into their interactions with Web 2.0 companies.² A persistent discourse of “Do-It-Yourself” media (Lankshear and Knobel 2010), for example, has fueled not only alternative modes of production but also explicit and implicit critiques of commercial practices. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of “digital revolution” and empowerment surrounding the launch of Web 2.0 has, if anything, heightened expectations about shifts in the control of cultural production and distribution that companies have found hard to accommodate. (Game designer Alec Austin considers the emotional dimensions of a “moral contract” between producers and audiences in our enhanced book.)

Communities are in theory more fragmented, divided, and certainly more dispersed than the corporate entities with which they interface, making it much harder for them to fully assert and defend their own interests. Fan communities are often enormously heterogeneous, with values and assumptions that fragment along axes of class, age, gender, race, sexuality, and nationality, to name just a few. Yet the moral certainty shaping the reactions of such groups to debates about business models, terms of service, or the commercialization of content reflect how audiences may be more empowered than we expect to challenge corporate policies, especially as they gain greater and easier access to communication platforms which facilitate their working through differences and developing shared norms. It is important, however, to remember that the values associated with fan communities, for instance, may differ dramatically from those of other kinds of cultural participants—activists, members of religious groups, collectors, and so on. As we emphasize throughout this book, these different types of participatory culture do not command equal levels of respect and attention from the media industries.

Stolen Content or Exploited Labor?

New technologies enable audiences to exert much greater impact on circulation than ever before, but they also enable companies to police once-private behavior that is taking on greater public dimensions. Some people describe these shifts as a crisis in copyright and others a crisis in fair use. Fans defend perceived rights and practices that have been taken for granted for many years, such as the longstanding practice of creating “mix tapes” or other compilations of quoted material. Corporations, on the other hand, want to constrain behaviors they see as damaging and having a much larger impact in the digital era. Both sides accuse the other of exploiting the instability created by shifts in technology and media infrastructure. The excessive rhetoric surrounding such digital circulation suggests just how far out of balance the moral understandings of producers and audiences have become.

Consider these two quotes:

This next block of silence is for all you folks who download music for free, eliminating my incentive to create. (Baldwin n.d.)

<dsully> please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.

<jwb> you make all the content. they keep all the revenue. (Quote Database n.d.)

The first, from a cartoon depicting an artist preparing to sit in silence onstage during a concert in protest of his audience, demonstrates a sense that media audiences are destroying the moral economy through their expectations of “free” material. The second sees the creative industries as damaging the moral economy through expectations of “free” creative labor from media audiences or platform users. Both constructs represent a perceived breakdown of trust.

Sunny Web 2.0 rhetoric about constructing “an architecture of participation” papers over these conflicts, masking the choices and compromises required if a new moral economy is going to emerge. Instead, we feel it’s crucial to understand both sides of this debate. Both ends of this spectrum interpret the process of creating and circulating media through a solely economic lens, when we feel it’s crucial not to diminish the many noncommercial logics governing the engaged participation of audiences online. Further, both positions ignore the ongoing negotiation over the terms of the social contract between producers and their audiences, or between platforms and their users, while we believe that neither artist/company nor audience/user can be construed as stripped of all agency.

Writers such as Andrew Keen (2007) suggest that the unauthorized circulation of intellectual property through peer-to-peer networks and the free labor of fans and bloggers constitute a serious threat to the long-term viability of the creative industries. Here, the concern is with audience activity that exceeds the moral economy. Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur outlines a nightmarish scenario in which professional editorial standards are giving way to mob rule, while the work of professional writers, performers, and media makers is reduced to raw materials for the masses, who show growing contempt for traditional expertise and disrespect for intellectual property rights. Similarly, Jaron Lanier has labeled peer-to-peer production and circulation of media content “digital Maoism,” devaluing the creative work performed under a free-enterprise system: “Authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind” (2010, 83).

Here, we can see that the concept of the moral economy is crucial to understanding the business environment facilitating—or restraining—what we are calling spreadable media. As arguments such as Keen’s and Lanier’s demonstrate, the mechanisms of Web 2.0 may provide the preconditions for the sharing of media texts, but the moral position that many content owners take demonstrates how spreading material remains a contested practice. Corporate rights holders are often so threatened by the potential disruption caused by “unauthorized” circulation of their content that they seek to lock it down, containing it on their own sites—decisions justified through appeal to the “stickiness” mo...