The Social Media Reader

Michael Mandiberg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814764077
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Media & Entertainment Law
• Index: Law

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers.  The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field. Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control. 

PART I
Mechanisms

1
The People Formerly Known as the Audience

JAY ROSEN

That’s what I call them. Recently I received this statement.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak—to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak, who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another—and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

• Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines.¹ They extend freedom of the press to more actors.

• Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

• Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the web.

• You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.²

• A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

The “former audience” is Dan Gillmor’s term for us.³ (He’s one of our discoverers and champions.) It refers to the owners and operators of tools that were once exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.

Jeff Jarvis, a former media executive, has written a law about us. “Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will.”⁴

Look, media people. We are still perfectly content to listen to our radios while driving, sit passively in the darkness of the local multiplex, watch TV while motionless and glassy-eyed in bed, and read silently to ourselves as we always have.

Should we attend the theater, we are unlikely to storm the stage for purposes of putting on our own production. We feel there is nothing wrong with old-style, one-way, top-down media consumption. Big Media pleasures will not be denied us. You provide them, we’ll consume them, and you can have yourselves a nice little business.

But we’re not on your clock anymore.⁵ Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, has explained this to his people. “The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be—what application, what device, what time, what place.”⁶

We graduate from wanting media when we want it to wanting it without the filler, to wanting media to be way better than it is, to publishing and broadcasting ourselves when it meets a need or sounds like fun.⁷

Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, has a term for us: The Active Audience (“who doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share”).⁸

Another of your big shots, Rupert Murdoch, told American newspaper editors about us: “They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”⁹

Dave Winer, one of the founders of blogging, said it back in 1994: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”¹⁰

Online, we tend to form user communities around our favorite spaces. Tom Glocer, head of your Reuters, recognized it: “If you want to attract a community around you, you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work.”¹¹

We think you’re getting the idea, media people. If not from us, then from your own kind describing the same shifts.

The people formerly known as the audience would like to say a special word to those working in the media who, in the intensity of their commercial vision, had taken to calling us “eyeballs,” as in: “There is always a new challenge coming along for the eyeballs of our customers” (John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners in the United States).¹²

Or: “We already own the eyeballs on the television screen. We want to make sure we own the eyeballs on the computer screen” (Ann Kirschner, vice president for programming and media development for the National Football League).¹³

Fithian, Kirschner, and company should know that such fantastic delusions (“we own the eyeballs . . .”) were the historical products of a media system that gave its operators an exaggerated sense of their own power and mastery over others. New media is undoing all that, which makes us smile.¹⁴

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.

The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. You should welcome that, media people. But whether you do or not, we want you to know we’re here.

NOTES

1. Jay Rosen, “Bloggers vs. Journalists Is Over,” lecture at the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility Conference, Harvard Berkman Center, Cambridge, MA, January 21, 2005, available online at http://archive.pressthink.org/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

2. Digg.com, “Help & FAQ,” http://about.digg.com/faq (accessed January 30, 2011).

3. Dan Gillmor, We the Media (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2004), accessed online at http://www.authorama.com/we-the-media-8.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

4. Jeff Jarvis, “Argue with Me,” BuzzMachine (blog), November 11, 2004, http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_11_11.html#008464 (accessed January 30, 2011).

5. Jay Rosen, “Web Users Open the Gates,” Washington Post, June 19, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800618.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

6. Tom Curley, keynote address at Online News Association Conference, Hollywood, CA, November 12, 2004, available online at http://conference.journalists.org/2004conference/archives/000079.php (accessed January 30, 2011).

7. Leslie Walker, “In the Face of Catastrophe, Sites Offer Helping Hands,” Washington Post, September 4, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300226.html (accessed January 30, 2011); Freevlog, “Freevlog Tutorial,” http://freevlog.org/tutorial/ (no longer online).

8. Mark Thompson, “BBC Creative Future: Mark Thompson’s Speech in Full,” Guardian, April 25, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/apr/25/bbc.broadcasting (accessed January 30, 2011).

9. Rupert Murdoch, address at American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, DC, April 13, 2005, available online at http://www.newscorp.com/news/news_247.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

10. Dave Winer, “Bill Gates vs. the Internet,” DaveNet, October 18, 1994, http://scripting.com/davenet/1994/10/18/billgatesvstheinternet.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

11. Tom Glocer, “The Two-Way Pipe—Facing the Challenge of the New Content Creators,” address at Online Publisher’s Association Global Forum, London, March 2, 2006, available online at http://tomglocer.com/blogs/sample_weblog/archive/2006/10/11/97.aspx (accessed January 30, 2011).

12. Rick Lyman, “A Partly Cloudy Forecast for Theater Owners,” New York Times, March 12, 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/business/media-a-partly-cloudy-forecast-for-theater-owners.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

13. Stuart Elliot, “Adding to the Annual Spectacle, NBC and the N.F.L. Take the Super Bowl to Cyberspace,” New York Times, December 18, 1995, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/18/business/media-business-advertising-adding-annual-spectacle-nbc-nfl-take-super-bowl.html (accessed January 30, 2011).

14. Vin Crosbie, “What Is ‘New Media’?,” Rebuilding Media (blog), Corante, April 27, 2006, http://rebuildingmedia.corante.com/archives/2006/04/27/what_is_new_media.php (accessed January 30, 2011).

2
Sharing Nicely

On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production

YOCHAI BENKLER

The world’s fastest supercomputer and the second-largest commuter transportation system in the United States function on a resource-management model that is not well specified in contemporary economics. Both SETI@home, a distributed computing platform involving the computers of over four million volunteers, and carpooling, which accounts for roughly one-sixth of commuting trips in the United States, rely on social relations and an ethic of sharing, rather than on a price system, to mobilize and allocate resources. Yet they coexist with, and outperform, price-based and government-funded systems that offer substitutable functionality. Neither practice involves public goods, network goods, or any other currently defined category of economically “quirky” goods as either inputs or outputs. PCs and automobiles are privately owned, rival goods, with no obvious demand-side positive returns to scale when used for distributed computing or carpooling.¹ The sharing practices that have evolved around them are not limited to tightly knit communities of repeat players who know each other well and interact across many contexts. They represent instances when social sharing² is either utterly impersonal or occurs among loosely affiliated individuals who engage in social practices that involve contributions of the capacity of their private goods in patterns that combine to form large-scale and effective systems for provisioning goods, services, and resources.

This chapter in its original form serves as the introduction to a longer essay that seeks to do two things. The first three parts of the full essay are dedicated to defining a particular class of physical goods as “shareable goods” that systematically have excess capacity and to combining comparative transaction costs and motivation analysis to suggest that this excess capacity may better be harnessed through sharing relations than through secondary markets. These first three parts extend the analysis I have performed elsewhere regarding sharing of creative labor, like free software and other peer production,³ to the domain of sharing rival material resources in the production of both rival and nonrival goods and services. The characteristics I use to define shareable goods are sufficient to make social sharing and exchange of material goods feasible as a sustainable social practice. But these characteristics are neither absolutely necessary nor sufficient for sharing to occur. Instead, they define conditions under which, when goods with these characteristics are prevalent in the physical-capital base of an economy, it becomes feasible for social sharing and exchange to become more salient in the overall mix of relations of production in that economy. The fourth part of the full essay is then dedicated to explaining how my observation about shareable goods in the domain of physical goods meshes with the literature on social norms, social capital, and common property regimes, as well as with my own work on peer production. I suggest that social sharing and exchange is an underappreciated modality of economic production, alongside price-based and firm-based market production and state-based production,⁴ whose salience in the economy is sensitive to technological conditions. The last part explores how the recognition of shareable goods and sharing as a modality of economic production can inform policy.

Shareable goods are goods that are (1) technically “lumpy” and (2) of “midgrained” granularity. By “lumpy” I mean that they provision functionality in discrete packages rather than in a smooth flow. A PC is “lumpy” in that you cannot buy less than some threshold computation capacity, but once you have provisioned it, you have at a minimum a certain amount of computation, whether you need all of it or not. By “granularity” I seek to capture (1) technical characteristics of the functionality-producing goods, (2) the shape of demand for the functionality in a given society, and (3) the amount and distribution of wealth in that society. A particular alignment of these characteristics will make some goods or resources “midgrained,” by which I mean that there will be relatively widespread private ownership of these goods and that these privately owned goods will systematically exhibit slack capacity relative to the demand of their owners. A steam engine is large grained and lumpy. An automobile or PC is midgrained i...