canarytrap.net

[image from nicely85, licensed under creative commons]

Back in March, I wrote a piece critiquing Anderson’s model of the “Freeconomy,” calling it a fallacy. My critique was not necessarily of the models he was proposing, but the way he was conflating things that had no cost with things that were “free.” I argued that rather than being “free,” no-cost goods and services (such as YouTube, facebook, etc) in fact were not giving anything away, but rather exchanging services with its users for things such as data, labor, attention, and social capital.

The debate around “free” as ramped up since then, with Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Anderson’s book in the New Yorker, where Gladwell takes Anderson to task through a series of examples of services and information that are emphatically not free:

The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide . . . in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws. (Gladwell 2009)

Anderson then responded by explaining that “free” also encompasses other forms of non-monetary payment that may in the long run lead to monetary payment:

* Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
* Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
* The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc). (Anderson 2009)

Many others have since jumped in the fray, including Valleywag’s slightly meta take on the accuracy of some of the numbers cited by Gladwell as well as the perhaps ideological frame of the debate itself. Perhaps more interesting is the piece at continuations that attempts to disaggregate some of the fuzzy economics behind “free.”

I will probably have more in-depth and articulate thoughts in the near future, once I polish off a draft of some of the transnational television research I’m currently mired in. But for now, I’d simply like to suggest that part of the problem and part of why we can’t seem to come to an agreement about the complex economic models being build online is that “free” is simply the wrong way to talk about it.

This is similar to the way “viral” media masked the agency of the users, thus preventing us from thinking clearly beyond whether or not something “goes viral” to how and why and for what social and cultural reasons. “Free” masks the systems of value-exchange that are in place in all of these models. Moreover, as Gladwell points out, it is not a matter of information simply “wanting” to be free:

And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. (Gladwell 2009)

These so-called “free” services are entangled with a number of players: content creators, users, platforms, advertisers, etc. All of whom have different investment, different needs, and different desired outcomes. Rather than paying attention only to one criteria of value — monetary cost — by calling it free, and ignoring all the other criteria and social contracts that are in play, we have to start looking at what different systems of value exchange are being enacted every time something is offered for “free.”

In just looking at Youtube, you not only have the exchange between the service and the content, data, and attention provided by the users. You also have an exchange of those things with advertisers. You also have a number of social exchanges between the users themselves, as they build communities and social capital through uploading content, commenting, responding, and sharing. And these are just some of the most immediately visible forms of exhange, each of which follow their own criteria of value and parameters and regulations. And more importantly, the are all interconnected and dependent upon one another. To gloss over it all as “free” ignores the complexity and the deeply entangled nature of both monetary and non-monetary exchanges. The iron law of the digital world isn’t that everything is free, it is that everything is connected, including different forms and systems of exchange.

So I’m guest lecturing later today at a class on Researching Media Audiences and it has me thinking about my initial, and admittedly lingering, resistance to considering myself as someone who does research on “audiences.” Part of it, I’m sure, comes from having emerged out of the “hard” humanities, where terms like social science and empirical research don’t have the best of reputations. Part of it a fear that, as Feuer argues, tactics like reception theory can sometimes be more a deferral of meaning-making onto the production of the “text” of the audience’s discourse rather than actual analytical work on specific texts. And of course, part of it is that I’m afraid someone is going to jump out and shout “ethnography, ur doin’ it wrong!” at me (like all graduate students, I live in fear of accusation “lacks rigor”).

Audiences to Audienceship (or, not just another neologism, I swear)
I have, in my work, been using the term “audienceship” rather than “audience.” The distinction for me, broadly, is that whereas I see “audience” as something that seeks to describe the subject position and context of the viewers, “audienceship” is something that looks to describe a context for the process of viewing, or perhaps more accurately, the encounters between the audiences and their texts. This is sort of important to me for a couple of reasons.

First is that in thinking of “audienceship” or the act of engaging with a text within a particular context steers us away from the audience as a category of person and towards audience as a sort of situation that describes particular sets of practices and engagements with texts and cultural materials. There has always been something presumptuous to me about audience categories — “diasporic audiences,” “working class audiences,” “minority and majority audiences,” and even perhaps less politically loaded ones like “surplus audiences” — that tempts us to presume some kind of coherence or neat alignment between identities/conditions of viewing and how meanings are made. Does being part of a diaspora and viewing texts from your country of origin automatically make you part of a diasporic audience? What determines which of the many axes of identity marks what kind of audience you are?

Of course, historical conditions, positions of race, class, gender, migration, and so forth, powerfully inform their view and understanding of the world and delimit the range of audienceships and set the parameters of viewing that you can be a part of, but no single condition or affiliation can wholly dictate or account for the whole of the engagement of any audience member with the text, or with the other members of the audience, especially as media moves across national and cultural borders and, coinciding with an increasingly complicated negotiations with cultural identity that has increasing dramatically with the rise of globalization.

So that in thinking of these modes of engagement as audienceships instead of audiences help me, at least, remember that we can slice an orange many ways and reveal different shapes and patterns of formation. That any member of an audience as whole, coherent subjects, we can think of them as participates negotiating across multiple audienceships, often simultaneously, producing both rich synergies and contensions.

Audience Publics, Audienceship/Citizenship
When I first started thinking in terms of audienceships, I wasn’t explicitly thinking of the linguistic evocation of “citizenship.” Honestly, I just didn’t like how “audiencehood” sounded like Robin Hood. But there is, I think, something compelling about that linkage, as new media forms and platforms make audience and increasingly public act, both in terms of visibility and in terms of the public sphere. I’m still sorting through some of these things, but it strikes me that many of the audienceships that I look at — particularly in the fan-driven online circulation of transnational media content — are not only collective imaginaries, but collaborative ones, communities of sentiment that are radically involved in creating, selecting, curating, and distributing the very text and images that shape them.

So if we can think of social imaginaries that are being constructed through audienceship, and that these social imaginaries, in turn, by being collective and collaborative, constitute, in some way, publics. Perhaps then what we have is an audience-public, not a public made from an audience nor an audience that also happens to be a public or is transformed into a public due to circumstance, but a public that is constituted through the very act of audienceship.

Recently, Viacom, in the process of of trying to “protect” their intellectual property not only managed to make copyright claims on original transformative work that is protected under fair use, they managed to censor political protest against racism in the process.

(one of the revised shirt designs available at racebending.com)

In one of their “routine sweeps,” they issued a take-down to on-demand retail platform zazzle.com for the contents of the racebending.com store, a non-profit effort that sold t-shirts to protest the all-white casting of non-white leads in the Avatar: the Last Airbender live-action film (more details on that particular controversy here and here). Racebending.com sold shirts with original art and designs, sporting slogans such as “Aang ain’t white” and “this is not a tan” (in response to a statement by one of the cast members about tanning to get into character), and “The Last Airbender: putting the Cauc back in Asian.”

None of the products on the site contained any images from the series (see them here, posted by the creator) — the only thing “in violation of Viacom’s intellectual property rights” were words used to talk about something that Viacom produces. Viacom, it seems, sees itself as owning your discussions around its properties.
We are, by now, long accustomed to epic failure on the part of DMCA takedowns initiated by major media conglomerates. Viacom, in particular, has been a visible and often hilariously illogical offender, with its memorable removal of a clip Christopher Knight put up on youtube from the show WebJunk 2.0, which had featured none other than Knight’s own campaign commercial (presumably aired without permission).

But there are two unsettling things that this instance in particular highlights. The first is a rising trend in companies deciding to “participate” and “acknowledge” and with fans and users by effectively claiming ownership over their discussions and discourse. This is, for instance, what I pointed out with Skittles use (and consequent barring of access to) the twitter feed on their front page. It is a problem of companies claiming to want conversation, but attempting only to enact control.

Related to this is then the second pattern, which is that these supposedly objective methods at issuing take-down, general search-term sweeps that don’t differentiate and make value judgements, are in fact anything but neutral. They presumes the right of large corporations — which are, lest we forget, are already part of a structure of unequal power relations — while simultaneously allowing them disavow responsibility by blaming it on the technological limitations. That is to say, Viacom, in this instance, will no doubt claim innocence to censorship by virtue of it having been “unintentional,” convieniently overlooking the fact that they have structured their use of technology in a way that makes precisely these types of “unintentional” abuses possible, and increasingly prevalent.

All of this, finally, is made all the more poignant by the fact that this case centers around a question of race. In other words, the very voices Viacom tried to silence this time around  — whatever their intent — we those being raised in protest of already being silenced. Viacom is effectively making a statement that groups already struggling for representation in mainstream mass media similarly don’t even have the right to represent themselves elsewhere.

This was later cross-posted to the Convergence Culture Consortium blog

A funny thing happened on my way to check out the new Skittles homepage-as-social-media-experiment that’s been generating all sorts of attention over my twitter feed. I went to the homepage, and in my sleep deprived idiocy, entered today’s date in their terms of service agreement instead of my birthdate.
And since Skittles decided to take my word for it that I was born today, it deemed me underage and thus not the appropriate audience for it’s free-for-all social media aggregation scheme.

While it was indeed my own oversight that got me blocked from their page, the block speaks to the underlying problem with this stunt, which is that while the idea seems interesting, the execution and practical application might fall somewhat short of potential.

There is, of course, the technical side in which their terms didn’t manage to catch that I’d entered an impossible birth date. But beyond that, there are other practical issues, such as the overlarge navigation console pointed out by Stan Schroeder at Mashable. Moreover, as Christopher Carfi astutely observes in his blog, with no way to regulate the signal/noise ratio, the site runs the risk of people loosing interest because of the sheer volume of content.

However, what interests me is that my mistake this morning presents a dilemma that has yet to be discussed in the first flush of interest and excitement over Skittles.com’s new strategy. For all intents and purposes, in aggregating this content through their site, and thereby putting it under their terms of service, they are effectively taking content that is otherwise open to and created by the public — what is essentially public discourse — and branding it as their own, then resetting the parameters for access.

What in one way appears to be a handing over of control to the consumers to discuss and use the brand as they wish, is in another way an assertion of a measure of ownership. Skittles owns the site and set the regulations and protocols of interaction there, but the site is composed of content created totally outside of those regulations, content created through social relations that did not agree to the boundaries that Skittles requires for its site. In other words, by asserting their right to not only aggregate, but then redefine the conditions through which the content can be viewed, Skittles is suggesting that they have some claim over the content by virtue of it being about them.

Of course, though this echoes of the notion of “fan labor,” Skittles’ incursion is fairly minor . After all, your content is still available openly elsewhere, and the terms Skittles has imposed on it seem to only be limited to age to prevent minors from open access to potentially objectionable content, which is a perfectly understandable, if somewhat ironic, concern. But it makes you think: in talking about Spreadable media, we had always been so focused on instances of individuals and communities appropriating and claiming ownership of the content of corporations for their own ends, but media spread is by nature multi-directional, so we can only expect that it would work in the other way as well. Is it different when companies appropriate content created by individuals for their own purposes?

And while this stunt certainly generated the attention it was looking for, is any of that sustainable? It is merely a flash of PR hand-waving or does Skittles actually have an idea of how they want to begin facilitating relationships between both the brand and its audience and between audience members through the brand? And more importantly, is this really the right step towards the kind of relationships they will want to cultivate?