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” model. Others take legal action to foreclose the circulation of their intellectual property through grassroots media, using threats to contain what they cannot technologically restrain. However, such knee-jerk responses to unauthorized audience circulation have rarely been more than temporarily effective and have left media companies that take this approach continuously frustrated. (In our enhanced book, Queensland University of Technology researcher John Banks examines how creative professionals can be frustrated by the growing need to involve audiences in the process of making and circulating media content and argues that such questions are organizational challenges professionals must engage with rather than bemoan.)
On the other hand, critics of commercial models built from profiting off audience activity with no compensation deploy labor theory to talk about the exploitation of audiences within this new digital economy, a topic we will return to several times in this book. For instance, Tiziana Terranova has offered a cogent critique of these economic relationships in her work on “free labor”: “Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited. […] The fruit of collective cultural labor has been not simply appropriated, but voluntarily channeled and controversially structured within capitalist business practices” (2003).
Consider also Lawrence Lessig’s critique (2007) of an arrangement in which Lucasfilm would “allow” fans to remix Star Wars content in return for granting the company control over anything fans generated. Writing in the Washington Post, Lessig described such arrangements as modern-day “sharecropping.” Terranova and others have argued the corporate capitalization of free labor, coupled with the precarious employment conditions surrounding the creative and service industries in the early twenty-first century, have reconstituted the labor market in ways which further undercut the possibilities of collective bargaining around benefits, pay scales,