I Want to Believe

There’s a new X-Files movie coming out on July 25. I was an enormous X-Files fan in college, and I’m very excited about it. I’ve been watching old episodes in preparation, and they really hold up. This week the NYT ran a nice article about the film that included this quote from Gillian Anderson, who played Scully:

Ms. Anderson used to find the whole idea [of Mulder & Scully pursuing a romantic relationship] ridiculous. “There was always part of me that thought, ‘What’s so special about these two, and will everybody not shut up about it?’ ” she said. “And then, while we were doing this movie, somebody sent me a link to a YouTube montage that a fan had put together of Mulder and Scully. Clips of our growing intimacy through the series. One, it was really moving, and two, I couldn’t believe how many times we held hands and actually kissed. And I was left with my very first understanding of what the fans were on about. I finally kind of got it.

I think it is extremely cool that a fanvid by an X-Phile helped Gillian Anderson reformulate her opinion of the relationships of a character that she played! This is a great example of the influence of fandom on canon texts, and it’s also a nice counterpoint to many of the popular conceptions of romantic/shipper fanvids, that they’re something that silly teenage girls do.

I first learned about fanvids from seeing a really great presentation by Francesca Coppa at Media in Transition 5 at MIT. She pointed out that this is a historically female form of fandom that pre-dates machinima and video mash-ups, but gets almost no attention in comparison. (She also showed how incredibly time-consuming and complex creating fanvids was during the heyday of the VCR.) Here’s a great two-part interview with Francesca on Henry Jenkins’ blog: part one and part two.

Incentivizing Creativity

Got into a juicy argument today in my Information Law & Policy class over the idea that dismantling the copyright system (bear with me) will prevent artists from making money off their works. This is the classic “incentive” argument in copyright law, which states that a limited time of monopoly ownership over information is necessary in order for the creator of the work to profit from it. In other words, I am Stephen King, I write The Stand, I get to reap the profits from it as long as I’m alive. Otherwise I might never write anything. (I’m ignoring the “creators will create no matter what” counter-argument because I think it’s kind of insulting; it may be true, but that doesn’t mean people should create out of pure artistic love and not get paid for it.)

So we have two ends of the spectrum here. Either copyright disappears, or copyright enforcement continues on its current path.

So let’s fiat first that copyright disappears. Poof. So how does Mr. King make money off this work?

All of a sudden, everyone can produce copies of The Stand and sell them. I’m unsure whether the costs to rival producers are really worth this effort, as I can already go into any used bookstore in the world and buy The Stand for about $3 US. Likewise, Lessig’s Code 2.0 is Creative Commons licensed, but nobody else has bothered to put it out as a book, as the printing and distribution cost is much higher than creating a wiki or a PDF.

But King could use the book as an incentive to get fans to pay for different kinds of work. For example, a patronage model to write chapters of a novel, an audiobook read by him, an autographed copy, or tickets to see him lecture. Maybe Stephen King t-shirts.

If Stephen King was, say, a tenured professor, he might write articles for free (as all professors do) and edit a journal for free (as some professors do, although few journal editors get paid) because this would enhance his reputation (or social capital) which, along the line, would convert to economic capital (tenure, a better appointment, a fancy chair).

(This is also analogous to IBM working on open-source software in order to charge the big bucks for software consulting.)

King could also create an edition that’s worth paying for due to its materiality. One of my friends just showed me the new Creatures box set - it’s beautiful and elaborate and definitely geared towards fans only. I could easily pirate a copy of it off my favorite private tracker, but a “real” fan will want the extras.

So let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. Continue using public resources (courts, police, etc.) to enforce copyrights.

King is a superstar, so he probably does get money from every sale of his work. But it’s not likely that your average small band fighting to get notice from their record company is really pulling in huge amounts of royalties. The effort that the record company might put out enforcing their copyright might not actually enhance the profits that the small band sees.

Instead, the small band would probably do better for itself going the OK Go route and writing MySpace messages to local promoters.

We also need to remember that it will only get easier and cheaper for people to get digital copies that are DRM-free. Right now, BitTorrent setup really does require tech savviness and a knowledgability about private trackers, search engines, et cetera. But that’s likely to change with sites like Oscar Torrents that are aimed squarely at your average Joe, if Joe is a reasonably smart fifteen year old.

Let’s say King decides that all of his work will be in some sort of magical DRM format that is extremely difficult to crack. Every time you open one of his books you have to key in a code, and without this code you can’t read the book.

Even if I heart King like nobody has ever hearted King before, this is going to piss me off. I’m likely to choose one of the many entertainment options that is not purposely crippled, or I’m going to get content from an author who’s giving it away for free to promote her work (like Cory Doctorow), or I’m going to find a pirated copy that is cracked. If you charge users for content, you have to make it better than what they can get for free. DRM is not better. It’s worse.

The model where the “incentive” for creativity is “selling your work to a big corporation who will dole out a tiny percentage of the profits to you” doesn’t work for anyone except big corporations. I defy anyone to look at the current climate in which people, far from only creating things for money, will create things that are ILLEGAL (mashup albums, parody trailers, etc.) and could get them fined enormous amounts of money just for fun, fame, or notoriety. There are plenty of ways to make money off creative works that don’t involve this model. Let’s not insult creators by propping up dead business models in the name of protecting artistry.

Technorati Tags: copyright, incentives to create

net pop culture blogs

Great new blog from Nancy Baym, who wrote the seminal study of USENET fandom, Tune in, Log on about soap opera fans online. She uses the term “net pop culture”, which I think is terrific and right up my alley. Baym is focused on fandom specifically, and participatory culture more broadly. I’m very interested in the ways that the internet is changing the relationship between “producers” and “consumers”, not only through the widening of “producers” to include kids putting up YouTube videos, writing blogs, etc. but also through traditional producers such as movie studios listening to fan feedback, identifying emergent behaviors, and altering their strategies and tactics in accordance.

Speaking of which, I’m slightly disappointed that Snakes on a Plane did so poorly at the box office this weekend. I saw it twice (not really by choice) and had a really terrific time with all the other internet nerds, hissing and throwing snakes around and generally being Rocky Horror and goofy. I’m actually surprised it didn’t even take the top spot; perhaps it’s because I’m in SF and all my friends are hardcore internet people, but both screenings I went to were well-attended and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. Perhaps it will have legs and end up being a culty sleeper hit. Anyway, SoaP is being used as a litmus test of whether internerd hype can really break a movie beyond the web. Naturally, two weeks ago the entertainment press was creaming itself over this brave new world of fan interaction changing big media, etc., and I really hope that this poor performance won’t make people dismiss all that. Henry Jenkins has been writing some interesting blog posts along these lines.

Other people writing about these themes include the NetPublics group at Annenberg:

The Networked Publics (netPublics) research theme invokes emergent changes to how we are engaging as audiences, activists, citizens, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies. These changes include but are not limited to the changing relationship between production and consumption, viral and peer-to-peer distribution, and networked lateral political mobilization. Although the Internet is clearly a central player, we consider media forms both old and new as part of a much broader media ecology undergoing profound social, technical, and cultural transformation.

I love this description! I’m working on setting up an independent study/directed reading with my advisor about network theory.. I think I’m going to push the syllabus in this direction rather than reading Castells again. Right now I know I want to read Benkler’s book, also Jenkins’ new book and the NetPublics essays by Ito, et. al. Any other reading suggestions?

ok go and the use of participatory culture by bands

Coolfer had a nice piece on OK Go this morning. You may remember them from such indie rock hits as “Get Over It” [wmp link] and, well, nothing else. Unless you’re the kind of person who gets most of her music news from MySpace and YouTube. Being 29, I’m personally not. I get all my music news from mp3 blogs.

After the band’s brief mainstream success, their record label made it pretty clear that they weren’t going to bother giving the band money to make any more videos, or even releasing another single to modern rock radio. So OK Go took matters into their own hands and shot a home-made video for “A Million Ways.” And when I say home-made, I mean budget of zero. It’s the four band members dancing around in their backyard. I’ve seen Google Idol videos that were more elaborate.

Nevertheless it’s hilarious. It’s on YouTube in atrocious quality so I’d recommend watching the WMP or QT versions (I won’t even dignify RealAudio with a link). Lazy? Here:

Anyway, this video got the band way more notice than any of the boring ass street team/fake viral marketing/MTV Beach House appearances that their record company might have garnered them. So they released another one. Coolfer writes:

Last week the band OK Go unleashed another homemade video, this time for “Here We Go Again” (see it in WM, RA or Quicktime). It’s already got the band an incredible amount of attention. The video was played on CBS’ “The Early Show,” entered into rotation at Fuse, debuted at #11 in the VH1 Top 20 Countdown and has received write-ups in The LA Times, Spin, Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly.

This video features the four band members doing synchronized dancing on 8 treadmills. Yes. (This YouTube link is much better quality).

I think this is all totally cool.

1. The overall aesthetic of these videos (home-made and no-budget) is totally aligned with the general YouTube/vlogging I-taped-my-friends-with-the-record-feature-on-my-digital-camera DIY ethic that harkens back to the 80’s video underground, etc. etc. In other words, you too could be a music video director! If the 90’s DIY ethic was all about starting a band even if you couldn’t play any instruments, the online video “revolution” (I use that word with the most pleasant irony possible) is about making movies, music videos, and video diaries even if you know nothing about film and have no money at all.

2. And shows that if you have a great and fun idea, that’s more important than cash.

3. I always like when major label bands admit that their labels are screwing them over and take matters into their own hands. This is the direct band-to-fan communication that people expect these days. Recently, I read something from a member of a popular indiepop band commenting on an LJ friend’s journal. I’m quoting this from a locked post without any sort of permission at all so I’ve removed the band’s name:

over the 7 years of bandname to date we’ve gathered a few thousand email addresses to our band mailing list and have had maybe a hundred thousand listens/downloads of mp3s of our site.

in the 18 months we’ve been on myspace we are closing in on nearly 1,000,000 listens, and 370,000 people have checked out our page. in a single bulletin, i can reach 27,000 people and tell them about shows, new music, whatever. that kind of access is super amazing and priceless. we sit next to ladytron on the electro chart nearly every day. the fact that that’s even feasible is amazing, given the resources they have and the resources we have.

now, the downside is true that the amount of work that band’s have to do now to get known is pretty astounding. we maintain our own 2 sites, a yahoo group (although that’s pretty much controlled by fans), a livejournal group, the myspace page, and a purevolume page. we design all our own artwork and merchandise, we book all our own shows, we recording, produce, and manufacture all our releases as well as staying on top of getting remixes made, getting tracks on to compilations, licensing songs to dvd’s, wrestlers, trapeze artists, spa’s, science fairs, videogames, radio spots. oh yeah, and we write music somewhere in there as well. no manager, no label, no booking agent. but the flip side? we have 1000% percent (i hyperbolize) control over our music, image, and destiny. i’d take that a million times over than losing any sort of control.

This is a totally different skillset than what’s traditionally needed to be a successful band. I read an interview with Lady Sovereign in the (cheesy) Nylon MySpace issue where she talked about how she puts together her MySpace page herself in order to have better access to her fans. Someone who’s creative, motivated, net-savvy, outgoing and organized is going to do better with MySpace and self-promotion in general than someone in the Rolling Stones/Makers vein who likes to sit around and get drunk and live the rock-n-roll lifestyle. I’m all for the rise of internerd band success, but it does limit others who may not be as computer savvy.

This is the post filesharing economy. While majors sue their customers and try to force DRM protected mp3s down everyone’s throats, smart bands will engage in participatory and collaborative creative projects and promotional efforts that will create a feeling of closeness between them and their fan base. I also like how this sort of breaks down the “rock star” mentality (Kathleen Hanna wrote a very eloquent essay about this) and levels the field between artist and fan. Which again, is very similar to the mid-90’s ethic about how the band down the street/your best friend’s band can be your favorite band.

Technorati Tags: ok go, participatory culture, myspace

using the internet

I’m writing a book review of the classic internet ethnographic study, creatively titled The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, by Daniel Miller and Don Slater. Despite the nondescript name, the book is a very rich text about internet use in Trinidad. The authors find much higher internet penetration rates than they had expected, and they find that Trinidadians (at the time) used the internet in a very wide variety of ways, in cybercafes, at neighbors’ houses, with friends. They write:

This degree of diffusion was impressive, but does not convey the shock of walking past the yard dogs in front of a squatter’s corrugated iron-and-plank built hut with no running water in order to ask the self-evidently daft question, “Do any members of your household use the Internet?”, only to find oneself in a very well-informed conversation about email, paying for computer courses, career prospects in IT and library access.

I’ve been thinking about the way that internet use is embedded in people’s lives. I know that now that I work at home, I surf the net in an entirely different way than I did when I was a 9-5er with plenty of free time on my hands. When I’m laptopping around the country, I use the internet very differently from when I’ve just got my machine on so that my giant torrent of The Amazing Race Season 3 can finish up. Anyway, I was reading this article¹ by John Carey on how people actually use the web, and I came upon this paragraph:

Lifestyles of people in the study group had a strong impact on how and when they usethe Web. Consider first a group of three recent college graduates who shared anapartment in Manhattan. They have very hectic and irregular schedules. On any given evening, one might be at a gym; another out on a date; or the three of them might be visiting a local sports bar. Much of their media use moved later into the evening and their apartment was crammed with media options: multiple televisions, PCs, cellphones, videogame consoles and MP-3 players. They also had broadband access to the Web and a wireless network. To reach them, media had to fit flexibly into their irregular schedules because they might not be available when regularly scheduled media were playing. Television was limited by having a schedule; the Web and other media such as videogames were generally schedule-free and therefore fit more easily into the routines of people with hectic, irregular schedules.

This basically describes me and everyone I know. Let’s look at TV: there are a few people I know who will make sure they see a certain program, and make it part of their weekly routine: folding laundry while watching Desperate Housewives, for example. But for most of the people I know, there are two options:

1. Pay for a DVR
2. Get all your media from the web.

Since 2 is basically free, since we all have broadband anyway, there’s not much compelling reason to do 1. When I’m watching TV on my computer, it becomes just another website that I’m looking at, often in a corner of the screen, movies and TV shows from past and present, US and abroad, cult and mainstream, cable and network are all undifferentiated.

I read something recently which referred to the “post-network” era of American broadcasting, which I think describes right now just fine. I don’t remember the last time I watched a sitcom. I watch a fair amount of TV: I download Grey’s Anatomy, Veronica Mars, the Amazing Race, and the Sopranos every week, and I work through the back catalogs of other shows that interest me. All of those shows, by the way, I got into by watching them on the web first (with the Sopranos, it was Netflixing DVDs, since it launched pre-torrent). This means that of all my friends, even if we’re all watching a show, one person is likely to be catching up on back DVDs, one person may TiVo it and watch it day of, and I may be three weeks behind because I haven’t bothered to download the torrents yet.

I’m more than happy to see the era of network TV lumber to a close, which may be hypocritical, because I still want to get entertainment products that I like and watch them when I want to. If I could pay a $10/mo fee for all-internet TV, with no DRM and total time-shifting, I’d probably do it just for the convenience, and because then I could watch shows that I really like, such as Made, which are never on the torrents.

But back to the internet: it becomes so hard to differentiate types of “media” from one another. Going physically to the movies, to me, is a fun activity to do with friends that displaces going to a club or a show if we’re feeling tired or there’s something really cool on. It’s not like I choose between going out to the movies and watching TV. Internet, video games, TV, DVDs are all kind of part of the same thing for me, and since I’m online most of the time, I’m usually working, taking a brief surfing break, working, watching an episode, working, etc. This is a pattern of media use that just doesn’t fit within old media models.

Big Media seems to be slowly stumbling into the sunlight and realizing they need to regroup; I have to say that the TV studios have been a lot less assly about P2P than, say, Jack Valenti or the RIAA. Anyway. Back to book review.

1.The Web Habit: An Ethnographic Study of Web Usage Patterns. Carey, John. Conference Papers — International Communication Association, 2005 Annual Meeting, New York, NY, p1-18.