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, or other terms of employment. (In our enhanced book, University of California–Berkeley media studies professor Abigail De Kosnik examines the labor that fans often provide for media producers and questions whether fans may have settled for too little in their implicit bargain with rights holders.)
However, as Mark Deuze and John Banks have warned, we must be careful that critiques of “free labor” do not paint audiences as somehow always unaware of the economic value being generated by their actions (2009, 424). Indeed, taking part in free labor may be meaningful and rewarding (as compared to previous corporate structures), even when a company may be perceived as providing too little value or recognition for that work. Instead, it seems audiences are increasingly savvy about the value created through their attention and engagement: some are seeking ways to extract something from commercial media producers and distributors in return for their participation. These fans see their attention—and the data mined when they visit sites—as a growing source of value for commercial interests, and some are demanding greater compensation, such as more control over and access to content, in recognition of the value they are generating. Individually, they may choose among a range of competing sets of arrangements and transactions which shape their access to material. Collectively, they can work through their responses together, organizing large-scale protests (such as those directed against Facebook when it sought to change its terms of service concerning users’ privacy) which can have a real impact on the public perception and economic fortunes of the companies involved. Of course, the potential for collective action and discursive struggle are limited when audience members are forced to use a corporation’s own platforms to pose their critiques of that company’s practices. All too often, Web 2.0 companies have not really opened up their governance to the communities they claim to enable and serve (Herman, Coombe, and Kaye, 2006).
The frictions, conflicts, and contestations in the negotiation of the moral economy surrounding such labor are ample evidence that audiences are often not blindly accepting the terms of Web 2.0; rather, they are increasingly asserting their own interests as they actively renegotiate the moral economy shaping future transactions. For instance, Hector Postigo (2008) has documented growing tensions between video game companies and modders (developers who build new games or other projects through appropriating and modifying parts of an original platform). While many game companies have made their code available for grassroots creative experiments, others have sought to shut down modding projects that tread uncomfortably close to their own production plans or head in directions of which rights holders do not approve. In return, because modders are aware of the many economic advantages game companies often receive from these “co-creation” activities, they may reject the moral and legal arguments posited for restraining their practice. We feel it is crucial to acknowledge the concerns of corporate exploitation of fan labor while still believing that the emerging system places greater power in the hands of the audience when compared to the older broadcast paradigm.
Engaged, Not Exploited?
When it comes to the matter of profits, it is clearly the media companies that win out in current economic arrangements. If, however, we are to truly explore who benefits from these arrangements, we need to recognize the varied, complex, and multiple kinds of value generated. Critiques of “free labor” sometimes reduce audience labor to simply alienated labor.
Richard Sennett (2008) complicates classical economic models that view labor as motivated almost entirely by financial returns. Rather, he notes, the craftsmen of old were also rewarded in intangible ways such as recognition or reputation, status, satisfaction,
