the course of their life cycle.
In Remix, Lawrence Lessig (2008) describes contemporary culture as shaped by the complex interactions between a “sharing” economy (which he illustrates through reference to Wikipedia) and a “commercial” economy (which he discusses through the examples of Amazon, Netflix, and Google). Not everyone agrees these two economies can coexist. Jaron Lanier (2010) argues that an ethos which assumes information and media content “wants to be free” can destroy the market for anyone who wants to sell material for a profit—whether a big company or a small-scale entrepreneur. At the same time, since the logic of Web 2.0 tends to commodify all works—assuming they will make a profit for someone—it thus undercuts the desires of people who wish to share their material with each other as “gifts.”
For Lessig, as for us, the way forward is to explore various points of intersection between the two systems. Lessig writes about “a third economy,” a hybrid of the other two, which he thinks will dominate the future of the web (177–178). Evoking something similar to what we are calling a “moral economy,” Lessig stresses that any viable hybrid economy needs to respect the rights and interests of participants within these two rather different systems for producing and appraising the value of transactions.
Value, Worth, and Meaning
In the 1983 book The Gift, Lewis Hyde sees commodity culture and the gift economy as alternative systems for measuring the merits of a transaction. Gifts depend on altruistic motivations; they circulate through acts of generosity and reciprocity, and their exchange is governed by social norms rather than contractual relations. The circulation of gifts is socially rather than economically motivated and is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. The commodity, Hyde suggests, moves toward wherever there is a profit to be made, while a gift moves toward resolving conflicts or expanding the social network (29). By contrast, he writes, “To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary” (105).
For Hyde, a commodity has “value,” while a gift has “worth.” By “value,” Hyde primarily means “exchange value,” a rate at which goods and services can be exchanged for money. Such exchanges are “measurable” and “quantifiable” because these transactions can be “reckoned” through agreed-on measurements of value. By “worth,” he means those qualities associated with things on which “you can’t put a price.” Sometimes, people refer to what he is calling “worth” as sentimental (when personalized) or symbolic (when shared with a larger community) value. Worth is variable, even among those who participate within the same community—even among those in the same family.
In that sense, worth is closely aligned with meaning as it has been discussed in cultural studies; the meaning of a cultural transaction cannot be reduced to the exchange of value between producers and their audiences but also has to do with what the cultural good allows audiences to say about themselves and what it allows them to say to the world. Talk about audience members making “emotional investments” in the television programs they watch or claims of a sense of “ownership” over a media property (such as those offered by Klink earlier) capture this sense of worth.3
The past couple of years have brought myriad examples of new Web 2.0 companies and longstanding brands alike misunderstanding what motivates audience participation. On the one hand, audiences are increasingly aware of the ways companies transform their “labors of love” (in the case of fan culture) or expressions of personal identity (in the case of profiles on social network sites) into commodities to be bought and sold. There is a growing recognition that profiting from freely given creative labor poses ethical challenges which are, in the long run, socially damaging to both the companies and the communities involved.
California-based online video start-up Crunchyroll.com found this out right after securing more than $4 billion in venture capital to support the development of its video-sharing platform for East Asian video. The company’s business plan was built around aggregating fansubbed material. However, the anime community was concerned that Crunchyroll.com was profiting without returning any value to dedicated anime fans and without bearing any of the potential legal liability that might emerge from effectively “commercializing” fansubbed material. As researcher Xiaochang Li notes, Crunchyroll. com hoped to profit on the back of fan labor while placing any costs of legal problems onto the fans, potentially damaging the implicit relationship between anime producers and fans in the process (2009, 24). Similarly, start-up company FanLib’s business model to commercialize fan fiction drew vocal objection in 2007. Fans who protested the company’s practices saw their work as gifts circulating freely within their community, rather than as commodities, and believed the companies that held intellectual property rights to appropriated characters were more likely to take legal action if a business model was built around these activities/creations (Jenkins 2007b). While some fans chose to accept the terms the company was offering (Li 2007), others formed the Organization for Transformative Works to create community-managed platforms where they could resist efforts to commodify their culture.
On the other hand, many participants are frustrated when companies offer them financial compensation at odds with the informal reciprocity that operates within some forms of peer-to-peer culture. Imagine how your lover would respond if you left money on his or her bedside table after a particularly passionate encounter, for instance. Far from accepting this reward for “services rendered,” it might well damage the intimacy of the relationship and send altogether the wrong message.
Contrasting such situations with the questions of audience labor earlier in the chapter highlights the complexity inherent in the contemporary media environment. How might we alleviate these misunderstandings if we infuse the idea of worth, in addition to our traditional reliance on value, into these discussions? How might we negotiate the range of possible exchanges—value-to-value, worth-to-worth, value-to-worth, worth-to-value—that such a vocabulary implies?
These complex negotiations of value and worth are examined in a 2008 episode of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory entitled “The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis.” Sheldon, the series’s comically maladjusted protagonist, experiences an emotional crisis when he discovers that his perky next-door neighbor, Penny, plans to give him a “silly neighbor gift” for Christmas. Sheldon’s initial reaction is one of shock and outrage: “Wait! You bought me a present? Why would you do such a thing?” Sheldon has clearly read Lewis Hyde and has a firm grasp of the meaning of gift giving in capitalist society: “I know you think you are being generous, but the foundation of gift giving is reciprocity. You haven’t given me a gift; you’ve given me an obligation.”
Sheldon’s friends, having suffered through this cycle of anxiety and recrimination many times before, delight at seeing the drama played out with a new gift giver, until their friendship “obligates” them to take their needy and nerdy friend to the local mall in search of a gift of “comparable value.” There, Sheldon confronts his distaste for the goods on offer at a Bed, Bath & Beyond–type store, finding little he thinks a woman would value. He chases a shop clerk, trying to get her to describe the social relationship implied by gifts of different economic value: “If I were to give you this gift basket, based on that action alone and no other data, infer and describe the hypothetical relationship that exists between us. […] Are we friends, colleagues, lovers? Are you my grandmother?” If the gift is a representation of a relationship, he ponders, can one read the relationship from the gift given?
In the end, Sheldon buys several gift baskets with a range of values in the hope that he can appropriately match the price range of the gift Penny bought him. He plans to open her gift first, sneak out of the room, look up the cost online, and return with something that approximates absolute
