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WHERE WEB 2.0 WENT WRONG
In December 2009, Capitol Records filed a suit against online video-sharing site Vimeo, claiming the site “induces and encourages its users” to engage in copyright infringement (Lawler 2009). Capitol argued that Vimeo failed to take sufficient action to monitor infringing material that was uploaded to its servers. They also claimed that Vimeo staff actively participated in the production and promotion of videos infringing Capitol’s copyrights. In particular, the complaint targeted the site’s regular promotion of the “lip dub”—a form of high-concept music video featuring intricate lip-syncing and choreography. Lip dubs are regularly highlighted on the site’s front page, and Vimeo staff has produced its own (some of which have drawn substantial attention online).
As word of the suit spread, people responded with a mixture of cynicism about Capitol’s motives, defenses of the recording industry’s need to protect its business models, and a litany of frustrated barbs about the lack of innovation from major industry players. At TechDirt—a site covering online technology, policy, and legal issues—readers suggested that Capitol’s actions occurred at a time when parent company EMI was suffering from massive losses. (See comments at Masnick 2009.) Rolling Stone’s Daniel Kreps (2009) noted that the action against Vimeo came soon after EMI had signed licensing deals with start-up Vevo—a site developed by YouTube and supported by a number of major U.S. labels as a central, officially sanctioned depository for music videos online. At both collaborative news site Digg and online journal Ars Technica, some commenters pondered why Capitol’s suit was necessary, given that there was no proof lip dubs result in any harm. Many people contended that such videos constituted free advertising and publicity for recording artists (see comments at LeechesofKarma 2009 and N. Anderson 2009), an argument regularly mobilized by those who disagree with “antipiracy” lawsuits.1
Conflicts between media rights holders and the platforms, such as Vimeo, which host that material have become increasingly common, particularly as the ideas behind Web 2.0 have led to a proliferation of start-ups looking to monetize and commodify user-generated content. These dramatic technological and economic shifts have disrupted normative practices but not yet produced a model satisfying any party. Throughout this chapter, we will map the varying conceptions about fair economic and social relations held by media companies and their audiences. As we do so, we will examine how value, worth, and trust are negotiated and legitimized in this shifting social-economic-technological context through a few crucial concepts—the idea of a “moral economy” derived from the work of historian E. P. Thompson and the relations between commodity and gift economies as envisioned most notably by philosopher Lewis Hyde. Both of these models suggest ways that economic relations are shaped, at least in part, by social and moral understandings between the participating parties, aspects which often get dropped out of popular representations of debates about who “owns” media content and who should be “paid” for creative “labor.”
What Is Web 2.0?
The idea of Web 2.0 was introduced at a 2004 conference of the O’Reilly Media Group. In Tim O’Reilly’s formulation, Web 2.0 companies rely on the Internet as the platform for promoting, distributing, and refining their products: treating software as a service designed to run across multiple devices, relying on data as the “killer app,” and harnessing the “collective intelligence” of a network of users (O’Reilly 2005). Since Web 2.0’s introduction, it has become the cultural logic for e-business—a set of corporate practices that seek to capture and exploit participatory culture.
More than “pasting a new user interface onto an old application” (Musser et al. 2006, 3), Web 2.0 represents a reorganization of the relations between producers and their audiences in a maturing Internet market, as well as a set of approaches adopted by companies seeking to harness mass creativity, collectivism, and peer production (Van Dijck and Nieborg 2009). The emerging business superstars in this category have promised users greater influence over the production and distribution of culture, and “users,” “consumers,” and “audiences” have been reimagined as “co-creators” (Banks and Humphreys 2008) of content and services. These co-creators are engaged as collaborators as they upload, tag, organize, and categorize content on YouTube, Flickr, and myriad other sites. Meanwhile, marketers have increasingly emphasized transmedia campaigns, interactive experiences, and participatory platforms encouraging such co-creation. The tenets of Web 2.0 entice audience members to join in the building and customizing of services and messages rather than to expect companies to present complete and fully formed experiences.
In theory, Web 2.0 companies relinquish a certain degree of control to users. What has been described as “putting the We in the Web” (Levy and Stone 2006), however, has brought with it contradictions, conflicts, and schisms, particularly around the imperfectly aligned interests of media producers and audiences.
As José Van Dijck and David Nieborg note in their critique of Web 2.0 management and business manifestos, many corporate practices effectively erode the line between “collective (non-market, public) and commercial (market, private) modes of production.” Such efforts “cleverly combine capital-intensive, profit-oriented industrial production with labor-intensive, non-profit-oriented peer production” (2009, 856). There is a considerable gap between the Web 2.0 rhetoric of happy collaboration and users’ actual experiences working with companies. On the one hand, the mechanisms of Web 2.0 provide the preconditions for spreadable media; many of the key tools and platforms through which material is spread operate according to Web 2.0 principles. On the other hand, conflicting expectations of what constitutes fair participation means that the actual spreading of media content remains a contested practice.
Taking the “You” Out of YouTube
Video-sharing platform YouTube has struggled since its inception to balance the activities of its users with the interests of large copyright holders. Founded in February 2005 and acquired by Google in October 2006, YouTube’s principal business strategy relies on advertising revenue from the attention drawn by the site’s wide range of videos (predominantly created and uploaded by users themselves). From its earliest days, YouTube has also signed revenue-sharing deals with corporate producers to distribute their videos—everything from the latest movie trailers to music videos—alongside user-created content and to provide licenses for some of the varied uses of these texts (Knowledge@Wharton 2006). YouTube has also sought to acquire, develop, implement, and refine digital fingerprinting technologies to identify texts belonging to major copyright holders and to automatically issue “takedown” notices to users presumed to have violated intellectual property law through the unauthorized uploading of videos.
Critics (Aufderheide and Jaszi 2008) have noted that automatic takedown notices fail to protect legitimate “fair use” claims, creating a “chilling effect” on a site where creative remixes of existing cultural materials have long been among the most visible and cherished contributions. However, the enforcement mechanisms and related revenue-sharing deals were developed to shield YouTube from accusations that their business rests primarily on directly or indirectly encouraging copyright infringement, a claim that Viacom leveled at the company in its 2007 legal action (Helft and Fabrikant 2007). Indeed, large media companies have sought compensation from YouTube since the site launched. (See Burgess and Green 2009; Driscoll 2007; Knowledge@Wharton 2006.) Holding users and rights holders in balance is especially difficult for YouTube given the scale of the site (as YouTube reports, more than 24 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute; see YouTube n.d.) and the diverse range of users—professional and amateur, market and nonmarket driven—who share content through it (Burgess and Green 2009).
On January 14, 2009, some YouTube uploaders found that the soundtracks to their videos had suddenly vanished. After a breakdown in licensing negotiations with Warner Music Group (WMG), YouTube had used an automatic tool to remove audio from videos featuring music from WMG artists. In a controversial post no longer available on the site’s blog, YouTube explained that removing audio shielded users whose videos would have otherwise faced an infringement claim: “Instead of automatically removing the video from YouTube, we give users the option to modify the video by removing the music subject to the copyright claim and post the new version, and many of them are taking that option” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009).
Unaware of the decision, many uploaders wondered whether they were encountering technical difficulties (Arrington 2009), while some were enraged over market forces intruding on their user-created content. One user wrote, “How does a song playing in the background of a slideshow about a colonial reenacting unit harm anyone—least of all Warner Music Group?” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009). Meanwhile, others mused that their use of the audio tracks added value for the music industry: “If we can use it then that would probably get more people to listen to the audio. It’s pretty much like us helping the artist, right?” (quoted in M. Campbell 2009).
While upsetting users, this strategy made business sense for YouTube. It provided the company a way to woo back Warner Music Group while minimizing the likelihood of further legal troubles. Indeed, as Michael Driscoll discusses, YouTube’s strategies for copyright management are generally focused on forging relationships with large copyright holders (2007, 566–567). Even though the site has expanded its “Partner Program” to “ordinary” users, promising them a cut of advertising revenues for videos that might suddenly “go viral” (Kincaid 2009), the company remains primarily focused on policing the copyrights held by large media companies for which the fingerprinting software is made available (Driscoll 2007, 566). Smaller professional and amateur producers who feel that their intellectual property has been infringed—those less likely to constitute a legal threat, to purchase significant ad inventory, or to provide licensed material—must still apply through formal channels to generate a takedown notice under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These various struggles to negotiate between YouTube as a platform for sharing and YouTube as a business model—which have taken place since the platform’s genesis—encapsulate the tensions that run throughout the Web 2.0 model. The rest of this chapter will explore those tensions in detail.
Toward a New Moral Economy
Having embraced rhetoric about enabling and empowering participants, YouTube should scarcely be surprised when users push back against shifts in the site’s policy and practice. Such shifts represent a unilateral reworking of the social contract between the company and its contributors and damage the “moral economy” on which the exchange of user-generated content rests.
The idea of a moral economy comes from E. P. Thompson (1971), who used the term to describe the social norms and mutual understandings that make it possible for two parties to conduct business. Thompson introduced the concept in his work on eighteenth-century food riots, arguing that when the indentured classes challenged landowners, their protests were typically shaped by some “legitimizing notion”: “The men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs; and in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community” (1971, 78). The relations between landowners and peasants—or, for that matter, between contemporary media producers and audiences—reflect the perceived moral and social value of those transactions. All participants need to feel that the parties involved are behaving in a morally appropriate fashion. In many cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short-term self-interest in favor of decisions that preserve long-term social relations among participants. In a small-scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to “cheat” a customer because the dealer counts on continued trade with the customer (and, the dealer hopes, the customer’s friends) over an extended period and thus must maintain his or her reputation within the community.
Economic systems ideally align the perceived interests of all parties involved in a transaction in ways that are consistent, coherent, and fair. A dramatic shift in economic or technological infrastructure can create a crisis in the moral economy, diminishing the level of trust among participating parties and perhaps tarnishing the legitimacy of economic exchanges. This moral economy might empower corporations that feel their customers, employees, or partners have stepped outside the bounds of arrangements. Or it can motivate and empower individuals or communities when they feel a company has acted inappropriately. In these contexts, both producers and audiences make bids for legitimization, proposing alternative understandings of what constitute fair and meaningful interactions. “File sharing” and “piracy,” for instance, constitute two competing moral systems for characterizing the unauthorized circulation of media content: one put forth by audience members eager to legitimize the free exchange of material and the other by media companies eager to mark certain practices as damaging to their economic interests and morally suspect.
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, 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, and, above all, their pride in a “job well done.” These craftsmen set higher standards on their own performance than necessitated by a purely commercial transaction. It was not enough to produce commodities to be exchanged for money; these were also artifacts that displayed professional accomplishments. Craftsmen performed labor that benefited others yet also created structures of self-governance on the level of the guild that helped shape the conditions of their production. (Of course, historically, guilds also sought to construct monopolies, making it harder for newcomers to enter trades, thus protecting the economic interests of their members. Though tempting, we must not overly romanticize such arrangements.) It is precisely the shift from this system in which individual craftsmen felt pride in their own labor to one in which they became anonymous and interchangeable contributors to an assembly line that resulted in the concept of “alienated labor.”
Sennett’s work is crucial to think through as we examine why participants engage in activities which may not yield them immediate financial returns or which may even cost money to sustain but which get appraised through alternative systems of value. Sennett himself cites the open software movement as an example of a modern social structure which in many ways replicates the self-motivation and shared governance of craftsman guilds (2008, 24), contrasting this system of voluntary labor with the kinds of compensating-yet-regulated performance associated with work in industrial or bureaucratic systems.
Like Sennett’s craftsmen, the millions of individuals producing videos for YouTube take pride in their accomplishments, quite apart from their production of value for a company. They create media texts because they have something they want to share with a larger audience. Certainly, as writers such as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) suggest, this process—whether the work of celebrities such as Tila Tequila or of an average teen posting videos of herself dancing with her friends—always involves some degree of “self-branding,” which can make the participants complicit in the systems of values through which commercial companies appraise their material. Users generating online content are often interested in expanding their own audience and reputation. They may measure their success by how many followers they attract on Twitter, just as television executives value the number of eyeballs their programs attract.
Yet, even if we agree that some degree of self-promotion plays a role in all communication, we must likewise recognize a desire for dialogue and discourse, for solidifying social connections, and for building larger communities through the circulation of media messages. The material emerging from DIY or fan communities provides a vehicle through which people share their particular perspectives with the world, perspectives often not represented in mass media. When audience members spread this content from one community to another, they do so because they have a stake in the circulation of these messages. They are embracing material meaningful to them because it has currency within their social networks and because it facilitates conversations they want to have with their friends and families.
We should thus describe such audience labor as “engaged” rather than “exploited.” Talk of “engagement” fits within industry discourse which has sought new ways to model, measure, and monetize what audiences do with content within networked culture (as we will examine in chapter 3). However, “engaged” also recognizes that these communities are pursuing their own interests, connected to and informed by those decisions made by others within their social networks. Perhaps this is what Terranova means when she describes the activities associated with “free labor” as “pleasurably embraced” by participants, even as they are also being commodified and “exploited” by corporate interests.
If Sennett offers us a way to frame labor that does not rest exclusively on economic relations, others have suggested ways of thinking about notions of ownership which respect the emotional and moral investments fans make in media properties and not simply the economic stakes of media corporations. Flourish Klink, Chief Participation Officer at transmedia branding and entertainment company The Alchemists, developed a statement of best practices to govern corporate relationships with a fan base. Reflecting her own involvement as a fan in debates around “free labor,” Klink contends in this “fan manifesto,”
A person who works in an office probably doesn’t own their own desk—it probably belongs to their company. But they feel like they own the desk; it’s their desk. In the same way, when you love a story, you feel like it’s your story. That’s a good thing. If you didn’t feel that way, you obviously wouldn’t care very much about the story. As storytellers, we want to encourage people to own their favorite stories. We want them to incorporate their favorite stories into their lives, to think about them deeply, to discuss them passionately, to feel like they know the characters and they’ve really been to the locations. (2011)
Klink goes on to argue that storytellers can increase their audience’s emotional investment in properties through respecting and recognizing the contributions fans make to the value of stories, thus strengthening the moral economy surrounding a brand or text. As she stresses, fans may be motivated to make creative contributions to content for many reasons—only some of which involve financial motives. Companies, she argues, are obligated to learn from and respond to fan expectations, not the other way around, since fans do not owe companies anything but rather freely give their labors of love.
The motives shaping cultural production within a commercial economy are multiple and varied; they cannot be reduced to purely economic rewards, as Richard Sennett shows us. In addition to remuneration, artists (both professional and amateur) seek to gain recognition, to influence culture, and to express personal meanings. Only a complex set of negotiations within the creative industries allow artists to serve all these various goals. The social motives for sharing media are also varied and cannot be reduced to the idea of “stealing content,” a phrase which still values the transaction almost entirely in economic terms. Within many peer-to-peer exchanges, “status,” “prestige,” “esteem,” and “relationship building” take the place of cash remuneration as the primary drivers of cultural production and social transaction. Across this book, we will explore a range of informal relationships which generate meaning through the exchange of media: economies based on reputation or status, competition and “bragging rights,” mentorship and learning, and the exchange of curatorial expertise and fan mastery. All these practices and motives are examples of an informal economy which coexists and complexly interacts with the commercial economy.
Giving Gifts, Creating Obligations
The social obligations audience members feel toward each other within audience groups may be as important for understanding how and why media spread as the economic relations between producers and audiences are (thus our emphasis later in this chapter on the concept of a gift economy). Indeed, many behaviors that have primarily been discussed through the lens of producer-audience relations look quite different when examined in terms of the relations among audience members. As Ian Condry explains, “Unlike underwear or swim suits, music falls into the category of things you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family, and friends. Yet to date, people who share music files are primarily represented in media and business settings as selfish, improperly socialized people who simply want to get something—the fruits of other people’s labor—for free” (2004, 348). Industry discourse depicting file sharers as “selfish” ignores the investment of time and money people make toward facilitating the sharing of valued content, whether individually among friends or collectively with any and all who want to download. Enthusiasts bear these costs because they feel an obligation to “give back” to their “community” and/or in the hope that their actions will direct greater attention and interest to the media they love.
When a firm moral economy exists, audiences will often police their own actions, calling out those who they feel damage the integrity of a platform or who undercut informal agreements with commercial producers and distributors. Consider, as another example, anime fans actively circulating underground copies of their favorite series with fan-translated subtitles, an activity called “fansubbing.” While their videos often attract takedown notices, fans (and some producers) view fansubbed material as mutually beneficial, demonstrating demand for properties not yet legally and commercially available. So long as the fans do not turn a profit, some content owners have chosen to overlook the use of their material in exchange for the work fans perform in testing markets and educating potential customers. According to this fandom’s moral economy, fansubs circulate when a show is unavailable commercially in their market, but fans often withdraw unauthorized copies voluntarily when titles secure commercial distribution (Leonard 2005). Mizuko Ito (2012) notes further that fans who actively participate in fansubbing refer to those who do not contribute to the community as “leechers,” an expression that signals the perceived obligations fans have toward each other to provide value within this informal cultural economy.
It’s crucial to realize that audiences and producers often follow different logics and operate within different economies (if, by “economies,” we mean different systems of appraising and allocating value). Painting in broad strokes, we might describe these two worlds as “commodity culture” and “the gift economy.” One (commodity culture) places greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (the gift economy) on social motives.
Certainly, most of us who have grown up in capitalist economies understand the set of expectations surrounding the buying and selling of goods. Yet we all also operate in another social order that involves the giving and accepting of gifts and favors. Within commodity culture, sharing content may be viewed as economically damaging; in the informal gift economy, by contrast, the failure to share material is socially damaging. We do not mean to imply that these cultures are totally autonomous; rather, at the current moment, they are complexly interwoven in ways both mundane and profound. All of us, from the poorest individual to the hugely profitable conglomerate, operate within an economic context of capitalism. And, at the same time, Web 2.0 companies—and neoliberal economics more generally—seek to integrate the social and economic in ways that make it hard to distinguish between them.
A “barn raising” might be considered a classic example of the social exchange of labor. In this nineteenth-century social ritual, established members of a community gathered to welcome newcomers and help them establish a homestead. The labor involved in a barn raising is productive, contributing real value to the new community member. However, it is also expressive, signaling the community’s embrace. Since barn raisings are recurring rituals, the value created through this labor gets passed forward to future arrivals, and thus, participation is a kind of social obligation, a repayment of contributions that earlier community members had made toward one’s own well-being. Social bonding takes place as the newcomer works side-by-side with other community members for common ends. Participants accept the unequal exchange of value through labor involved in the barn raising because the process knits the newcomer into the system of reciprocity on which the community depends for its survival. The message of the barn raising is that the community benefits when each member’s economic needs are protected.
Insert commercial logic into any aspect of a barn raising, and we alter the meaning of these transactions, creating discomfort for participants. Suppose the newcomers refused to join in on the work, seeing their neighbors’ labor as an entitlement for purchasing land in the area. Suppose the newcomers turned the productive labor into a public spectacle, charging admission for outsiders to watch the construction. Suppose the newcomers sought to sell parts of the barn to various community members, charging rents for the areas their neighbors were developing. Suppose they sold outside economic interests the rights to sell snacks and drinks to those who were laboring or sold information about their neighbors which would give these outside interests advantages in future economic exchanges. Or suppose they were to seek to use their neighbors’ labor to complete other tasks around their property or else to use the barn, once completed, for radically different purposes than the community perceived (for the sake of argument, let’s say to house a brothel). Each of these alterations would violate the spirit of the barn-raising ritual, making it less about the community’s efforts to promote its mutual well-being and more about exploiting the economic opportunities that arise as a consequence of the neighbors’ labor. Any newcomer who adopted such practices would not be welcome in the community for long, and the practice of raising barns would grind to a halt.
As absurd as such exploitative arrangements seem in the context of a barn raising, they are taken for granted in the Web 2.0 model, as companies generate revenue through monetizing the attention created by user-generated content. Web 2.0 business practices inevitably involve the exchange of labor. However, this labor may or may not be freely given. It may or may not be motivated by the desire to serve the collective interests of the participating community. It may or may not be viewed as a gift that creates obligations and encourages reciprocity. And participants may or may not benefit in intangible ways (such as enhancing their reputation or advancing their “brand”) from their participation. Over time, tapping free labor for economic profit can turn playful participation into alienated work. Insofar as the terms of this transaction are not transparent or are not subject to negotiation with all participants, they corrode the moral economy.
The concept of the gift economy has its origins in classic anthropology, dating back to Marcel Mauss’s 1922 book The Gift ([1922] 1990). There are substantial differences between the communities Mauss describes as organized entirely around gift exchanges and the digital cultures we are examining here, imbricated as they are into capitalist logics. As such, we can’t simply map one onto the other. The concept of the gift economy, however, has been adopted by digital theorists as a helpful way to explain contemporary practices, in which “the gift economy” functions as an analogy for the informal and socially based exchanges which characterize some aspects of the digital ethos.
Howard Rheingold’s 1993 book The Virtual Community, for instance, mentions the gift economy as central to relationships across the online world. Describing information as the web’s most valuable “currency,” Rheingold argues that the generalized spread of knowledge is one way of giving back to the larger community, suggesting, “When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions” (59). Richard Barbrook (1998), another early cybertheorist, argues that “network communities are […] formed through mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas,” practices that actually superseded commodity culture in the priorities of those who were the first to form online communities.
The early web was dominated by the ethos of the science community and a mindset in which researchers were obliged to address each other’s questions when they had relevant information to share. Rheingold describes this ethos less as a tit-for-tat exchange of value than as part of a larger reputation system in which one’s contributions are ultimately recognized and respected, even if there is no direct and explicit negotiation of worth at the time someone contributes. Companies were relative latecomers to the web, even though they now enjoy a dominant presence online. As commercial values have spread into the web, though, they have had to negotiate with the older web ethos.
That said, as anthropologist Igor Kopytoff (1986) reminds us, there remains a great deal of permeability in the relations between commodity and gift economies—especially within complex societies. The distinction between gifts and commodities does not describe their essence. Kopytoff explains, “The same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not another. […] The same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another. Such shifts and differences in whether and when a thing is a commodity reveal a moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions” (1986, 64). Kopytoff understands commodification to be a “cultural and cognitive process” which shapes our understanding of the objects we exchange with each other (64). Though we idealize “gifts of the heart” and “labors of love,” most gifts these days are manufactured and store bought. There is often a magic moment when we remove the price tag from what we purchased and transform it from a commodity to a gift. People do not necessarily fear that gifts’ origins as commodities diminish the sentiments expressed through their exchange, though such exchanges may never fully escape the tendency to appraise gifts at least in part on the basis of what was spent on them. Conversely, as companies talk about their desire to build “relationships” with their audiences, their transactions will be judged—at least in part—on the basis of the norms and values of the gift economy. Objects in movement—media that spreads—thus may travel across different systems of exchange, often multiple times in 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 parity. However, Sheldon is taken off guard when Penny gives him a gift of no fixed economic value—a soiled napkin—but great sentimental worth: it is autographed by Leonard Nimoy and personalized to Sheldon. What he first took to be worthless turns out to be priceless instead. When he learns that Nimoy has wiped his mouth on the napkin, Sheldon excitedly proclaims that he now possesses Nimoy’s DNA, enough that he can grow his own Spock if only he were provided access to an ovum.
Penny, obviously uncomfortable, makes it clear that she did not have such an intimate relationship in mind. It is Penny’s turn to feel uncomfortable about the “obligations” implied—or at least read from—this exchange of gifts. Sheldon retreats, only to return with every gift basket he purchased. Deciding that, even collectively, their value does not approximate the worth of the autographed napkin, he finally, awkwardly, gives Penny a hug, a gesture which is touching in its unexpectedness and which seems, at last, to bring the negotiations to their proper close. The episode offers us a comic dissertation on the differences between value (as negotiated around the exact alignment of the prices of the various gift baskets) and worth (as understood in terms of the personal meaningfulness of the gifts being exchanged).
Throughout this discussion, we have deployed a range of analogies to earlier historical practices—to the moral economy that shaped peasant uprisings in early modern Europe, to the barn raising as a nineteenth-century community ritual, to medieval craftsmen and their guilds as an alternative to alienated labor, and to the gift economy as a system of exchange in traditional societies. Our point here is not to romanticize these earlier moments in the historical relations between production and “consumption,” nor is it to depict what contemporary audiences do as somehow “authentic” and free of economic constraints. However, we also want to argue against totalizing accounts which subsume people’s social and cultural lives fully into the economic sphere: whether those associated with Web 2.0 discourse which often erase the conflicting interests of producers and audiences or those worried that the mechanisms of capitalism overwhelm any potential for us to pursue alternative agendas. In many ways, these older values of craftsmanship—reciprocity, collectivity, and fairness—continue to exert a residual influence on contemporary commercial culture, much as new forms of participatory culture can be understood as involving the application of traditional folk culture practices onto the materials of mass culture.
Part of what has given the discourse of Web 2.0 its power has been its erasure of this larger history of participatory practices, with companies acting as if they were “bestowing” agency onto audiences, making their creative output meaningful by valuing it within the logics of commodity culture. To maintain a balanced perspective, it is vital to be able to imagine alternative forms of value and meaning. Social and cultural practices operate in an economic context, but economic practices also operate in a social and cultural context. There is a relative autonomy between these spheres of activity, even as many of the practices we describe in this book are working to blur the boundaries between them. Holding onto a notion of the relative autonomy of cultural life gives us a way to critique the logic of Web 2.0, insisting on respect for prior cultural identities and practices, which often are deeply important to the communities involved.
For media properties to move from the commodity culture in which they are produced to informal social contexts through which they circulate and are appraised, they must pass through a point where “value” gets transformed into “worth,” where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment. Similarly, when a fan culture’s “gifts” are transformed into “user-generated content,” there are special sensitivities involved as the material gets absorbed back into commercial culture. When people pass along media texts, they are not doing so as paid employees motivated by economic gain; rather, they are members of social communities involved in activities which are meaningful to them on an individual and/or social level. Such movement—and the transformations that media texts undergo as they are circulated—can generate both value and worth. However, content producers and online platforms alike have to be keenly aware of the logics of worth being employed by their audiences or risk alienating those who are emotionally invested in the material.
Nothing Is Ever Free
In 2008 and 2009, the Internet buzzed about the idea of “free” things. Media giants such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation worried about services such as Google News “taking their content for free” and profiting from it (Smillie 2009). Rumors circulated about television-network-owned online video site Hulu introducing subscription models for its material, effectively cutting off the “free” stream (J. Herrman 2009). (In June 2010, Hulu indeed introduced the subscription service “Hulu Plus” [Stelter 2010].) Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote about “the economics of giving it away” (2009), and terms such as “freeconomy” popped up (The Freeconomy Community n.d.).
In an especially prominent example illustrating this “freeconomy,” rock music group Nine Inch Nails released digital copies of its 2008 album The Slip under a Creative Commons license. When physical versions were released a few months later for a fee, The Slip remained available on the band’s site as a free download. While press buzz focused on the cost of the album—its economic value—and talked about the band “giving away” its content, Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor discussed the decision differently. On the official NIN site, Reznor called the free download “a thank you” to the band’s fans for their “continued support” (Nine Inch Nails 2008), adding elsewhere, “This one’s on me” (Visakowitz 2008). Rather than “giving the album away,” Reznor was giving back to the fans for what they had already given him—their previous support and purchases—with an unspoken request that they continue to support him. What at first glance seemed to be “free” was actually a reciprocal exchange of social worth within an ongoing relationship between producer and fans.
Reznor’s efforts may be somewhat unconventional, yet the notion that no-cost exchanges aren’t truly free can be seen in types of “giveaways” with which we’ve been familiar for generations. Prior to the widespread introduction of air-conditioning, churchgoers in the U.S. once cooled themselves on hot summer days with paper fans branded by local funeral homes. Jewelry stores in shopping malls often offer services as marketing: providing “free” ring cleaning to passersby with the unspoken hope of gaining the loyalty of potential future customers. And brands—from local banks to presidential candidates—put their logos on pens, stationery, and T-shirts for “giveaways.” Those giving such gifts hope the receiver will incorporate the objects into their everyday lives, the brand regularly reminding them of the company, while the utility of the gift generates some sense of goodwill. Such branded goods also often turn users into brand promoters. In that sense, these branded goods are not “free”—there is some labor performed in exchange for these gifts. And, as people share their pens or other swag, these items become “spreadable media” themselves.
The exchange of “gifts” brings social expectations, as both Hyde (1983) and the writers of The Big Bang Theory note; as a result, not all gifts can be accepted. In that sense, there are goods and services which literally cannot be given away because we are all wary of hidden obligations, unstated motives, or covert interests smuggled inside the gift. This focus on the expectations which shape the exchange of gifts is especially important if we hope to explore how media spreads online, because many systems of peer-to-peer sharing, cooperation, and collaboration generate value through creating mutual ties, reciprocal expectations, and social “payments.”
Indeed, when we describe such goods and services as “free,” we mean that people have not purchased them with money, not that they have not paid for them via some other means. In each case, the producers and laborers working for “free” expect some form of (social) payment, and each person provides his or her time and labor under an expectation that others will contribute similarly, to the benefit of all. Understanding the popularity of many Web 2.0 platforms, then, means considering what motivates people to contribute their time and energy without expectation of immediate financial compensation—whether these motives are attention, recognition, and identity building; the development of community and social ties; the creation of a useful tool; or myriad other considerations.
Technology has made the flow of content across systems of exchange easy, allowing people to take media texts from one context and transplant them into the other without much difficulty. But, as we have already discussed with regard to disputes over terms of service or control over intellectual property rights, these transitions aren’t always smooth. This is why the clarification regarding “free” is so crucial. The use of “free” attempts to describe transactions based in reciprocity while clinging to the language of the market, obscuring the underlying social mechanisms in a way that invites conflicts and violations on both sides.
Often, commercial motives for offering a platform or text for “free” include commodifying audience labor, creating opportunities for gathering data, adding people to a contact list to be sold to marketers, or bringing together an audience to sell to advertisers (concepts we explore throughout the rest of this book). In other cases, these “free” offers generate benefits by attempting to enlist those who accept them as grassroots intermediaries or else encouraging those users to create content themselves and thus to attract greater audiences to expand the reach of a platform or brand. YouTube might offer its web platform to users at no cost, but the efforts of users to create social value through the site generates page views and data which are the basis for YouTube’s advertising and licensing relationships. As a result, these exchanges create implicit social contracts not just within the user community but between the community and the platform—contracts that, when violated, can generate a sense of being cheated, much as workers would object to having their wages changed on payday.
Toward Transparent Marketing
As companies come to terms with an online environment that records, amplifies, and proliferates the audience’s collective interpretation and appropriation of their marketing materials, and as companies try to make sense of how their material spreads in environments governed by peer-to-peer logics, those companies are spending more energy trying to engage their audiences directly. Consider, for instance, the public relations field. As noted in the introduction, “public relations” was once a term used for customer service; however, for most of the twentieth century, PR primarily stood for “press relations,” as companies sought to influence “the masses” through the intermediaries of professional journalists. Today, however, people tasked with promoting a brand are increasingly trying to bring the “public” back to public relations.
This doesn’t mean that traditional media is no longer a significant focus, since they remain a crucial and prominent amplifier in a spreadable media environment. However, suddenly, the importance of recommendations from “the average person” have become a renewed priority, and word of mouth, the original form of marketing, is treated as a new phenomenon due to one major distinction: online communication creates a textual trail of the conversations audiences have about a brand or media property which may be archived indefinitely for all to see.
If brands and media properties admit that the word-of-mouth recommendations of fellow audience members hold the greatest opportunity for influencing others, many questions remain. What implicit contracts exist between brands and those recommenders? What moral codes and guidelines should brands respect when encouraging, soliciting, or reacting to comments from those audiences they wish to reach? What types of compensation, if any, do audience members deserve for their promotional labor when they provide a testimonial for their favorite television show or company? Do some forms of compensation compromise the integrity of all involved? After all, as Hyde notes, a thin line separates gifts from bribes, but the distinction carries enormous moral implications (1983, 237).
North Carolina State University marketing professor Stacy Wood has conducted extensive research on the value people place on recommendations from everyday people and their potential impact on brands. In a world where audiences are bombarded by thousands of messages daily and where they have become incredibly suspicious of the authenticity and credibility of marketing messages in response, word-of-mouth recommendations are an incredibly important source of credible information. Brand managers and marketers have begun to capitalize on this, encouraging customers to write testimonials or to produce content recommending products. This encouragement needs to be carefully applied, however: Wood’s research suggests that, when customers are provided rewards for writing about their experiences, they often exaggerate, resulting in less genuine testimonials that no one (even the recommenders themselves) trusts. As Wood elaborates further in our enhanced book,
Firms must be careful to create a testimonial-giving space that is clearly not linked to prizes or other financial benefits, a space that highlights the voluntary nature of testimonial contributions. In this way, the facilitation of consumer engagement and testimonials must occur in the social economy (moral/gift) rather than in a traditional commodity-based economy. This acts as a signal of credibility, not only to the testimonial writer but also to other consumers who read the resulting testimonies.
As marketing disciplines tackle how best to encourage participation while still sounding bona fide, two buzzwords have consistently appeared in popular literature surrounding Web 2.0: “transparency” and “authenticity.” Both of these words have deep histories in various disciplines. In current Web 2.0 business rhetoric, “transparency” refers to the degree to which brands and audience members alike are forthcoming about their ties to one another, ensuring that potential customers have access to all the information needed to assess the credibility of a recommendation. Meanwhile, in the recent parlance of marketing, “authenticity” represents the overall assessment of the credibility of a brand or audience member. Here, the test of authenticity asks, Is the messenger being fully transparent? Is this piece of content or recommendation consistent with what is known about and expected from the messenger? And does the messenger genuinely have the knowledge, experience, and credentials necessary to back up the message?
Both these concepts are crucial to the moral economy presented in this chapter. Taken together, they help to establish “trust” among participants in an economic transaction, and they remain crucial as producers/advertisers and their audiences renegotiate relations managed by the logics of the gift economy. As companies seek to sustain and encourage supportive word of mouth, however, their transparency and authenticity is often brought into question.
In the past few years, corporate communicators have repeatedly been caught speaking as if they were unpaid customers or fan reviewers. Such practices are labeled “astroturf”—that is, fake grassroots. Few examples of astroturfing angered people more than a 2006 campaign from Zipatoni for Sony centered on “All I Want for Xmas Is a PSP,” a site portrayed as the creation of two teenage fans to convince their parents to buy them a Sony PlayStation Portable gaming system for Christmas. When gamers discovered that the videos from the blog were hosted on Zipatoni’s servers, the site was outed as astroturf. This discovery made the site “viral” (at least in the sense that it made those who came into contact with it sick), as myriad gamers saw the situation as an example of Sony’s disrespect for the gaming community. Marketers profiled the site as a “worst practice” example; watchdog groups highlighted the campaign as an example of the need for greater regulation of corporate marketing; and journalists and bloggers used the story (as we do here) to highlight missteps made by major companies (Snow 2006).
However, many examples of astroturfing are not so blatant. Take another now-canonical “lesson learned” from the public relations world: public relations firm Edelman’s collaboration with Walmart in supporting the website “Wal-Marting Across America.” A couple bought an RV and planned to blog about a trip around the country to visit their respective children. In the process, they realized that Walmart parking lots allowed for the free parking of RVs and decided their experiences could provide a unique look at the country. Since the blog series would fundamentally be about their experiences at Walmarts, however, the couple decided to contact Working Families for Walmart, an organization started by Edelman on the company’s behalf, to ensure they had the right to move forward with the project (Gogoi 2006a). Edelman and Walmart not only gave permission; they offered to support the couple, providing another RV and funding a much wider journey than originally planned.
While the impetus behind the resulting blog was truly “user” driven, Walmart and Edelman did not disclose their intervention, save a Working Families banner on the couple’s site. Thus, when bloggers and watchdog groups discovered Walmart’s and Edelman’s involvement, both the retailer and its public relations firm were the target of significant scorn. Many marketing bloggers were particularly upset that Edelman, which had been an industry leader in defining appropriate Web 2.0 strategies, would make this misstep (Gogoi 2006b). While the blog and the couple’s interest had not been fabricated, the situation was a reminder that astroturfing includes not only blatant lies but also initiatives that fail to be completely transparent.
The ethical questions that corporate communicators and audience members both face are crucial and demonstrate the challenges of a hybrid world where goods and media texts move fluidly between the logics of commodity and gift economies. What types of tie-ins or relationships must be made public? Clearly, corporate communicators pretending to be audience members or brands paying fans who speak favorably without disclosing that relationship violate the implicit contract of spreadable media. But what of bloggers who are reviewing a product provided to them by a company or fans being rewarded for their commentaries or promotional work with access to creators? In reverse, were professional marketers participating in the fan activities around Mad Men examined in the introduction inauthentic as fans because of their dual identity as marketers, as Deep Focus intimated? Did they have an obligation to be up-front from the outset about their professional identities?
Numerous questions such as these have led to consistent appeals for governmental regulators to intervene. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission updated its guidelines to require disclosure of paid relationships in 2009, sparking discussion among marketers and bloggers alike. While most agreed on the general need for policing unscrupulous behaviors, some bloggers questioned how to handle many of the less clear issues that could lead to their violating guidelines unknowingly. Online journalists questioned whether overly restrictive rules could target too wide a swath of online commentary in the interest of prohibiting unscrupulous behaviors. And some industry leaders felt that government-mandated rules rather than industry guidelines and self-policing could lead to overly onerous restrictions that would create a chilling factor among marketers. Do the guidelines encourage companies to persist in a broadcast-era mentality for fear that collaborating with audiences could lead to legal vulnerability?
What’s certain is that media producers and brands are becoming increasingly cognizant of the potential for profit and promotion in embracing “spreadable media.” However, there exists a strong need for a more nuanced discussion of the economic implications behind Web 2.0. Already, prominent communities are finding themselves increasingly barraged by marketers looking to create a “viral phenomenon” or to generate word of mouth. The “mommy blogger” community, prominent Twitterers, and active fan discussion forums are now on the target lists of marketers and public relations professionals tasked with “reaching out to influencers.” While paid journalists are monetarily compensated for their time liaising with corporate communicators, many of these audience members maintain their blogs out of social rather than economic interests: because their contributions are valued within their communities. As more brands want to foster community and “join the discussion,” brand managers, internal marketers, and the agencies and industry associations need to become better informed about the implicit and sometimes explicit assumptions audiences make about corporate participation in these conversations. Likewise, fans, bloggers, gamers, Twitterers, and other online community participants need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the implications of their new entanglements with advertisers and producers.
We Don’t Need Influencers
While public relations professionals have accepted that they can no longer just think about journalists when hawking their wares, some now contend instead that there exist a few elite members of any given community who—if convinced of a brand’s message—can convince everyone else to follow suit. We argue throughout this book that content creators need to pay attention to the audience’s agency in circulating content; however, we are not claiming that so-called influencers are more apt to be effective at circulating content than the rest of us are. In fact, the influencer is one of the major myths of the Web 2.0 world. In The Tipping Point (2000), Malcolm Gladwell based his theory of the influencer on the now well-known “Small World Problem” study (Milgram 1967; Travers and Milgram 1969), in which, through multiple experiments, Nebraska and Kansas residents were asked to get a letter to someone in Boston by passing it through social contacts they thought would be closer to the eventual target. Famously, among those instances when the letter successfully transferred, it took an average of five exchanges to get it to its intended target, or “six degrees of separation,” as it has now popularly been labeled. In his use of these studies, Gladwell emphasized that the letter eventually reached its intended target through the same few friends in most cases and argued that these “influencers” were ultimately the ones who needed to be engaged to reach the target audience.
Since Gladwell made this argument, the “influencer” has been emphasized in countless marketing case studies discussing why the attention and endorsement of key audience members is crucial for success. The argument is that the best way to reach anyone in a community is to find the few prominent people who influence most of the members. In particular, the language of the “influencer” has been used often by public relations professionals to justify the importance of reaching beyond traditional journalists to bloggers.
However, Peter Dodds, Roby Muhamad, and Duncan Watts (2003) tested such thinking by asking more than 60,000 people to reach 18 “target persons” in 13 countries by forwarding an email along to an acquaintance who might know them. Their study found a median of five to seven steps for the message to reach one of its intended targets (reinforcing the “six degrees” concept), but they did not find any evidence of “influencers.” As summarized by Clive Thompson, “[Watts] found that ‘hubs’—highly connected people—weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target” (2008). This research shifts the question from how to reach “influencers” to what social structures best support the spread of media texts. Certainly, people exercise varying degrees of influence. We all take the recommendations of trusted sources over strangers, experts over neophytes. However, that influence typically is contextual and temporal, depending on the subject, the speaker’s credibility, and a variety of other factors. Sure, there are influencers, but who those influencers are may shift substantially from one situation to another.
It’s easy to see how this concept of the “influencer” became popular alongside notions of viral marketing: both assume there is some shortcut to building interest around one’s message. In the case of viral marketing, the myth is that something inserted into the content’s “DNA” will infect people and give them no choice but to spread its messages. In the case of “influencers,” the myth is that, if a marketer reaches a very small set of taste makers, those few will bring “the sheep” along. In short, brand developers and media producers are still trying to figure out any angle of “public relations” that doesn’t require much in the way of relating to the public.
In marketer Scott Gould’s (2010) writing on spreadability, he examines the tension between “scattering” and “gathering.” Using a farming metaphor, he argues that marketers have to scatter seeds through many potential relationships and then identify which relationships develop and are worth deepening:
We don’t know which relationships will end up returning the greatest to us, which tweets return the deals, which bits of marketing make the biggest difference—and trying to carefully plant our seeds rather than scatter them neglects all the potential relationships that we could have, that we’d never normally pick. […] The conundrum is this: how do we go from a volume approach to a value approach? How do we filter all that we scatter, and know what relationships or opportunities to begin investing in with greater value?
Here, Gould rejects the influencer theory; a marketer doesn’t know at the outset which audience members might embrace a brand. Gould insists that the marketer build relationships through listening and interacting, deepening relationships with audience members when it’s contextually relevant and when both parties have common ground.
If the search for “influencers” is a vestige of a distribution mindset in an environment built on circulation, Gould’s suggestion of “scattering” content broadly and then “gathering” potential supporters follows the logic of online social connectivity: open communication that often leads to temporary and contextualized connections, a few of which might become long-term relationships. The media industries and marketing professionals must abandon the illusion that “targeting” the same nine “mommy bloggers” or a handful of celebrities on Twitter is all it takes to get one’s message circulated broadly. Such a model limits the meaningful relationships a producer or brand might build, devalues people not initially considered “influencers,” and ultimately reinforces a “one-to-many” mindset, seeking out a handful of affiliates to share a message rather than seeing it develop and build through many everyday interactions.
Moving Beyond Web 2.0 (But Not Just to “Web 3.0”)
For the media industries, for marketers, and for audiences, then, where has Web 2.0 ultimately gone wrong? Much as “viral media” pushed us toward embracing a false model of audience behavior, one which simplifies the motives and processes through which grassroots circulation of media content occurs, the language of Web 2.0 oversimplifies the “moral economy” shaping commercial and noncommercial exchanges. In the process, these terms mask some fundamental differences in how producers and audiences value what gets generated through their interactions with each other.
Web 2.0 discourse assumes that fan participation is highly generative—yielding new insights, creating new value, reaching new audiences—but the business model often isolates the resulting texts from the social contexts within which they were produced and circulated, thus devaluing notions of reciprocity. Many Web 2.0 companies have sought to assert total ownership over content generated by their fans, even after having sought to strengthen participants’ sense of personal stakes in the space. In other cases, platforms too quickly sell out user interests in order to placate the contested assertion of intellectual property claims posed by other commercial interests. All of this has contributed to a sense of instability and insecurity about the promises of Web 2.0.
Further, as companies embrace and desire to harness the credibility of customer testimonials and the recommendations of grassroots intermediaries, marketers and audiences alike must take a new set of ethical considerations into account. Brands must strike the balance—appropriately valuing and collaborating with enthusiasts while respecting both the autonomy and voice of its audiences. They must avoid crossing the nuanced ethical boundaries of “authenticity” and “transparency,” lest shortsighted marketing tactics put a company’s reputation in crisis. And they must abandon the illusion that they can effectively relate to a whole community or audience through reaching a few key “influencers” who everyone else mindlessly follows. Instead, corporate communicators must accept the complications and nuance necessary to truly engage with the public.
The flaws in Web 2.0, at their core, can be reduced to a simple formulation: the concept transforms the social “goods” generated through interpersonal exchanges into “user-generated content” which can be monetized and commodified. In actuality, though, audiences often use the commodified and monetized content of commercial producers as raw material for their social interactions with each other. This misrecognition is perhaps most profoundly expressed when companies seek not simply to “capture,” to “capitalize on,” or to “harvest” the creative contributions of their audiences but also to lock down media texts so they can no longer spread beyond their walled boundaries. In chapter 2, we will further explore the sometimes parallel, sometimes conflicting, and sometimes unrelated motives that drive the production, circulation, and appraisal of media content at the juncture between commodity culture and the gift economy.
