Steal This Film & the Future of GoogTube
Loading ...In the documentary Steal This Film, a variety of talking heads, mostly web 2.0 site founders and (new) media scholars, discuss the significance of file-sharing and its supposed threat to the established media industries.
WE’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE
The film begins by explaining that historically there new technologies have always provoked strong resistance from the dominant industries that stand to be undermined. When the printing press was developed and the everyman became able to produce and disseminate his thoughts, the monarchies and churches of Europe railed against it as the work of the devil because it took away their ability to control knowledge and information, and therefore, their power. Fast forward to the 1970s, when network television stations rallied against cable because they thought it too was piracy, along with the VCR.
YOU CAN’T STOP THE BEAT
So the current conflict over p2p technology is harldy new, but it has elicited an unprecedented reaction from the establishment, which is seeking criminal rather than civil recourse for piracy. But can they really shut down file sharing by suing a few big guns like Napster and Kazaa and going after individual users? The one speaker the doc features from the MPAA admits that they will “never” be able to stop p2p, but they hope to slow it down and find a way to return control to the producers of the material being shared online.
The doc goes on to explain that there are 2 primary reasons that p2p is unstoppable. First, with the development of network computers in the late 50s-early 60s, computers became decentralized. The internet is simply a global expansion of this decentralized network whose function is contingent on the reproduction of data, such that it’s impossible to simply go and shut down one central computer. You’d essentially have to go and cut every single wire. As one commentator put it, “in fighting file sharing, the entertainment industry is fighting the fundamental structure of the internet.” Second, sharing is a fundamental human urge. We are social beings who seek to create and partake in communities.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE: AN INTERNET UTOPIA?
Ultimately, the documentary explains that the conflict over p2p technology isn’t really about economics, but about power. As long as there have been new technologies, there has been a struggle over acessibility. Preventing file sharing is really preventing consumers from becoming producers, about excluding the masses, about retaining control over information and therefore over social and cultural capital.
 The documentary thus asks how will society change if p2p makes media no longer a scarce commodity and everyone into a potential creator? This is where the doc takes a slightly utopian turn, featuring the London grime scene as an example of creators who want others to take their music and rework it, who produce not because they want to be paid but because they love what they do and want to share it. In this way, the doc closes by arguing that file sharing will enable everyone to reach their potential by allowing them to consider themselves as valid creators, as masters of their own universe, part of a community where you have to create to participate.
 The documentary relates to Henry Jenkin’s article about what happens when major corporations like Google purchase p2p-based sites like YouTube. He describes the enormous outcry of YouTube users when the transaction was made, both from those who praised YouTubes entrepreneurship and those who feared it would ruin the site.
The main question Jenkins asked is an extension of the dilemma discussed in Steal This Film, namely, who owns user-generated, reproduced, and distributed content and can it be monetized? If Google and YouTube are going to profit from the material created by users, shouldn’t the users be compensated for their production, or is their contribution a kind of tax for supporting the infrastructure than enables them to create in the first place?
Jenkins cites John McMuria’s reaction to YouTube, which is mixed. On the one hand he celebrates the way YouTube enables the “interplay between different forms of cultural production,” the mixing of new and old media, and the way it allows users to garner attention to valued but under-exposed material. In other words, McMuria values the way YouTube democratizes cultural production the same way the documentary does. But he also has his hesitations about YouTube which bring into question the documentary’s utopian view of p2p, namely, the persistent inequalities online. How is it that there is less racial diversity in the top 100 videos online than in the most-subscribed to broadcast networks. It seems that although YouTube holds the possibility of democracy, inequalities are recreated online, or at least are not challenged, what Jenkins calls “the Participation Gap”
The Participation Gap is a term Jenkins uses to describe the factors than inhibit some groups from participating because, in his view, even if access is free there are still barriers of cultural capital or entitlement that keep people out. Jenkins then raises the question of what diversity is about: the ability of subcultures to penetrate and influence the masses, or the ability of subcultures to reach and influence each other.
The article then cites Geoffrey Long’s take on the Google buyout, on whether it’s reminiscent of the first dot-com wave or whether their really is palpable value to YouTube. Long lists several values of YouTube, including it’s value as a brand that combined with Google’s clout could achieve new partnerships, for instance with network television. He mentions that Google’s purchase enables them to get a grip on video content, the one area they have yet to control because they don’t yet have a way to search video. By extention, the purchase presents Google with the possibility of applying the adWords principle to video, inserting targeted video adds into clips. Long then argues, in line with the documentary’s point of view, that Google-YouTube could bridge the gap between large advertisers and independent creators, for example facilitating the exposure of niche shows that don’t have enough viewers to get on TV but are still significant.
Finally, Long points out GoogTube, as he calls it, is only the most prominent instance of these kinds of partnerships, and that there are plenty other smaller fish exploring similar possibilities.
 So the question remains: can the internet escape power dynamics or will the establishment eventually gain some control over new media as they have in the past with other media?
[...] NYU: http://www.mushon.com/spr08/nmrs/02/26/201/#more-201 [...]