Content-Type: text/html
Community Property
Community Property:
Digital Music
and the
Economic Imperatives
of
Transmission and Ritual Modes of Communication
Submitted to:
The Critical and Cultural Studies Division
of the
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
To be reviewed for Presentation
At the
Annual Conference
Miami FL
August, 2002
Mark Giese, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Communication
University of Houston
Houston TX 77204-4072
(713) 743 - 2861
(713) 743 - 2604 (Fax)
email: [log in to unmask]
3/28/02
Community Property:
Digital Music
and the
Economic Imperatives
of
Transmission and Ritual Modes of Communication
By
Mark Giese
University of Houston
ABSTRACT:
Using the evolution of the digital music-sharing phenomenon as a springboard, this talk will explore the economic imperatives inherent in two different but not mutually exclusive theoretic constructs of communication advanced by James Carey. The first construct is the transmission mode of communication, which theorizes that communication is the transmission of information from one point to another. The second, and more novel construct is the ritual mode of communication that theorizes forms of communication whose primary purpose is to strengthen communal bonds by sharing communication/communal experiences. Religious ceremonies and music are two prime examples of communication experiences whose primary purpose is not to transmit information. This talk will explore the role digital recording technologies, the Internet and the World Wide Web play in pointing out the economic conflicts inherent in these two modes of communication.
Community Property:
Digital Music
and the
Economic Imperatives
of
Transmission and Ritual Modes of Communication
Introduction: MP3s and the Napster Phenomenon
According to an article by Jon Halpin (http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/trends/0,7607,2690384,00.html) posted at ZDNET's website, 2.66 billion songs were downloaded from Napster in January of 2001. This reflects almost a one hundred percent increase from September 2000, which recorded 1.39 billion, downloads. The Napster music-sharing phenomenon grew exponentially since it was introduced in 1999. The Napster phenomenon is a combination of technological and cultural factors that are illustrative of many of the issues widespread use of digital communication technologies have raised. Napster is the common name for both a P2P (peer-to-peer) networking program and the website spawned by this program. Napster allowed the location and downloading of MP3 music files over the Internet. In order to examine the theoretical and economic issues that this program has raised a brief history of both the MP3 format and the evolution of the Napster software and website are in order.
MP3 is a common abbreviation of MPEG - layer 3. It is a compression standard promulgated by the Moving Pictures Expert Group of the ISO (International Standards Organization). MP3 is a codec (compression/decompression) algorithm that allows the compression of relatively large music files into much smaller digital files without much loss of quality. This codec is based on a perceptual model of compression. A brief history of the technical development of the MP3 format found at the found at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft website notes:
[Y]ou may shrink down the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality. Factors of 24 and even more still maintain a sound quality that is significantly better than what you get by just reducing the sampling rate and the resolution of your samples. Basically, this is realized by perceptual coding techniques addressing the perception of sound waves by the human ear.
(http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/techinf/layer3/index.html)
The original MPEG audio standard was developed by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft in the late '80s and through successive improvements evolved into MP3 in the early '90s. The development of the MP3 standard significantly reduced the bandwidth needed to transmit digital audio files over the Internet and, along with the evolution of larger and larger and cheaper and cheaper computer storage and processing capacity, made it possible - even easy - to store and playback music on desktop computers.
The ISO did not address intellectual property issues as it developed the MPEG standards. This was due in part to the fact that this wasn't its charter and in part because the possibility that there would be millions of computers that were both networked and had the processing and storage capacity to accomplish this seemed very remote. Adam Powell puts it this way:
[A]t the time (and remember this was not too long ago), it was pretty difficult to imagine a world where millions of powerful desktop computers could be linked to a gigantic network with high data-transmission rates. It was also hard to imagine people having huge storage capacities on these desktop computers - and on network machines. All of these factors needed to be built into the infrastructure for something like the MP3 phenomenon to occur.
(http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/templates/print_template.htmlt?meta=/webmonkey/99/06/index2a_meta.html)
The practice of "ripping" CDs began to grow but didn't become widespread until the introduction of the Napster software. It seems hard to imagine, given the headlines Napster has generated that the software didn't even exist until 1999. It is equally difficult to imagine that it was written by an 18 year-old college dropout. The Napster software suite is the work of Shawn Fanning. It combines aspects of several existing programs including Internet Relay chat or IRC, the file sharing functions of Windows and search and filtering characteristics of several advanced search engines. At a time when the digerati were consumed with buzzwords like e-commerce, e-tailing, B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) Shawn Fanning was inventing the new new thing: P2P - a peer-to-peer network. Napster invoked some the early less commercial, more egalitarian cultural tenets of early text-based virtual communities and combined them with an easy to use web-based interface. Th
e program Fanning wrote makes it easy for music fans of all stripes to collect and exchange MP3 files over the Internet. Time Magazine's October 2, 2000 cover story on the phenomenon notes:
Fanning's program already ranks among the greatest Internet applications ever, up there with e-mail and instant messaging. In terms of users, the Napster site is the fastest growing in history, recently passing the 25 million mark in less than a year of operation. And, as Fanning predicted, his program does everything a Web application is supposed to do: it builds community, it breaks down barriers, it is viral, it is scalable, it dis-intermediates. (Greenfield, p. 62)
Napster's phenomenal growth is only part of the reason it has caused such a stir in the popular imagination. The furor has also been fueled by the issues surrounding copyrights and intellectual property rights that the widespread use of the software suite has raised. Greenfield ends his praise for the software cited above with: "- and, oh yeah, it may be illegal" (Greenfield, p. 62). Almost from the beginning the program's popularity set off alarm bells within every sector of the music recording industry. Musicians and many of the major recording labels as well as the Recording Industry Association of America have filed lawsuits claiming infringement of copyright. The ability to make near-perfect copies of almost any type of media that digital technology enables coupled with the Internet's ability to connect fans around the globe has disrupted large media conglomerates' stable and secure grip on the reproduction and distribution of cultural products.
The Napster phenomenon has brought to the forefront of the industry's consciousness the economic implications of digital communication technologies. Napster moved the discussions of endless copies of movies and music circulating freely around the globe from the realm of science fiction into an everyday reality. The fear and loathing the recording industry shows for Napster, Gnutella and an ever-growing number of similar software products is rooted in the recording industry's economic stake in conceptualizing and conflating cultural production into cultural products. While this is an understandable stance for the industry to take and a commonly held conceptualization among a much wider public, I would argue that this conflation is based on an incomplete understanding of two differing modes of communication and the economic implications inherent in these modes of communication.
Theoretical Perspectives: Modes of Communication
In Communication as Culture (1989), James Carey made two seminal observations about the nature of and relationship between communication, culture and technology. The first was that the invention of the telegraph made it possible for a person's words to arrive at a distance more quickly than that person could actually travel to deliver those words in person. This marked the first time in human history that communication actually became distinctly different from transportation. The second was that human cultures engaged in two different modes of communication. The first was the transmission mode. He argued that the transmission mode of communication was the most common and familiar way to think about the process of communication in part because, historically speaking, the separation of transportation and communication was a very recent phenomenon. He then put forward the radical notion of a second mode of communication he called the ritual mode. According to Carey the transmi
ssion mode is "the commonest in our culture - perhaps in all industrial cultures."
It is formed from a metaphor of geography or transportation. In the nineteenth century but to a lesser extent today, the movement of goods or people and the movement of information were seen as essentially identical processes and both were described by the common noun "communication." The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages over distances for the purpose of control. (Carey. 15)
Carey argues that it is particularly easy and comfortable for us to consider the act and process of communicating as an act of transmission or transportation. In many cases not only is it easy and comfortable but accurate as well. Any communicative interaction that passes on new information - reading an instruction manual or textbook, listening to a lecture, sending (back in the day) a telegram or (today) an email might all be unproblematically characterized as trasmissive acts. Carey rightly pointed out that while we commonly think of most communicative acts as transmissional there is another mode of communication that transmits very little information. He has called this the ritual mode of communication and defines it as:
Directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs. (Carey. 18)
He notes that these two modes of communication are not mutually exclusive and indeed typically operate, to a greater or lesser degree, in tandem. As evidence he notes that, while a newspaper might most easily be thought of as an artifact "intent" upon the transmission of information, if it is considered from a ritual view that same newspaper is a cultural artifact "in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed (Carey. 20)."
Carey connects the ritual view of communication specifically with religious ceremonies but there are a wide range of secular cultural artifacts and activities that might be said to be ritual-dominant. That is to say the primary purpose of the artifact or activity is not to convey new or specific information to those who attend to such artifacts or participate in these rituals. A partial list would have to include most of today's mass-mediated entertainment products/activities such as textual fiction, prime-time television, films/video rentals, and almost any form of recorded music. All these cultural forms are more prominently geared to "the representation of shared beliefs" than they are to the transmission of specific information. If we think about the two modes of communication that have been articulated by Carey we can see that these modes have been operating in tandem across much, if not all of human history. Bureaucratic proclamations and epic poetry both carry some information and some artifice yet one would have to say that the former is "the transmission of signals or messages over distances for the purpose of control," and the latter much more oriented to "the representation of shared beliefs." One of the major differences between the ancient and medieval world and the modern or postmodern world is the role technology plays in human communication. Superficially, there are no qualitative differences betwe
en information such as stock market quotes and the information traders extracted from shipping manifests in less technological times. Superficially there are no qualitative differences between Aesop's fables and the types of morality plays available via any number of sitcoms such as All in the Family, The Simpsons, the Bill Cosby Show, or Malcolm in the Middle. Yet modern communication technologies radically alter the number of people these offerings reach and the speed with which they can be. This in turn produces qualitative changes in our societies, our sense of self and the way we conduct our everyday lives.
Recording Technologies: Cultural Performance Becomes Cultural Artifact
I would like to return to the Napster phenomenon and the recording industry's reaction to it with an understanding of these dual modes of communication in mind. It can be argued that the recording industry, in addition to conflating cultural production into cultural products, thinks of these products strictly (and implicitly since it is doubtful that recording company executives spend much time thinking about communication theory) in terms of a transmissive mode of communication. As noted earlier this is understandable in part because the industry has a huge economic stake in this conceptualization, but also because until the advent of digital media production technology and the ever-growing reach of the Internet, cultural production was indeed almost synonymous with mass produced cultural artifacts.
Cultural production, like other areas of production, underwent a transformation as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam. It became possible to mass-produce cultural artifacts. Books and other printed material came first but as other technologies of recording, transmitting and storing information were developed media of all types were soon being mass-produced. Like other arenas of production, the mass production of cultural artifacts entailed a complex production process and an equally complex set of production technologies. The ability to record images (first still then moving) and sound made it possible to turn cultural performance into a cultural artifact that could be mass-produced and distributed. As the Twentieth Century progressed it did not take long for the manufacturers and distributors of these cultural artifacts to forget that, in an earlier time most cultural production consisted of either handcrafted, one-of-a-kind artifacts such as paintings or sculptures or
ephemeral performances. The ability to record and copy these once irreproducible or ephemeral cultural productions and embody them in mass-produced and distributed cultural products elided the difference between cultural production and the cultural artifacts that were the instantiations of that production.
It was modern recording and production technologies that made it possible to conflate cultural performance into cultural artifacts. Until the advent of these industrial-age recording technologies Carey's ritual mode of communication (except for printed material like poetry and fiction) was almost always instantiated in performance rather than artifact. Music and plays come to mind most prominently. Until the industrial revolution, cultural producers were paid for individual performances. As sophisticated media technologies evolved through the twentieth century cultural producers, the artists, became the raw input material in a complex manufacturing and distribution process that culminated in mass-produced cultural artifacts[1]. Moreover, not only was cultural production distilled into and confused with the mass-produced artifacts that embodied that production but these now mass-produced artifacts could easily be commodified and widely distributed. This commodification further encouraged a conceptualization of cultural production as a transmissive mode of communication rather than a ritual mode of communication. This confusion in categorizing the mode of communication, however understandable, contributes to the media industries' fear and a
ngst over the widespread use of digital recording and distribution technologies.
It was not until the widespread use of digital communication and networking technologies that the difference between cultural production and the mass-production of cultural artifacts once again became obvious. The media industries which grew up around the mass production of cultural artifacts are in a situation analogous to an industry growing up around the sale of cups of tea in which a complex chain of manufacturing and distribution evolved around producing and selling teacups filled with tea until the producers and consumers of tea could no longer conceive of tea as something separate from the teacups it was sold in. The thing that frightens media industries so much is that digital technologies have, metaphorically, made it possible to brew tea and distribute it without using a teacup. In theory at least, artists need not be dependent on the complex manufacturing and distribution chains developed and maintained by modern media conglomerates because cultural production no lon
ger needs to be instantiated in a videotape or a CD in order to be distributed.
As useful as this analogy may be as a way to illustrate how media industries and consumers have conflated cultural productions into their instantiation as cultural artifacts, it hides the difference between a physical product such as tea or a videotape and the metaphysical nature of information. The metaphysical nature of information coupled with digital communication technologies has begun to change the way we think about cultural production. Just as there are two modes of communication, it might be argued that there are two modalities for information, proprietary information and common knowledge. These differing modalities may be thought to be more "comfortable" with one or the other of the two modes of communication. The interactions between the two different modes of communication and information that 'fits" one mode "better" that the other have economic implications. It might be useful to explore the difference between the virtual or metaphysical nature of information a
nd other commodities of a more physical nature n order to understand how and why one sort of information may be more "comfortable" in a ritual mode as opposed to a transmissive mode and visa versa.
Common Knowledge vs. Proprietary Information: Virtual Economics
In his chapter on the economics of online cooperation, Peter Kollock opens his piece with an explanation of gift economies by making a distinction between gifts and commodities which may be useful in understanding the distinction I am drawing between common knowledge and proprietary information.
Gift exchanges should not involve explicit bargaining or demands that the gift be reciprocated, but a relationship in which there is only giving and no receiving is unlikely to last. The contrast to a gift exchange is a commodity transaction, in which no obligation exists after the exchange is consummated - the bottle of water purchased at a convenience store does not create an obligation to buy something there again. A gift is also tied in an inalienable way to the giver. This is to say that gifts are unique: it is not simply a sweater, but rather the sweater-that-Bill-gave-me. In contrast, commodities are not unique and derive no special value having been acquired from person X rather than person Y - a pound of flour is a pound of flour is a pound of flour when purchased at a supermarket. Finally, gifts are exchanged between individuals who are part of an ongoing interdependent relationship. (Kollock, p. 221.)
The Napster phenomenon would seem at first glance to be a gift economy, but closer examination shows that the way MP3s are exchanged within the Napster community is a strange hybrid of these two notions. Members of the Napster community visit the Napster website and search for individual pieces of music. Any given piece of music may be available on a number of other members' hard drives. Members then select a fellow Napsterite's hard drive from which to download a particular piece of music. The exchange looks like a gift but there is no expectation of continued interaction with a specific individual within the Napster community. The file downloaded, to paraphrase Kollock is just an MP3; it is not the MP3-that-Bill-gave-me. It fits all of the definitions of a commodity exchange except there are no expectations of payment from either party thus making the transaction in some way gift. Kollock might argue that in this case the MP3s members of the Napster community exchange are m
ore properly defined as public goods.
A public good is defined by two characteristics. First, it is to some degree non-rival in that one person's consumption of the good does not reduce the amount available to another. One person's viewing of a fireworks display, for example, does not reduce what can be seen by another person. Second, a public good is to some degree non-excludable in that it is difficult or impossible to exclude individuals from benefiting from the good - one receives the benefits of a national defense system regardless of whether one pays taxes. (Kollock, p. 223)
I would argue that much of what I have been calling cultural production might come under the heading of public goods. Common knowledge most comfortably fits under the rubric of the ritual mode of communication in part because it is indeed common in the sense that this is knowledge that is a common or communal resource that is freely circulated. It also fits the definition of public goods in that it is both non-rival and non-excludable. In fact James Carey argues that these virtual public goods, this common knowledge is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of social structure especially over time.
All human activity is such an exercise (can one resist the word "ritual"?) in squaring the circle. We first produce the world by symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced. We not only produce reality but we must likewise maintain what we have produced, for there are always new generations coming along for whom our productions are incipiently problematic and for whom reality must be regenerated and made authoritative. Reality must be repaired for it consistently breaks down. (Carey, p. 30)
There is a vast range of cultural production that we, and indeed all societies, use to maintain the common knowledge that is our social structure. Much of this cultural production most comfortably resides within Carey's ritual mode of communication and is comprised in the main by music, paintings, sculpture and other so-called "fine arts," photographs as well as plays and movies and advertisements whether they appear in magazines, on billboards or on television. These are, regardless of the medium, essentially stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we should be both individually and collectively. In the absence of the free circulation of these narratives, this common knowledge, community withers and dies.
In contrast, let us explore the notion of proprietary information a little more fully. It is perhaps telling that much of what is written about new media and digital communication technologies uses the term information in a generic and all-encompassing way. As noted above, much, if not all, cultural production tends to be more comfortable in the ritual mode. While ritual information is indeed widely circulated, it is not generally thought to contain new or useful information. Much of this common knowledge is characterized as entertainment and thought of as material that should be engaged in as a leisure activity. On the other hand, information, intellectual property or more properly proprietary information is something that is thought to be more properly used and closely held - out of circulation or in restricted circulation. Knowledge has always been power. Or more properly, proprietary information is held closely precisely because it conveys to its possessor some sort of advantage - military, political or economic. Vincent Mosco characterizes information
as a unique sort of raw material.
[I]nformation is a valuable raw material in its own right and something that adds value to existing factors of production labour, capital and other raw materials. According to this view, information possesses unique characteristics that distinguish it from other resources, preeminently, that information is non-depletable - it can be used, but not used up. (Mosco, p. 23.)
Inherent in this characterization is the notion that, as a raw material albeit an insubstantial one, information is a commodity, but, because it "can be used but not used up," it must be closely held - kept proprietary - in order for it to retain its economic value. Holders of proprietary information, whether individual or corporate, are in a situation similar to early users of wireless telegraphy. The technology of the wireless was radiational and omni-directional meaning that anyone with the proper equipment could receive wireless signals. Nevertheless users of the wireless overlaid the conceptual model of the telegraph upon this new technology and used it in a point-to-point mode. This caused wireless users to devise elaborate codes to solve the "problem" of using a radiational technology in a point-to-point mode. Patents and copyrights have traditionally the methods used to protect ownership rights for intellectual property. Laurie Thomas Lee defines intellectual proper
ty this way:
Intellectual property essentially encompasses the intangible mental work products of authors and creators and includes writings, trade symbols, processes, and secrets. Unlike most tangible goods, information rights exist separately from any particular copy of the information, permitting the owner to maintain rights to the work while distributing copies. Property rights may also be spread across several individuals or organizations. (Lee, p.149)
The delineation of intellectual property using patent and copyrights is a strategy similar to the use of secret codes when using radiational technologies in a point-to-point mode. Note that this definition specifically differentiates between the information designated as property and the physical manifestations of that information in tangible copies. We will also return the notion of corporate ownership of intellectual property rights outlined in this definition because it will be important in understanding the nature of the cultural producer's role as raw material or a resource in the complex chain of manufacturing cultural artifacts. However we must first explore how information (as opposed to cultural production or ritual communication) acquires and retains value.
In order for proprietary information to retain its value some method needs to be devised to exclude unauthorized access. According to Mosco, information can only become a commodity or proprietary information - that is to say subject to ownership - after two conditions have been met. First buyers and sellers must be able to define what it is "preferably in a precise, quantitative form." The second is to be able determine when an exchange has been consummated and ways to measure the exchange. Mosco adds that the intangible and fleeting nature of information has made these two conditions difficult to meet. He goes on to note that print marks the beginning of our ability to meet these conditions. (Mosco, p. 26) Significantly, he does not comment on the notion that books are the physical instantiation of information. Notice also that he inherently characterizes information as useful. This leads inevitably to a transmissive view of information - the notion that it can be moved from one point to another and that it can be measured, bought and sold. Contrast this with Carey's radiational characterization of ritual communication and the notion that it must be shared in order to be valuable. Mosco certainly feels that digital technologies meet the necessary condition of being able to measure and meter this intangible resource.
The reduction of information to a common digital code and the ability to process and transmit this coded information instantaneously make it possible to measure information and monitor information transactions with considerable quantitative precision. These developments have augmented the possibilities for packaging and repackaging information in a marketable form. (Mosco, pp. 26 - 27.)
It is important to note that Mosco focuses on aspects of digital information that seem to emphasize metering and measuring information for purposes of bureaucratic or industrial control which conforms tightly to Carey's definition of the transmissive mode. To this end he implicitly uses a fluid metaphor. Information is measured in terms of keystrokes per employee, the number of minutes or seconds it takes to complete routine tasks or time spent for a long distance telephone call. Measurements are made to the flow of information and the measurement of this information is almost always in the service of some instrumental agency. In this conceptualization, information is metered and charged for in the same way water or electricity might be metered and charged for. Implicit in this is the notion that information is proprietary, must be controlled, and loses its value if control and metering functions are lost. He makes passing reference to the commodification of cultural producti
on: " The information and video industries can package and repackage bits of information or video material in an infinite range of marketable configurations." (Mosco, p. 27.) Key in this sentence is the idea that a cultural production or performance is synonymous with its package.
For Mosco there seems to be two kinds of proprietary information based on how control over the information is maintained. The first is related to the idea of information as a flow and is closely connected to information as a useful resource or raw material. Whether it flows downstream and is charged for by a unit of time or other measurement like bits or bytes or flows upstream and is measured in keystrokes per employee or "hits" on a web page the method of control is monitoring the flow and metering it. This is instrumental information and is most "comfortable" in the transmissive mode. The second kind of information is cultural production and performance. The method of control needed to keep this sort of information proprietary rests on an ability to control the technological aparati of reproduction which results in discrete tangible packages - books, CDs, videotapes, CD-ROMs that can then be sold as objects.
It is at this point that Lee's notion of corporate ownership in her definition of intellectual property becomes key to the economic control of ritual communication. Cultural producers in the Industrial Age have traditionally been the beginning of the manufacturing and distribution chain that results in mass-produced cultural artifacts. Cultural production has always been difficult to quantify which exempts it from Mosco's first method control - metering the flow. However, control over cultural production in the Industrial Age passed from the actual producers to those industrialists who could afford to invest in and maintain the vast complex of technology used to manufacture, reproduce and distribute cultural artifacts. Cultural producers came under the thrall of these industrialists for two reasons. First, cultural producers - artists - could not afford to acquire the technology required for the reproduction and distribution of their production. Second because of the nature of their enterprise, economic gain, while not shunned, is not typically the primary motivation for their production.
Given the time (1989) that Mosco published The Pay-Per Society, and the intellectual arena in which he makes his arguments, it is perhaps understandable that he failed to account for Moore's[2] Law in his assumptions. From Mosco's historical vantage point there was no reason to assume that over the course of the following decade computing capacity would increase immensely and, in the form of desktop computers, become common place in the United States and much of the developed world. Nor did he anticipate that Internet access would also spread rapidly and that ordinary people would make everyday use of both technologies. There was no reason for Mosco to think that control, whether that control came in the form of the ability to meter the flow information of information or that control stemmed from the ability to control the complex manufacturing and distribution chain for cultural production. The Napster phenomenon indicates that, in the case of cultural production at least, tha
t control is slipping from the grasp of large corporate media producers.
Because cultural production does not lend itself easily to the metering process, control of this manufacturing and distribution complex was (and is) essential to the media industries. The reproduction and distribution technologies condensed cultural production into tangible cultural artifacts. It is precisely this process of condensation into the physical from the virtual that allows media industries to maintain the control of this intangible resource that could be "used but not used up." It is the instantiation into the physical that allows them to "force" the manifestations of a ritual mode of communication into a transmissive mode so that it can be held proprietary and thus retain its economic value to the distributors.
The profound difference between information that is most "comfortable" in the transmissive mode and information that is most "comfortable" in the ritual mode is how the value of that information is derived. As I have repeatedly argued, in order for transmissive information to retain its value it must be closely held. In order for information that is most "comfortable" in the ritual mode to accrue value it must be widely shared. It is not until some critical portion of a community becomes aware of any given cultural production that it gains some (you should pardon the pun) currency. It is precisely because these cultural productions are more "comfortable" in the ritual mode that they need to be widely circulated in order for them to become the sort of common resource necessary to "the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs."
Paying the Piper: Incentive Structures vs. Motivations
It is this difference that makes the economic imperatives of the two modes of communication different. In a time before the industrial age of media production this work of maintenance and representation of shared beliefs was done by priests, wandering troubadours, epic poets, painters and sculptors among others. It was done in person and by hand and they were paid piecemeal and on the spot. Most importantly for this argument though is the notion that it was the cultural producer who was paid. In the industrial age of media artists and producers of ritual information were forced into the role of intellectual sharecroppers, ceding the lion's share of their productions' value to the industrialists who had the capital necessary to reproduce and distribute them to a wider audience. There is an argument to be made that this method of distributing ritual information or cultural capital that has no instrumental use and compensating artists and producers as vassals of media conglomerates is economically unjust. It is nevertheless made possible the evolution and maintenance of vastly more populous and complex social structures than were possible before the advent of industrialized media. Many might argue about the value of any number of cultural offerings available from the mass media but it would be difficult to argue that societies comprised of hundreds of millions or even billions of individuals could cohere without the wide circulation of cultural productions made possible by mass media. The key to this ability to distribute ritual information widely enough to maintain societies of such vast proportions lies explicitly in the ability to instantiate these offerings in physical form. Before the industrial age of media this was
not possible. With the advent of the age of networked digital media it is no longer necessary.
The old saying goes "he who pays the piper calls the tune." It might also be said that artists, like Tennessee Williams' Blanch Dubois in A Street Car Named Desire, have always depended on the kindness of strangers. I have noted that before the age of industrial reproduction artists were paid piecemeal and in person. In many cases this came literally from passing the hat. That was certainly true of wandering troubadours and others of their ilk but there were in fact other methods of giving artists and other cultural producers their daily bread, if not their due. Many artists worked under a patronage system. Under this model artists worked for wealthy merchant families or in the Court of some feudal King or Baron. Academics have never been directly paid for their intellectual property on a per-piece basis yet their status in the academy and their economic well being has always been (and still is) securely and undeniably linked to their ability to circulate their contribution
s to the common knowledge. Priests, under a patronage system different from that granted to favored artists, also kept body and soul together by sharing the word of God and seeing that it was widely circulated and available to all for free or at the lowest possible nominal cost.
These examples show that essentially there were three modes of payment for the production and circulation of ritual communication in the pre-industrial age. Two modes apply to production and a third to circulation. "Passing the hat" and patronage were both methods that applied to differing kinds of artistic endeavor. Passing the hat served well for performance and the "quality" of the performance and the performer were essentially judged by those present in the form of their contributions. Patronage served better for those artistic endeavors that entailed the production of actual artifacts and hinged on the ability of the artist to convince a wealthy cultural elite that their productions were unique and superior. The patron on the other hand, derived status both from actual ownership of the artist's production and from the ability to support artistic production. These two methods both served to support the production of ritual information. A third mode of payment served to
promote wide circulation of essential cultural resources. I would characterize this sort of patronage as institutional patronage.
Institutional patronage supported three classes of people, the clergy, academics and librarians. All three classes were employed because there was no technologic infrastructure in place to serve the need for the wide circulation of cultural resources and it therefore had to be accomplished more or less "by hand." Both the clergy and academics' charge was to disseminate information to other members of the culture by speaking to them. This mission was necessary due to the exceedingly low literacy rate and the paucity of books. The clergy preached the Word of God, and academics professed the contents of books they had read. Librarians on the other hand, acted as curators of the vessels of common knowledge; seeing to their storage and indexing and allowing access to authorized persons as needed.
It should be pointed that while these three methods of compensating the production and circulation of cultural materials served to provide sustenance for those engaged in these activities, the compensation was not enough to alter their relative social or economic status in their communities. The reason this is import is because it is important to remember that the motivating factors for those engaged in these activities are typically not primarily economic. Many artists, then and now, claim to work for the sheer joy of creation. Similarly, academics, librarians and clerics all profess to work more or less selflessly for higher powers or the social good rather than money. In fact, it could be argued that, while not universal, a large proportion of people engaged in these occupations are financially naive and sometimes even willfully ignorant of the economic factors that have an impact on their incomes. This is evident from the standard stereotypes of these occupations includin
g the "starving artist," the reclusive librarian, and the dowdy and "absent-minded" professor. Given this reduced economic motivation it is not surprising that, overall, most engaged in producing and circulating ritual communication are compensated relatively modestly.
The advent of modern media technologies have changed the raw income amounts but from a proportional standpoint. It is possible now for persons engaged in the production of ritual communication to earn millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Nevertheless, given that revenue from the trade in cultural artifacts is in the realm of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year, cultural producers are no better off relatively than their historical counterparts. The task of cultural circulation has bifurcated into the highly profitable trade in cultural artifacts presided over by media industrialists and the remaining realm of institutional patronage. The circulation of popular culture is presided over by the media industrialists has become very lucrative because of its industrialization. Cultural producers' status has not changed. It is the media industrialists who patronize them now, and by dint of their ability to command the technological infrastructure of reproduc
tion, control those cultural resources and reap the economic benefits. Academics, clerics, and librarians still labor under a system of institutional patronage that presides over more obscure and therefore less economically viable cultural knowledge. Even the cultural circulation conducted under this remaining institutional patronage is to some degree also dependent upon the distribution aparati of the media industrialists. As long as media industrialists control the machinery of reproduction any codification of cultural production as intellectual property works to enhance their economic control of that production.
In fact, copyright, despite its current popular conceptualization as method to encourage artistic and intellectual innovation by preserving economic incentives, was initially an instrument of governmental control of seditious information and a specific response to the disruptive impact of the printing press.
European authorities reacted to the printing press by enacting controls and censorship over the explosion of troublesome literature. (The Church's Index Expurgatorius was a sixteenth-century device, not a medieval one.) The British government at first allowed only members of a recognized guild to print, and only in the already established plants in the city of London and in Oxford and Cambridge. An act of 1643 requiring licenses for printing was protested in Milton's free-speech classic, the Areopagedca. American law adopted Milton's view of licensing publications as anathema; it is what the courts call "prior restraint" on speech, which is not allowed under the First Amendment. (de Sola Pool A, p. 330)
Despite its repressive origins, the current rationale for legal codifications such as copyrights and patent rights is explicitly centered on providing an incentive to contribute new and innovative knowledge toward the common good. These legal codifications are put in place to address the articulated concern about the non-excludable nature of public goods. Even if it were desirable, it is probably impossible to exclude every individual from benefiting from a public good.
Everyone in a group may be made better off by the provision of a public good, but that in no way guarantees that it will be produced. Because excluding others from consuming the public good is difficult or impossible, there is the temptation to free-ride on the efforts of others, enjoying a public good without contributing to its production. Of course, if everyone tries to free-ride, the good will not be produced and everyone suffers, hence the social dilemma. (Kollock p. 223)
Patents and copyrights are regulatory attempts to ensure that some economic benefit is retained despite the fact that it is difficult, even impossible to preclude access to intellectual resources. It is important to understand that these regulatory strategies rest at their foundations upon particular reproduction and distribution technologies. This has been true from the very beginning of mass media.
The concept of copyright is rooted in the technology of print. The recognition of a copyright and the practice of paying royalties emerged with the printing press. When numerous copies were reproduced in one place, it became easy to identify the source of the copies and how many had been made. That plant was the practical place to apply any control or fiscal accounting. (de Sola Pool B, p.254)
In addition to the fact that these strategies are rooted in the physical instantiations of cultural production, note that on more theoretical level they are rooted in the attempt to "force" ritual communication into a transmissive mode. The legal strategies of patent and copyright work reasonably well as long as cultural and intellectual production must be instantiated physically. The capital-intensive nature of the technological complex of reproduction makes it difficult and inconvenient to mass-produce unauthorized copies. The nature of digital media technologies changes this equation. Digital technologies reveal a previously overlooked flaw in these legal strategies that is teleologically connected to the physical instantiation of these cultural artifacts.
Because these artifacts are distributed in tangible form, the notion of First Sale arose to acknowledge that the purchaser of the artifact (first applied to books and other printed material) not only had actual control over the disposition of the artifact but had some right to the contents of that artifact. The doctrine of First Sale is the notion that, once an artifact is purchased, the purchaser can then dispose of that particular copy in any way he or she might desire. They might, for instance, sell a used book to a half-priced bookstore or to another individual without compensating the copyright holder whether that be the author or some corporate entity. They might also lend the book to a friend to read without further compensating the copyright holder. Both of these examples point up how this type of unauthorized circulation might cause economic harm to the copyright holder. The First Sale doctrine makes needed concessions to the legal strategy of copyright because it do
es not make a distinction between the physical and therefore transmissive nature of cultural artifacts as opposed to the metaphysical and ritual nature of the intellectual enterprise embedded within that artifact. The doctrine of First Sale acknowledges two key facts. First that it is impossible to track the circulation of mass-produced cultural artifacts beyond the first sale; and second, that the economic impact of such circulation to the copyright holder is negligible.
Digital media technologies change that economic equation in a radical way. The Napster phenomenon is just one example of how the doctrine of First Sale becomes an intolerable threat to media industrialists whose economic base is the sale of mass-produced cultural artifacts. Members of the Napster community and their supporters have made the argument that what they are engaged in is not rampant piracy and wanton copyright violation but rather they are merely exercising their rights of ownership of an artifact that they have legitimately purchased under the doctrine of First Sale. They argue, with some merit, that they have legitimately purchased the latest Jewel or Matchbox20 CD and therefore have the right to listen to it and share it as they please. The widespread use of multi-media capable, internet-connected personal computers makes it possible for them to share their tunes globally and massively. While the individuals involved in trading MP3 files through Napster or Gnutella
over the Internet are not profiting economically, and, in theory, are simply exercising their traditional ownership rights under the Doctrine of First Sale it is clear that the negative economic impact this has on media industrialists has increased dramatically. It is also clear that the economic advantage accrued by the ability of media industrialists to transubstantiate common knowledge into proprietary information and "force" ritual communication into a transmissive mode by condensing it into cultural artifacts is evaporating.
This upheaval has generated some rather absurd scenarios. For instance the R.I.I.A. is suing the owners of Napster claiming that it is facilitating massive copyright violations. It demands that Napster purge its servers of any and all copyrighted songs or face punitive economic fines. On another front, The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case in which the New York Times has been sued by a group of freelance writes who demand compensation from the Times for articles that they have allowed to be placed on for-profit data bases such as Lexus-Nexus. (Bugeja, B10.) The Times argument against this claim is that it would be too difficult to track down all these articles and that it would cause harm to librarians, researchers and scholars by removing from the public record valuable public information. It is ironic that one set of media industrialists cynically argue that it is in the public interest to ignore the copyrights of freelance writers when it is clearly to
their economic benefit to not pay those writers for additional uses of their work. At the same time the R.I.I.A. is equally as fervent in its insistence on strictly enforcing the copyrights of the media industrialists it represents and equally cynical in the assertion that this is only to protect the economic interests of the artists whose work is being pirated.
Common Knowledge vs. Community Property: Reconfiguring the Relationship
As the title of this paper implies, the relationship between media industrialists and the producers of ritual communication might be compared to a long and tempestuous marriage that is foundering. Media industrialists fit the role of a strong provider if not a loving husband, media artists and producers the flighty and somewhat naive wife and media consumers as willful and ungrateful children who are to simultaneously protected and indulged. It was digital communication technologies that forced this marriage onto the rock but it remains to be seen how the community property will be divided and how these three parties' relationships will be reconfigured.
Industrial (analog) methods of media production favored the commodification of cultural artifacts and set distributors up as gatekeepers because of the expense of industrial-age production equipment i.e. printing press, film and television recording apparatus, television and radio transmission apparatus, music recording apparatus. Digital technologies of production and distribution drastically reduce the cost of sharing cultural artifacts and as these technologies spread and become ubiquitous cultural artifacts can now be shared without resort to the technological apparati traditional industrial age distributors of cultural commodities invested so heavily in. It is clear that digital communication technologies are here to stay and equally clear that the widespread use of these technologies will radically alter the relationships between media producers, media industrialists and media consumers.
How do producers of cultural artifacts take economic advantage of the digital technology to become marketers and distributors of their own work? How do they reform the economic model that is based upon the notion that the value of information is derived from the fact that it is closely held to one that provides economic rewards based on how widely the cultural artifacts they produce are shared? There are several different notions about how this might be accomplished. One essentially reverts to the pre-industrial media era in which artist, musicians and other cultural producers pass a digital "hat." An example of this can be seen http://www.tipjar.com. Another possibility is some form of central clearing house for collecting payment for cultural production similar to the role ASCAP and BMI now perform in ensuring that copyright holders are compensated for the use of their intellectual property. A third alternative may be some sort of decentralized technology-based micro-payme
nt system based on the development of so-called trusted systems as outlined by Mark Stefic in his book The Internet Edge.
The role of media industrialists will play in this new digital environment no less muddy. While they have been reviled for the economic force they have exerted on cultural production and for their insensitivity to issues other than economic they have, nevertheless played an important role in the distribution and circulation of the common knowledge necessary to maintain the social cohesion of societies that span continents. The technological infrastructure of reproduction and distribution of cultural artifacts that they financed will become increasingly irrelevant and may disappear as the new digital technologies take hold. Their role as manufacturers and distributors may no longer be need by media producers and no longer necessary as a means to circulate common knowledge. They may still have expertise in marketing cultural production that is useful to the producers of ritual information and may find their economic salvation in their ability to display and entice consumers to a
ccess cultural production. They may also find roles as gatekeepers and metering agents controlling the flow of cultural information rather than the manufacture and distribution of cultural artifacts. Whatever their role becomes there will still be some period of transition defined by new media producers who find no economic benefit in relinquishing their intellectual property rights to these media industrialists. They, the industrials, will hold the copyrights of the industrial age of media but their access to and control of new cultural resources may eventually wither away to nothing. One thing is certain; they will not relinquish their economic control of cultural production willingly or easily. The legal wrangling over Napster has proven that.
It remains to be seen how these relationships will be renegotiated. It is clear, however, that networked digital media technologies have a transformative potential similar to the transformative nature of the printing press. Carl Sagan once characterized the key difference between humans and other species as humans' ability to create extra somatic knowledge - the ability to create and store information outside our bodies. James Carey has suggested that the invention of the telegraph as the historical moment communication became separate and distinct from transportation. I would like to suggest that digital communication technologies make distinct the theoretical difference between transmissive communication and ritual communication. These technologies disrupt the notion that cultural artifacts and the cultural production embedded in those artifacts are one and the same thing. These distinctions between digital media technologies and industrial media technologies are what carry the digital media's transformative potential. The transformative potential of digital media will, like the printing press and the telegraph, radically alter the way we produce and circulate the valuable cultural resources needed to maintain a coherent culture - the cultural resources that are our community property.
Notes:
It should be noted that from an historical point of view the ability to transmit information electronically preceded the ability to record that information in either analog or digital formats. An argument could be made that radio and television provide counter examples to the argument I am making about the economic consequences of the conflation of cultural production into mass-produced cultural artifact. I would argue that, though this is true, especially before electronic recording was developed, the media industrialists were forced to find an economic alternative to the sale and distribution of cultural artifacts. That alternative was advertising in which the costs of the production of these cultural performances were hidden from the consumer.
This definition of Moore's Law was found at: http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/M/Moores_Law.html . "The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades." Although this definition does not attribute it Moore is also credited with the notion that cost for producing these chips will be cut in half every 18 months as well.
References:
Bugeja, Michael J. "The Advent of Print On Demand: ...But Make Sure You Read the Fine Print." The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 30, 2001. (B9 - B10)
Carey, James W. Communication as Culture. Unwin Hyman. Boston. 1989.
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. "MPEG Audio Layer3: History" http://www.iis.fhg.de/amm/techinf/layer3/index.html.
Greenfield, Karl T. "Meet the Napster" Time. October 2, 2000. 59 - 68.
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[1] It should be noted that from an historical point of view the ability to transmit information electronically preceded the ability to record that information in either analog or digital formats. An argument could be made that radio and television provide counter examples to the argument I am making about the economic consequences of the conflation of cultural production into mass-produced cultural artifact. I would argue that, though this is true, especially before electronic recording was developed, the media industrialists were forced to find an economic alternative to the sale and distribution of cultural artifacts. That alternative was advertising in which the costs of the production of these cultural performances were hidden from the consumer.
[2] This definition of Moore's Law was found at: http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/M/Moores_Law.html . "The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades." Although this definition does not attribute it Moore is also credited with the notion that cost for producing these chips will be cut in half every 18 months as well.