Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

1 Where Web 2.0 Went Wrong

47 In December 2009, Capitol Records filed a suit against online videosharing 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 1 1 WHERE WEB 2.0 WENT WRONG WHERE WEB 2.0 WENT WRONG Where Web 2.0 Went Wrong 48 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-economictechnological 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. Where Web 2.0 Went Wrong 49 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 Dijk 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...