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