The Commodified Story
Friday, October 16, 2009 by adonohue26
Yar is concerned with how anti-piracy campaigns naturalise capitalist notions of property. His concern is understandable, but I believe that he does not go far enough in his criticism. The issue that needs to be focused on is a more fundamental one: the entertainment industry’s construction of media texts as commodified objects.
This practice, I believe, is one reason why piracy is such a prominent issue today. For years media corporations have promoted the story and the media text not as amalgamations of knowledge and artistry influenced by wider society (which, Yar suggests, they are) but as discrete, desirable consumer objects. This approach worked for the companies for a long time, but now, with the widespread use of the internet, it has backfired. After all, if a person can get such a desirable object for free via piracy, why would they choose to pay for it?
While piracy’s economic impact is relatively minor now, it is likely that it will have more and more of an impact as larger numbers of people become familiar with technology, worldwide internet speeds increase and new distribution technologies like anonymous BitTorrent are released.
This could lead to a dearth of new media texts, as many of our society’s predominant cultural forms, such as the Hollywood blockbuster, are interlinked with the capitalist system. If the system struggled, so too would they. Indeed, there are types of new media, such as the modern 3D video game, that owe their very existence to the large budgets and technological infrastructure facilitated by the capitalist entertainment industry. After all, it would be prohibitively expensive to make a game like Crysis in a non-commercial context.
Our society needs to have a frank discussion about the commodification of stories and media texts now, as ignoring the issue now could lead to serious consequences in the future. We need to either come up with a new model of media distribution, complete with new media forms, or fundamentally alter the existing model to bring it into line with new technology.
This practice, I believe, is one reason why piracy is such a prominent issue today. For years media corporations have promoted the story and the media text not as amalgamations of knowledge and artistry influenced by wider society (which, Yar suggests, they are) but as discrete, desirable consumer objects. This approach worked for the companies for a long time, but now, with the widespread use of the internet, it has backfired. After all, if a person can get such a desirable object for free via piracy, why would they choose to pay for it?
While piracy’s economic impact is relatively minor now, it is likely that it will have more and more of an impact as larger numbers of people become familiar with technology, worldwide internet speeds increase and new distribution technologies like anonymous BitTorrent are released.
This could lead to a dearth of new media texts, as many of our society’s predominant cultural forms, such as the Hollywood blockbuster, are interlinked with the capitalist system. If the system struggled, so too would they. Indeed, there are types of new media, such as the modern 3D video game, that owe their very existence to the large budgets and technological infrastructure facilitated by the capitalist entertainment industry. After all, it would be prohibitively expensive to make a game like Crysis in a non-commercial context.
Our society needs to have a frank discussion about the commodification of stories and media texts now, as ignoring the issue now could lead to serious consequences in the future. We need to either come up with a new model of media distribution, complete with new media forms, or fundamentally alter the existing model to bring it into line with new technology.