Spreadable Media. Henry Jenkins
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community-managed platforms where they could resist efforts to commodify their culture.
On the other hand, many participants are frustrated when companies offer them financial compensation at odds with the informal reciprocity that operates within some forms of peer-to-peer culture. Imagine how your lover would respond if you left money on his or her bedside table after a particularly passionate encounter, for instance. Far from accepting this reward for “services rendered,” it might well damage the intimacy of the relationship and send altogether the wrong message.
Contrasting such situations with the questions of audience labor earlier in the chapter highlights the complexity inherent in the contemporary media environment. How might we alleviate these misunderstandings if we infuse the idea of worth, in addition to our traditional reliance on value, into these discussions? How might we negotiate the range of possible exchanges—value-to-value, worth-to-worth, value-to-worth, worth-to-value—that such a vocabulary implies?
These complex negotiations of value and worth are examined in a 2008 episode of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory entitled “The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis.” Sheldon, the series’s comically maladjusted protagonist, experiences an emotional crisis when he discovers that his perky next-door neighbor, Penny, plans to give him a “silly neighbor gift” for Christmas. Sheldon’s initial reaction is one of shock and outrage: “Wait! You bought me a present? Why would you do such a thing?” Sheldon has clearly read Lewis Hyde and has a firm grasp of the meaning of gift giving in capitalist society: “I know you think you are being generous, but the foundation of gift giving is reciprocity. You haven’t given me a gift; you’ve given me an obligation.”
Sheldon’s friends, having suffered through this cycle of anxiety and recrimination many times before, delight at seeing the drama played out with a new gift giver, until their friendship “obligates” them to take their needy and nerdy friend to the local mall in search of a gift of “comparable value.” There, Sheldon confronts his distaste for the goods on offer at a Bed, Bath & Beyond–type store, finding little he thinks a woman would value. He chases a shop clerk, trying to get her to describe the social relationship implied by gifts of different economic value: “If I were to give you this gift basket, based on that action alone and no other data, infer and describe the hypothetical relationship that exists between us. […] Are we friends, colleagues, lovers? Are you my grandmother?” If the gift is a representation of a relationship, he ponders, can one read the relationship from the gift given?
In the end, Sheldon buys several gift baskets with a range of values in the hope that he can appropriately match the price range of the gift Penny bought him. He plans to open her gift first, sneak out of the room, look up the cost online, and return with something that approximates absolute parity. However, Sheldon is taken off guard when Penny gives him a gift of no fixed economic value—a soiled napkin—but great sentimental worth: it is autographed by Leonard Nimoy and personalized to Sheldon. What he first took to be worthless turns out to be priceless instead. When he learns that Nimoy has wiped his mouth on the napkin, Sheldon excitedly proclaims that he now possesses Nimoy’s DNA, enough that he can grow his own Spock if only he were provided access to an ovum.
Penny, obviously uncomfortable, makes it clear that she did not have such an intimate relationship in mind. It is Penny’s turn to feel uncomfortable about the “obligations” implied—or at least read from—this exchange of gifts. Sheldon retreats, only to return with every gift basket he purchased. Deciding that, even collectively, their value does not approximate the worth of the autographed napkin, he finally, awkwardly, gives Penny a hug, a gesture which is touching in its unexpectedness and which seems, at last, to bring the negotiations to their proper close. The episode offers us a comic dissertation on the differences between value (as negotiated around the exact alignment of the prices of the various gift baskets) and worth (as understood in terms of the personal meaningfulness of the gifts being exchanged).
Throughout this discussion, we have deployed a range of analogies to earlier historical practices—to the moral economy that shaped peasant uprisings in early modern Europe, to the barn raising as a nineteenth-century community ritual, to medieval craftsmen and their guilds as an alternative to alienated labor, and to the gift economy as a system of exchange in traditional societies. Our point here is not to romanticize these earlier moments in the historical relations between production and “consumption,” nor is it to depict what contemporary audiences do as somehow “authentic” and free of economic constraints. However, we also want to argue against totalizing accounts which subsume people’s social and cultural lives fully into the economic sphere: whether those associated with Web 2.0 discourse which often erase the conflicting interests of producers and audiences or those worried that the mechanisms of capitalism overwhelm any potential for us to pursue alternative agendas. In many ways, these older values of craftsmanship—reciprocity, collectivity, and fairness—continue to exert a residual influence on contemporary commercial culture, much as new forms of participatory culture can be understood as involving the application of traditional folk culture practices onto the materials of mass culture.
Part of what has given the discourse of Web 2.0 its power has been its erasure of this larger history of participatory practices, with companies acting as if they were “bestowing” agency onto audiences, making their creative output meaningful by valuing it within the logics of commodity culture. To maintain a balanced perspective, it is vital to be able to imagine alternative forms of value and meaning. Social and cultural practices operate in an economic context, but economic practices also operate in a social and cultural context. There is a relative autonomy between these spheres of activity, even as many of the practices we describe in this book are working to blur the boundaries between them. Holding onto a notion of the relative autonomy of cultural life gives us a way to critique the logic of Web 2.0, insisting on respect for prior cultural identities and practices, which often are deeply important to the communities involved.
For media properties to move from the commodity culture in which they are produced to informal social contexts through which they circulate and are appraised, they must pass through a point where “value” gets transformed into “worth,” where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment. Similarly, when a fan culture’s “gifts” are transformed into “user-generated content,” there are special sensitivities involved as the material gets absorbed back into commercial culture. When people pass along media texts, they are not doing so as paid employees motivated by economic gain; rather, they are members of social communities involved in activities which are meaningful to them on an individual and/or social level. Such movement—and the transformations that media texts undergo as they are circulated—can generate both value and worth. However, content producers and online platforms alike have to be keenly aware of the logics of worth being employed by their audiences or risk alienating those who are emotionally invested in the material.
Nothing Is Ever Free
In 2008 and 2009, the Internet buzzed about the idea of “free” things. Media giants such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation worried about services such as Google News “taking their content for free” and profiting from it (Smillie 2009). Rumors circulated about television-network-owned online video site Hulu introducing subscription models for its material, effectively cutting off the “free” stream (J. Herrman 2009). (In June 2010, Hulu indeed introduced the subscription service “Hulu Plus” [Stelter 2010].) Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote about “the economics of giving it away” (2009), and terms such as “freeconomy” popped up (The Freeconomy Community n.d.).
In an especially prominent example illustrating this “freeconomy,” rock music group Nine Inch Nails released digital copies of its 2008 album The Slip under a Creative Commons license. When physical versions were released a few months later for a fee, The Slip remained available on the band’s site as a free download. While press buzz focused on the cost of the album—its economic value—and talked about the band “giving away” its content, Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor discussed the decision differently. On the official NIN site, Reznor called the free download “a thank you” to the band’s fans for their “continued support” (Nine Inch Nails 2008), adding elsewhere, “This one’s on me” (Visakowitz 2008). Rather