CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND THE DIGITAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Abstract

The Digital Rights Movement is an effort by activists and advocacy organizations to expand consumer rights in media content use. A central argument for legitimating those rights pivots on a view of culture as a participatory endeavour. This article focuses on the Movement's use of the discourse of culture and digital technology describing (1) how the Movement positions culture as necessarily participatory; (2) the role of mediating technologies in achieving a culture that is participatory; and (3) the connection of those visions to a discourse of free speech in the form of what is termed here, remix speech. The article suggests that adopting this view of culture and media consumption can result in a politics of participatory culture, where the political economic arrangements of the cultural industries and consumers are realigned.

Keywords:

• ICTs
• media studies
• social movements
• digital rights

Notes

The idea of creative and participatory rights comes from interviews with activists and advocacy groups. See, for example, Postigo 2008a. While not explicitly noted in that article they are implied in the interviews discussed there.

Cultural products meaning primarily the products of the cultural industries.

See sections below for a discussion of mashups.

In another article, I have outlined how the Movement does this by both institutional (lobbying and legal work) and extra-institutional methods. In the latter case, the Movement does this by capturing the various meanings associated with participating in mass cultural creation; capturing the meaning of user vs. consumer, fair use and as exemplified in this article the idea of ‘culture’ (Postigo, 2008a).

What I mean here by the ‘right’ technology will be explained further in the following sections. For now, right technologies should be understood as technologies whose meaning has been constructed/politicized and interpreted as supportive of user rights; technologies that realize the Movements vision of culture. The ambiguity in the term ‘right’ (as in correct and as in ‘Constitutional right’ is intended for these technologies are seen a both to the Movement. They are right in the sense that they are the proper ways of mediating cultural products and they also ensure certain user rights.

Culture jamming is a semiotic resistive tactic that often converts well known corporate/elite symbols into their meaningful opposites, undermining their intended impact and laying bare the contentious politics under their original/encoded meanings. I do not go into great detail regarding the theoretical implications of this tactic for Movements writ large. See Naomi Klien's well-known text No Logo for more on this tactic.

Interestingly, the name of the TPM system for Apple was called FairPlay, a clear reference on Apple's part that it had struck a bargain of sorts between wary copyright owners selling their goods in a digital environment and consumers who were eager to ‘rip, mix and burn’.

In previous work, I have analysed this campaign as it framed legal implications for the movement. Here I look at how the technologies were framed as facilitators of accessible culture. Together these frames build the overarching narrative of the interconnectedness of technology and culture as seen from the point of view of the digital rights movement.

Master-frames in social Movement theory are nearly ubiquitous ways of understanding or lending meaning to an issue or cultural form. In the case of this example, free speech in the United States is commonly understood as an important and universally held value.