The hidden demography of new media ethics

Abstract

The early years of the twenty-first century have been characterized by an explosion of new ‘configurable’ cultural forms and practices, such as mashups, remixes and machinima, enabled by rapidly proliferating global digital network technologies. These new cultural forms blur the distinctions between traditional production and consumption and have come increasingly into contrast with the letter of copyright law. In the absence of functionally relevant economic and legal frameworks, communities around the globe have developed their own ethical criteria to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate configurable practices. In the present article, the authors share data from surveys fielded in 2006 and 2010, suggesting that as these practices have become more prevalent, the ethical frameworks people employ to make sense of them have continued to proliferate and mature. Finally, we analyze the demographic profiles of respondents applying each ethical framework, revealing hidden national, class and ethnic distinctions underpinning the disparate value systems that have been employed to make sense of these new practices.

Keywords:

• social media
• media studies
• digital arts
• communication studies
• law

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Marissa Gluck and Nadia Riley for their contributions to this study, and Lauren Weinzimmer and Isaac Rottman for research assistance. This project was supported by a generous grant from the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy.

Notes and contributors

Mark Latonero is the Research Director at the Annenberg Center for Communication Leadership & Policy and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Mark holds a PhD from the USC Annenberg School. [email: [email protected]]

Aram Sinnreich is an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information. His first book, Mashed up: Music, technology and the rise of configurable culture, was released by University of Massachusetts Press in 2010. His forthcoming book, The piracy crusade: How the music industry's war on sharing destroys markets and erodes civil liberties, will be released by UMP in December, 2013. He holds a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University and a PhD in Communication from USC Annenberg. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. A PDF of the full survey instrument can be viewed at: http://aramsinnreich.typepad.com/Remix_instrument_2010.pdf.

2. Mean US survey respondent age: 45.1; Mean US adult age: 44.9.

3. Initially, the survey was intended to be fielded only to US respondents, hence the US-centric ethnic categorizations.

4. We have declined to correct the spelling and grammatical errors in the original data, in order to provide as transparent a representation of respondents' communications as possible.