Collected Essays, Reviews and Associated What-Have-You.

Friday 11 March 2011

'Internet Haet Machines': New Media Terrorism and its Implications For The Music Industry


In this essay, I will examine online culture in the 'Web 2.0' era and its potential implications for the way in which music fans interact with the music industry. I will use the umbrella term 'new media terrorism' to describe a set of attitudes and actions arising from certain contemporary online cultural phenomena, the applications of which are potentially harmful to the traditional corporate media superstructure, within which most popular cultural texts are exchanged.

In their article 'The Anthropology of Online Communities', anthropologists Samuel Wilson and Leighton Peterson attest to the fact that 'information and communication technologies based on the internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices... technologies comprising the internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products' (Wilson & Peterson: 449). In light of this, a single unified online culture is understandably hard to quantify. One may as well attempt to identify and delineate a singular unified world culture of literature. If not impossible, then certainly a thankless and, perhaps, an ultimately pointless exercise. Of course, looking at online culture as an entire lived culture in zero-sum terms, excluding other cultures of which one can be a part, is problematic. There are a series of practices which share commonalities; there are modes of expression, and technical necessities which a wide cross-section of web users take part in, use, or are influenced by. For example, even at the most basic level, using a social networking site requires that you behave in certain ways as a technical necessity of its use. This gives rise to a culture of attitudes and activities.  That said, using the internet doesn't exclude other cultures of which you are a part. Rather, one's use of online culture as a lived experience functions in a layered, vertically integrated fashion. There isn't a place where 'British' ends and 'Internet' begins, for example. Internet culture's functions are closer to the uses and practices of a musical subculture; e.g. one can be American, but that will not preclude them being a 'punk-rocker' or 'metal-head'.

Wilson and Peterson assert that 'a focus on interactions that take place online, to the exclusion of those that do not is counter-productive', that 'an online/offline conceptual dichotomy is also counter to the direction taken within recent anthropology, which acknowledges the multiple identities and negotiated roles individuals have within different socio-political and cultural contexts' (Wilson & Peterson: 456). 
Users of internet culture can be said to engage in a kind of 'meta-life', one which is informed by, and informs their everyday life. The widespread use of the 'IRL' trope – an acronym for 'In Real Life' – amongst internet forum users in particular, is a telling example of this conceptual model. Users will occasionally ask questions such as, 'what do you do IRL?' or talk about their 'IRL friends', the opposite to this being 'OTI', or 'On The Internet'. As we can see, the implications of this are that many internet users see their online lives as distinct from, but not actually divorced from, their so-called 'real lives'. An awareness of this distinction is important because, as Wilson and Peterson point out, 'identities are negotiated, reproduced, and indexed in a variety of ways in online interactions, and these often cannot be understood without considering the offline content' (Wilson & Peterson: 457). They go on to quote Agre and Schuler's Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community (1999), which states that 'so long as we focus on the limited areas of the internet where people engage in fantasy play that is intentionally disconnected from their real-world identities, we miss how social and professional identities are continuous across several media, and how people use those several media to develop their identities in ways that carry over to other settings' (qtd. in Wilson & Peterson: 457) . Our online lives are not mere fantasy or pretence, but rather one in a series of constructed cultural 'selves' – net users 'become' their ideologies, a structure of beliefs and 'signifiers' governed by their will alone, their desire to 'be', their identity almost completely detached from their mundane corporeal form. It is this placement of the internet, somewhere between fantasy and reality, oftentimes occupying both positions simultaneously, that leads to the description of an internet 'meta-life'.

How does this relate to music? Put simply, it is a potentially important consideration in terms of its implications for the engagement of individuals with popular culture and its texts. The advent of the internet has meant widespread changes in the dissemination of information, and cultural exchange. The non-physical reproduction of texts has wrought significant changes to the culture industry. Now more than ever, users of popular culture have the ability to possess, exchange, modify, deface and debase cultural products, or enter the mass-market with their own artistic expression, enjoying fewer barriers to participation than ever before. 'Culture Jamming', a term introduced by American experimental sound-collage group Negativland, and discussed by Naomi Klein in her book 'No Logo', is an important example of this new engagement with the culture industry. Here, Klein talks about 'culture-jamming' as it relates to the advertising industry: 'culture-jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing... must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow... the most sophisticated culture-jams are not standalone ad parodies but interceptions; counter-messages that hack into a corporation's own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended' (Klein: 281). These principles inform a lot of what I will term 'New Media Terrorism', a tool-box of methods internet culture has developed for changing the use-value of cultural texts, and in some cases completely subverting the exchange value of same.
I want to examine three examples of NMT which I feel are of considerable import when considering the engagement of net users with the culture industry:

'Meme-ing'

The concept of the 'meme' was introduced by Prof. Richard Dawkins in his 1979 book on evolution, The Selfish Gene, and was defined by him initially as a noun which 'conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation' (Dawkins: 192). It refers to stores of cultural signifiers, or repeated and imitated tropes which take shape and are passed on via a means of cultural evolution. The 'internet meme' is a slight misuse of the term which relates to recurring themes, topics, words, phrases and images used to express certain things on the internet. The acronyms I used earlier, IRL and OTI, are examples of internet memes, as is the erroneous use of the word 'meme' to describe this practice. They are the online equivalent of idioms – turns of phrase that just seem to stick. Their use is widespread online, a popular example being 'leet-speak' (LOL, LMAO, pwned, etc.), a linguistic style which has begun to encroach into the wider cultural sphere. Another form that memes commonly take, and one which is pertinent to the discussion of popular culture, is the 'image macro', typically a picture with a humorous caption emblazoned across it in large letters, either used instead of a text response on a message board or forum, or else simply for the purpose of making other forum-users laugh. Image macros often involve pictures of celebrities or other famous people, re-contextualising the images, often to debase the public image the individuals in question put across, and internet memes in general often involve making new meaning from cultural texts, the 'star text' being no exception. The phenomenon is characterised by irreverence; anyone and anything is up for grabs, in terms of appropriation for use as a signifier of something else. The meme is an example of web users creating and propagating their own culture, a culture peculiar to the medium, a form of cultural expression which relies on the technical capabilities of the modern internet.

Mass Online Action

The sheer connectivity of the internet allows people from across the globe, and from all walks of life, to group together and act as one. Message boards and forums create horizontally-integrated networks of interest, where people can work together, either for good or for ill. The concept of 'peering', or 'peer-to-peer' collaboration, is a very powerful engine for change in the Web 2.0 era, as the 2006 treatise on the future of internet business, Wikinomics, attests. Its authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, assert that 'the new web challenges the assumption that information must move from credentialed producers to passive consumers' (Tapscott & Williams: 146). In a free and open peer environment, information is freely exchanged, and collective action is eminently possible. One example of how peering affects the music industry can be found in the case of 'Gene Simmons vs. Anonymous'.

Anonymous is a group of users of an unmoderated anime fan-site, 4chan.org, dedicated to what can only be described as 'malevolent fun', mischief, or, to use the vernacular of net culture, 'trolling'. Not much is yet written in academia about the phenomenon of trolling, but to frame it in basic terms, trolling is the action of causing distress or frustration to a person or group for the purpose of schadenfreude. Such behaviour is rampant on the internet, but Anonymous take the concept to new levels of extremity. Anything goes: racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, images of gore, pornography; they have also been known to relentlessly persecute individuals and groups who have aroused their ire. In some cases even national governments have been objects of their attention, such as the incident they termed 'Operation Titstorm', when the group attacked the Australian government's official web-pages in retaliation for new legislation curbing, and in some cases completely banning, certain web-pages being indexed by Australian web-servers. The assault took the form of 'Distributed Denial of Service' attacks, a form of computer 'hack' which floods a website with requests for information, in this particular case, several million requests per second, effectively shutting down the Australian government's online presence intermittently. The operation culminated in the Australian Prime Minister's official web-page being hacked, and defaced with hard-core pornography, from whence the name of the operation was taken. These tactics are typical of the group, and have thus far been used to attack the Church of Scientology, youtube.com and teen pop-star Justin Beiber. The group even went so far as to attack the Epilepsy Foundation of America by hacking its website and replacing its homepage with a rapidly flashing screen. It's worth remembering that this organisation is avowedly nihilistic in outlook. Most of it's members commit these acts for fun.
Gene Simmons attracted the attentions of Anonymous by declaring open war on internet users who download music illegally, saying the following at an industry conference:

'Make sure your brand is protected...Make sure there are no incursions. Be litigious. Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars. Don't let anybody cross that line...' (source: www.noisecreep.com)

In response, Anonymous used DDoS attacks on both genesimmons.com and simmonrecords.com, shutting them both down temporarily. Simmons responded:

'Some of you may have heard a few popcorn farts re: our sites being threatened by hackers. Our legal team and the FBI have been on the case and we have found a few, shall we say "adventurous" young people, who feel they are above the law. And, as stated in my MIPCOM speech, we will sue their pants off. First, they will be punished. Second, they might find their little butts in jail, right next to someone who's been there for years and is looking for a new girl friend. We will soon be printing their names and pictures. We will find you. You cannot hide. Stay tuned.'
(source: www.noisecreep.com)

In response, his websites sites were once again shut down. It remains to be seen how this war between a major recording artist, and and an anonymous group of internet anarchists and 'hacktivists' will end, but it's a safe bet that it will not end well.

The Streisand Effect
This conflict represents a textbook example of what Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com termed 'The Streisand Effect'. Originally used to mean 'perversely publicising something you are trying to keep secret' (Arthur: 6), it has expanded to denote the hyena-like behaviour of people who have been told not to do something, and their exponentially increased desire to do so. The term refers to an incident in 2003 when an aerial photograph of singer Barbara Streisand's California beach-house was published among 12,000 other images on photography website, ostensibly as a record of California coastline erosion. Streisand unsuccessfully tried to sue the owner of the site, Kenneth Adelman, for $50m, sparking widespread outrage amongst anti-online censorship activists. As a result, the pictures were viewed and copied by half a million people within a month, and the images spread like wildfire across the web.

It it interesting that many discourses on copyright and censorship in the context of the internet assume that the individuals who flout these laws have a vehemently oppositional stance to legislation designed to protect intellectual property. What is important is not what such individuals believe, but what they don't believe. In the words of Warf and Grimes in their essay Counterhegemonic Discourses and The Internet, 'the internet does not guarantee the emergence of counterhegemonic discourses, but it does facilitate the opening of discursive spaces within which they may be formulated and conveyed. (Warf & Grimes: 270)' In an age when information, including music files, can be so freely exchanged, and the music industry has taken steps to curb people's freedom to do so, it is perhaps no surprise that such discourse has arisen amongst certain concerned parties. However, it seems likely that the vast majority of internet users simply see IP legislation as an irrelevance. These people are not political revolutionaries, they are merely living a part of their lives online that would have in the past been lived in the physical realm. They do not live in a virtual reality, rather a changing one. The music that they want to hear can be obtained at no cost, at the click of a mouse. They can can choose to accept or deface the 'star text'. The power of distributed peer groups allows them to act globally on issues that concern them, but their most powerful 'push-back' method against the music industry is simply their refusal to be mediated by it to the same degree as has been the case in the past.

As a conclusion, I would like to say a few words on the state of the recording industry as of 2010, as a result of my last, and potentially most important, aspect of new media terrorism:

File-sharing.

Much has been written on the subject of downloading, and much more hand-wringing about it has been done by the popular press and leading industry figures. A briefing in the 9th of October's issue of the Economist reports that '19 out of every 20 tracks downloaded are illegal' (Economist: 90) and that 'rampant piracy means just $19m-worth of CDs were sold in China last year – about the same as in Hungary' (Economist; 90). This is leading some companies to quietly consider simply giving away recorded their recorded music, seeking to profit from it in less direct ways, such as licensing and advertising. Yet, large companies are still able to turn a very healthy profit by ramping up the costs of going to see live music; 'between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales tripled in value, from $1.5bn to $4.6bn' (Economist: 89). Illegal downloading may have all but obliterated the exchange value of recorded music, but the 'aura' (in the Benjaminite sense) of seeing one's favourite performer in time and space can never be copied and distributed to millions of fans across the globe for free, so its exchange value remains, and will remain intact for the foreseeable future.

So, it appears that internet-users may not possess the ability to completely dismantle the music industry after all, but one thing is certain: they undoubtedly have the power to profoundly change it.


Bibliography

Books
Dawkins, R. 1979. The Selfish Gene. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Klein, N. 2000. No Logo. London. Flamingo.

Tapscott, D., Williams, A. D. 2007. Wikinomics. London. Atlantic Books.

Journals
Jones, S. 2000. 'Music and The Internet'. Popular Music, Vol 19: (2), pp. 217-230

Peterson, L. C., Wilson, S. M. 2002. 'The Anthropology of Online Communities'. Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 31, pp. 449-467

Warf, B., Grimes, J. 1997. 'Counterhegemonic Discourses and the Internet'. Geographical Review, Vol 87:(2), pp. 259-274

Wilson, B. 2006. 'Ethnography, the Internet and Youth Culture: Strategies For Examining social Resistance and 'Online-Offline' Relationships'. Canadian Journal of Education, Vol 29:(1), pp. 307-328

Periodicals
Arthur, C. 2009. 'The Streisand Effect: Secrecy in the Digital Age'. The Guardian. 19th March, pp. 6

Author Unknown. 2010. Briefing: 'What's Working in Music'. The Economist. 9th October,
pp89-91

Online Resources
Debenedictis, M. Kiss' Gene Simmons Says 'Sue Everybody' Who Downloads Illegally. Available at: http://www.noisecreep.com/2010/10/28/kiss-gene-simmons-sue-everybody-illegal-downloading/
(Accessed 20 December, 2010)

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