Response: Negroponte, Barlow, and Gilder

This week I am responding to Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and “Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net” by John Perry Barlow, and Life After Television by George Gilder

While reading the Barlow essay “Selling Wine Without Bottles” and Barlow’s discussion of how our information-age, material-based mindset concerning intellectual property cannot be applied to the digital age, I was reminded of Melissa Anelli’s discussion of how copyright infringement and intellectual property was negotiated in the early days of the Harry Potter fandom and its presence on the internet. Anelli is the webmistress of the Leaky Cauldron, a popular Harry Potter fansite. Her book, Harry, A History, details the growth and development of the Harry Potter fandom. I unfortunately did not bring my copy of the book to school with me, so I can’t quote the direct passage. However, points out that the beginnings of the Harry Potter fandom were concurrent with the internet’s rapid development as a community forum (the Y2K era). In this time, fans began making fan websites, fan art, fan fiction, etc., using names and terms from the Harry Potter books. When Warner Brothers bought the rights for the Potter films, they began cracking down on what they felt to be copyright infringement, targeting these fansites. There was a highly publicized of a twelve-year-old girl, who had started a Harry Potter fansite, receiving a “cease-and-desist” letter from Warner Brothers. Being twelve, she, quite understandably, freaked out, thinking she was about to be sued or arrested or something. There was a great deal of backlash against Warner Brothers after this, and in the ensuing months they worked out exactly how to respond to these unauthorized usages of Harry Potter names and terms.

Again, I regret that I don’t have the book with me, so I can’t precisely say what the result was; I think it has something to do with making profit, but then again I know that wizard rock bands write music about Harry Potter and sell their music for profit. In any case, I think it’s an example of companies attempting to apply the industrial-age mindset described by Barlow to digital goods in the post-information age. While the use of the name “Harry Potter,” the term “Expelliarmus,” or the image of the Hogwarts crest in fan art may technically violate the sorts of copyrights we are accustomed to using, there just seems something wrong with penalizing a pre-teen for drawing a picture of Harry Potter and posting it online. J.K. Rowling herself, I think, has spoken a bit on the topic, and said that she is glad that people find her work and her world to be a source of creative inspiration, and she does not want to stifle that or to shut down conversations. I think this sort of negotiation that has occurred within the Harry Potter fandom is indicative of the negotiations that will need to happen in all sectors of “the economy of the mind” to achieve a system that allows free exchange of ideas but also does not violate a creator’s right to their creation.

I mentioned wizard rock above, and I think that’s an example of Negroponte’s new Sunday painter. In chapter 18 of Being Digital, he says, “The middle ground between work and play will be enlarged dramatically. The crisp line between love and duty will blur by virtue of a common denominator—being digital. The Sunday painter is a symbol of a new era of opportunity and respect for creative avocations—lifelong making, doing, and expressing” (Ch. 18). Internet forums like YouTube, DeviantArt, and Etsy allow people the opportunity to, perhaps, turn their recreational arts-and-crafting into a source of profit. The internet allows them to find and appeal to niche markets—like “wrock” (wizard rock) for Harry Potter fans or “trock” (timelord rock) for Dr. Who fans. These internet platforms allow amateur artists a low-cost way of distributing their art to a wide audience, until they gain enough attention or fans to profit. This is one example of digital media’s empancipatory power, in that it creates greater freedom of expression.

I think it’s interesting how both Negroponte and Gilder note an increasing emphasis on personalization and interactivity in our new technologies. In chapter 13, Negroponte describes the way new technologies can gather very specific demographic information about an individual, such that that individual’s devices may offer him or her extremely personalized information, recommendations, and advertisements. Similarly, Gilder discusses how the television, a one-way broadcast device, is giving way to the more interactive telecomputer: “Instead of a master-slave architecture in which every receiver can function as a processor and transmitter of video images and other information” (18). This capacity for user to interact with machine, and for user to interact with user via machine is what many of the Marxist writers (Ensenzberger, Baudrillard, etc.) we read earlier wanted in order to make new media truly democratic. The fact that more contemporary writers are noticing the existence of these trends is probably a source of their optimism. If the earlier, Marxist writers prescribed interactivity as the necessary change in media, and if interactivity is in fact encouraging, contemporary writers may feel that the democratization of the media is actually in their power.

And now, for your listening pleasure, "The Bravest Man I Ever Knew" by The Ministry of Magic.