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Start Date
23-6-2022 5:00 PM
End Date
23-6-2022 6:30 PM
Abstract
The global phenomenon of media piracy, in which millions of fans participate daily and routinely, is usually investigated through the lenses of copyright infringement, financial impacts to media industries, and how Global South fans access Global North content. This lecture will focus on fans and pirates in the U.S. who are marginalized because of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and/or disability, and how they regard media piracy as a practice of information and cultural access that enables their familial and community relations as well as their very survival. While scholars such as Lawrence Lessig have defended pirate and remix practices as useful for allowing presumptively white, middle-class youth to learn important technical and creative skills, other theorists, such as Kavita Philip, have claimed that piracy must be valued beyond its utilitarian value to already-technologically- and culturally-privileged users. Drawing on my interviews with a number of Black, brown, Asian, queer, poor, and disabled pirates, I argue the “paywalling” of media contributes to large-scale structures of poverty and deprivation. I show that, through piracy, U.S. minorities insist on their rights to participate on equal footing in cultural scenes and to derive the maximum personal and collective benefits from those scenes regardless of their social statuses.
The ‘General Library,’ or, Media Piracy as Minority Access, Survival, and Relation
The global phenomenon of media piracy, in which millions of fans participate daily and routinely, is usually investigated through the lenses of copyright infringement, financial impacts to media industries, and how Global South fans access Global North content. This lecture will focus on fans and pirates in the U.S. who are marginalized because of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and/or disability, and how they regard media piracy as a practice of information and cultural access that enables their familial and community relations as well as their very survival. While scholars such as Lawrence Lessig have defended pirate and remix practices as useful for allowing presumptively white, middle-class youth to learn important technical and creative skills, other theorists, such as Kavita Philip, have claimed that piracy must be valued beyond its utilitarian value to already-technologically- and culturally-privileged users. Drawing on my interviews with a number of Black, brown, Asian, queer, poor, and disabled pirates, I argue the “paywalling” of media contributes to large-scale structures of poverty and deprivation. I show that, through piracy, U.S. minorities insist on their rights to participate on equal footing in cultural scenes and to derive the maximum personal and collective benefits from those scenes regardless of their social statuses.
Bio
Abigail De Kosnik is the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media,(link is external) an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies. She researches popular media, particularly digital media, film and television, and fan studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of feminism, queerness, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies.
De Kosnik’s book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom,(link is external) was published by MIT Press in 2016. She is the co-editor (with Keith Feldman) of the essay collection #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation(link is external) (University of Michigan Press, 2019), and the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection “The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era” (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in JCMS (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. Her courses include History and Theory of New Media (a core required seminar for the Designated Emphasis in New Media), Performance, Television, and Social Media.