Jonas Andersson Schwarz

The liability of politicalness: legitimacy and legality in piracy-proximate entrepreneurship

This article explores three entrepreneurial ventures that have evolved in proximity to online piracy. In reviewing the respective cases of Spotify, Skype, and The Pirate Bay, the argument outlines the radically divergent strategies with which the entrepreneurs have sought to legitimise their ventures and underlying technologies. The article concludes that: 1) the context of practices labelled ‘pirate’ are paradigmatic examples of fields in which entrepreneurs must work exceptionally hard to legitimise themselves; 2) in this context, it is crucial that the role of law is analytically isolated from the role of institutionalised legitimacy; 3) success in legitimisation is largely dependent upon the entrepreneur’s ability to demonstrate that the venture is governed by ‘the natural order’ of the economy. It is further argued that piracy-proximate ventures may contribute to the entrepreneurship field, inasmuch as they teeter on the border of being considered too disruptive, and thus suffer from a ‘liability of politicalness’.

Heuristics of the algorithm: Big Data, user interpretation and institutional translation:

Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media (e.g. laptops, smartphones, credit cards/swipe cards and radio-frequency identification) build on large aggregates of information (Big Data) analysed by algorithms that transform data into commodities. While the former technologies were built on socio-economic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, media preferences (i.e. categories recognisable to media users and industry representatives alike), Big Data technologies register consumer choice, geographical position, web movement, and behavioural information in technologically complex ways that for most lay people are too abstract to appreciate the full consequences of. The data mined for pattern recognition privileges relational rather than demographic qualities. We argue that the agency of interpretation at the bottom of market decisions within media companies nevertheless introduces a ‘heuristics of the algorithm’, where the data inevitably becomes translated into social categories. In the paper we argue that although the promise of algorithmically generated data is often implemented in automated systems where human agency gets increasingly distanced from the data collected (it is our technological gadgets that are being surveyed, rather than us as social beings), one can observe a felt need among media users and among industry actors to ‘translate back’ the algorithmically produced relational statistics into ‘traditional’ social parameters. The tenacious social structures within the advertising industries work against the techno-economically driven tendencies within the Big Data economy.

Public Service Broadcasting and Data-Driven Personalization A View from Sweden

Through an interview-based study of Swedish public service broadcasting (PSB) companies, I explore the ways in which these institutions react to and interact with a set of normative conceptions of a contemporary digital media ecology characterized by social networking and personalization of the media experience. The respondents were engaged in negotiations of how to realistically maintain public values in a commercially configured online milieu. The nature of organizational adaptation within PSB is found to be complex. Several elements of the Nordic PSB model appear to counteract acquiescence to algorithmically aided personalization: its majoritarian heritage, its institutional caution toward data positivism, favoring more interpretive editorial audience knowledge, and the high costs and structural consequences of making individual users uniquely identifiable. These organizational ambitions and obstacles are embodied in recent innovations that act to mimic a personalized delivery, however, doing so without utilizing algorithmically aided prediction and instead favoring manual editorial selection.Through an interview-based study of Swedish public service broadcasting (PSB) companies, I explore the ways in which these institutions react to and interact with a set of normative conceptions of ...

Piracy and Social Change

As guest editors for this special issue on piracy and social change, we re-engage a line of inquiry in critical media studies on popular communication begun in prior issues of Popular Communication. This journal’s previous editors and contributors have already recognized the role of piracy in altering media economics and in promoting cultural reproduction in ways that promote or suppress the popularization of certain kinds of communication. Bielby and Harrington (2010), for example, noted how piracy alters TV marketing strategies, while Baym (2010, 2011) linked piracy to a general retooling of music for export markets and Adejunmobi (2011) linked piracy to deflationary economics in national film industries. Text-centered approaches have assessed how piracy assists popular communication by increasing the diffusion and impacts of cultural texts and paratexts (Gray, 2011; Pearson, 2010). Since then, Castells and Cardoso (2012) solicited cultural studies research on the topic of piracy in another journal, the International Journal of Communication, and even more recent books on the subject (Andersson Schwarz, 2013; Burkart, 2014) add new facets to social studies of piracy. This special issue on piracy and social change presents new popular communication scholarship as seen “through the prism of world events and their underlying dynamics” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 3) and using a variety of scholarly perspectives. In much communication research, online file sharing is still approached as a novel form of media distribution and consumption, yet it underlies the rationale for the Internet protocol suite; it is now more than 15 years since Napster’s emergence as a commercial platform for file sharing (Nowack & Whelan, 2014), and infamous sites such as The Pirate Bay have entered a decade or more of existence. The turn from legal studies to critical communication literature on piracy

Piracy and Social Change: Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable discussion draws together researchers with an interest of overcoming purely juridical treatment of piracy in their work. Christopher Kelty and Gabriella Coleman consider the aspects of cyberculture, which conflictually engage with intellectual property rights, through various communities of technology practice, including hackers. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s work on fair use addresses the growing opportunities for creators in the United States to utilize the tradition in their creative fields. Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart, co-editors of this special issue, have researched user motivations and political activism around copyright and software patent reforms, partially explaining the emergence of dozens of European Pirate Parties, beginning with the Swedish Pirates in 2006.

Popular Communication, Piracy and Social Change

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creat ...

Catering for Whom? The Problematic Ethos of Audiovisual Distribution Online

The purpose of this chapter is to make some general conclusions from recently conducted fieldwork on one of the world’s most comprehen- sive, but also selective, communities for film swapping; I ha ...