Abstract
While many studies of global media track the flows of media products internationally, Evan Elkins intelligently asks how and why companies prevent media from flowing around the world in Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture. While theoretical perspectives like cultural imperialism suggest that companies make products globally available to secure more profits and to grow international cultural power, Elkins usefully argues that media industries often prevent media from flowing globally through regional lockout practices. He writes that regional lockout is a “form of power that operates ironically by keeping media out of particular places” that runs “contrary to concerns about the invasion and proliferation of dominant culture” (p. 7–8). Regional lockout therefore functions as one of the primary frictions occurring within the global flow of media (Tsing, 2011), and Elkins masterfully tracks how these frictions play out in global media industries. Locked Out is primarily interested in tracking how these regional restrictions create and reinforce global social hierarchies as well as afford particular “cultures of use” (Turner, 2019) around different types of media globally. Elkins’ engagement with this question is timely and of critical importance to both the academic discipline of global media studies and the cultural concerns that arise in an era of media industry consolidation and globalization. It is essential reading for global media scholars, media industry practitioners, and students interested in cultural interactions globally.
Throughout Locked Out, Elkins looks at how global media frictions are not just enacted through media industry practice but also technologically encoded into specific media technologies. One of the many strengths in the book is the scope of the media examined, offering insights on multiple media industries including film and television (ranging from DVDs to streaming platforms like Netflix), video games (ranging from Nintendo Famicom to the Nintendo Wii U), and music (ranging from cassettes to streaming platforms like Spotify). Locked Out therefore offers an expansive look at media industries that mirrors recent pushes to comparatively look at similarities and differences in media industries writ large (Herbert, Lotz, & Marshall, 2019). This scope affords Elkins the ability to theorize about global media industries beyond the silos of individual media industries common to much media industry research.
Elkin’s usefully pushes global media theory forward through his conception of geocultural capital. This concept ties together Bourdeusian concepts of the social usage of cultural capital with theories of global media flows and media geography. He argues that the cultural capital given to specific geographies through regional lockout empowers those geographies culturally, writing “just as cultural capital is about social status and mobility, geocultural capital affords nations, regions, and cities opportunities to shape and participate in various global cultural economies of media, fashion, and so on” (p. 13). Geocultural capital relates to regional lockout insomuch as that “nations and regions gain geocultural capital through both the accessibility of media within their borders as well as their ability to shape what kinds of media resources are made available within their borders and around the world” (p. 13). Because of this, geocultural capital provides an explanatory heuristic that pairs nicely with Curtin’s concept of media capitals. Elkins’s theorization of geocultural capital therefore answers Curtin’s (2003) call that “scholars need to understand the historical processes and the specific institutional practices by which some cities rise to the status of global centers and other do not” (p. 204). While this theoretical intervention offers useful insight into how global media industries function, Elkins focuses his attention on how regional lockout produces geocultural capital within audiences and within national relations without fully engaging with how media industries employ this capital for their own purposes. As such, Elkins fails to fully employ geocultural capital in a way that matches his own explanatory conception of the term but provides a fruitful path forward for future research.
Elkins begins his analysis of regional lockout and geocultural capital by examining how these international restrictions emerge through a blend of technologies, distribution practices, and regulations. Elkins focuses this introductory analysis on DVD region codes. While not the first industry to incorporate regional lockout, the film industry’s use of DVD region codes offers a straightforward example of how regional lockout is constructed and employed to restrict access to media. DVD region codes divide the world into eight distinct regions. For a DVD to work, the region code of the hardware of a DVD player must match the region code of the software encoded into the DVD. For instance, Region 1 DVD players will only play Region 1 DVDs while Region 4 DVD players will only play Region 4 DVDs. This system emerged to prevent filmic windowing practices to be circumvented through the global distribution of DVDs, ensuring that viewers in one part of the world cannot watch DVDs from another part of the world earlier than the film should be available within that region. Elkins argues that the construction of different DVD regions created a global social hierarchy that clearly demonstrates the differential cultural value of nations and regions. He writes, “If there is a certain cultural cachet that comes from owning a product first, or even at all, then the staggered release dates that region codes attempt to preserve represent a hierarchy of global difference inscribed in the technical standards of the DVD” (p. 29). For instance, countries grouped within lower regions receive later distribution windows of DVDs, distribute fewer releases, and often face a lower quality of product while countries included in higher DVD region codes have a broader array of options, get media content sooner, and receive the highest quality of products. These region codes therefore offer a simple way to show how regional lockouts function as restrictive enactments of power that limit the global flows of media.
Chapter 2 expands beyond the restrictive forms of lockout examined in Chapter 1 to examine how regional lockout also produces specific outcomes. As such, he shows how regional lockout functions as a form of Foucauldian (1980) power/knowledge, where industry practice not only restricts but also produces certain social outcomes. Moving his focus to video games, Elkins argues that the lockout of certain games and consoles in different regions of the world helps to create gaming cultures globally. He notes how the conception of “hardcore gamers” is tied to questions of access to play. He argues that the ability for a person to garner cultural capital within video game culture(s) is inherently tied to their ability to access the media. As such, gamers’ ability to hack “out” of regional lockout helps gamers achieve cultural capital by showcasing both technological skill as well as industrial knowledge about what games are available where and how to access to them.
Next, Elkins moves away from examinations of regional lockout encoded into physical media and instead focuses on how regional lockout is becoming digitally encoded via code. Online platforms rely on geo-blocking technologies, where access to media is technologically determined by the perceived location of a user’s device through their IP address. Because utopian visions of the internet view it as a borderless space where the global flow of products isn’t limited by the movement of physical products, Chapter 3 looks at geo-blocking practices in video-on-demand platforms to demonstrate how regional lockout is still employed online to protect national identity and economies by media industries. While media industries recreate these industrial logics through digital code, users attempt to circumvent these geo-blocked lockouts through resistive actions such as using VPNs to access other regions’ media offerings. This chapter therefore offers insight into how convergence continues existing industry logics about regional restriction despite the globalizing technological affordances of the internet.
In his last chapter that examines a specific media industry, Elkins examines how regional restrictions may increase online through an examination of the music industry. He notes that the international flow of music has become more restrictive online despite the internet’s globalizing possibilities. Records, cassettes, and CDs did not contain technologically restrictive regional lockouts like other media industries, but the geo-blocking practices employed by platforms like Spotify and Apple Music have brought the music industry into the fold of regional lockout. Elkins traces how Spotify’s rhetoric employs the myth of global availability while simultaneously pushing music into the restrictive political economies of geo-blocking.
In his final chapter, Elkins provides insights into how global media distribution exists within informal media distribution networks (Lobato & Thomas, 2018) as a result of regional lockout. He notes that many informal media economies have emerged to counteract the restrictions of global media industries by offering region-free media to people. Elkins looks at two competing trends in region-free media. First, drawing on interviews with diasporic video store workers in the United States, he highlights how informal media economies afford the region-free movement of products to serve the needs of global diaspora. Running counter to these communal, diasporic uses of region-free media are privileged uses of region-free media that commoditize global culture in similar ways to global tourism, where culture is viewed primarily as something to be consumed and/or collected. While both perspectives value the ability to access media across the world, Elkins usefully contests that region-free media present additional questions about the ethics and utility of the movement of media products internationally, therefore concluding that neither regional lockout nor the free flow of media products allow people to escape the complexities of cultural interactions globally.
Altogether then, Elkins’ work crucially interrogates how regional lockout is enacted in multiple media industries to create global social hierarchies. While Elkins maps out this conception with both depth and complexity, Locked Out leaves open space for future expansion on his ideas and raises additional questions about how regional lockout functions in practice. As many media industries move toward streaming (Herbert et al., 2019), future research will need to further engage with how regional lockout occurs in digital spaces beyond standard geo-blocking practices. Elkins hints at this type of work, particularly in his brief discussion of “soft geoblocking” regarding differences in price by location on Spotify (p. 101). Research on “soft geo-blocking” may encompass the examination of many different types of digital affordances, ranging from what tender is accepted as forms of payment on platforms (e.g., Lobato, 2019) to how algorithms privilege certain social groups (e.g., Noble, 2018) within global media flows.
