Abstract
In recent years, media and communications scholars have put increasing emphasis on power structures in media industries that are undergoing fundamental change following technological innovation. Business models of traditional news and broadcast media have come under pressure as broadband and mobile Internet have made the 20th century morphology of the media industries almost unrecognisable. New platforms and players are disrupting established practices and challenging the state’s role in digital societies. A lot of this dynamic activity in global media, however, happens at the edges, or entirely outside the boundaries, of what are traditionally seen as the media industries. Reference is made to a range of informal, if not criminal, activities and processes occurring outside the official, authorised spaces of the media economy that, more often than not, stay beyond the view of the state. Since traditional approaches of economic inquiry into mass media systems – such as conventional media economics and the more critical political economy of communications – largely focus on the well-known, consolidated and regulated media sectors, they tend to overlook activities in informal, unauthorised media spaces that have a considerable impact, both negative and positive, on the operations, performance and even legitimacy of the ‘formal’ media business.
The Informal Media Economy by Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas, both affiliated with Swinburne University of Technology, provides a theoretically supported account of the workings of informal media practices such as the parallel import of smartphones, second-hand booksellers, illegal copying of media commodities and collaborative production, and helps in understanding the mutual influence, or interactions, between formal and more informal dimensions of the media economy. Whereas most approaches restrict their focus to formal players and practices, this book encompasses both formal and informal media sectors and places them on a continuum, instead of in binary opposition. As the authors argue, even the most established media companies have never been entirely formal, and undertake activities, strategies and techniques that range across the spectrum of formality. Consider YouTube, which is now a promotional vehicle for professional productions but started as a distribution system for unauthorised uploads and amateur content. Or take Google, whose operating system Android would have never become such a success without the voluntary developments in the open software community. Processes of formalisation, when informal media economies become rationalised and financially transparent due to increased state intervention, go hand in hand with processes of de-formalisation, when regulatory relaxation or overreach open up space for informal activity.
Lobato and Thomas not only discuss the degree of formality, and the often unnoticed presence of informal flows of communication, information and entertainment in our everyday media practices, but they also provide, in the first chapter, a conceptual framework to study the interactions between formal and informal media. They identify three kinds of interactions – functions, effects and controls – to think about the boundaries and linkages between formality and informality. How are informal elements used within formal media markets? What happens to the formal media economy when these informal elements are incorporated into formal systems? And how are these effects managed, organised and/or regulated? The approach is helpful for understanding change in media industries and how various parts within them interact. The framework shows the deep interdependency of formal and informal media, and refreshes critical thinking about the role of informal media in our society. Hence, it not only provides scholars, but also practitioners and public policymakers, with the necessary tools to evaluate the impact of informal media and debunks a lot of normative claims and oversimplified judgements about the overly harmful character of informal media.
In the six subsequent chapters of the book, the authors use the informal economy perspective to explore current debates in media studies and public policy from an alternative angle. In doing so, they put forward a series of original viewpoints and tackle the idea commonly held among practitioners and policymakers that informal media work is counterproductive. Chapter 2 focuses on entrepreneurship in media industries, and emphasises that many media entrepreneurs have worked across the borders of formal and informal economy, building their success on the ability to move activities and transactions from one zone to the other. Chapter 3 zooms in on the creative labour debate, and puts forward the view that creative industries are a mix of formal and informal work practices, organisational cultures and firm structures that cannot be regulated like other industries. Chapter 4 focuses on the geographic aspects of informal media trade and studies the friction of the borderless geography of digital media where everything is just one click away and real-world geographies of corporate location, infrastructure, differential pricing and tax regimes are circumvented. Chapter 5 deals with the regulation of grey markets, such as digital transport and wireless commons, and contains an interesting discussion of copyright enforcement which triggers a range of second-order activities. Chapter 6 builds on the previous chapter, and presents an analysis of illegal copying and reproduction and their impact on media brands. Finally, Chapter 7 is about how to measure informal media activities that are elusive and obscure. It holds that informal metrics are mostly driven by transparency (e.g. Bitcoin, BitTorrent), whereas formal media metrics, such as TV ratings, are characterised by opaque sources and methods due to confidentiality.
The main contribution of this fascinating book is that it focuses on informal media, which have largely been neglected in traditional media and communications research, and debunks a range of clichés about the informal media economy. By presenting a theoretical framework exemplified by compelling cases, Lobato and Thomas provide a better understanding of the many shades of grey between formality and informality in the media industries, and make clear that informal media do not automatically replace formal media. In a similar vein, this book presents a complementary approach for media industries research. It does not replace established economic approaches, but expands the toolkit of economic theories of the mass media, and increases the plurality of terms, concepts and vocabularies to describe and analyse media industries. It allows identifying new – informal – agents and players, defining a broader scope of empirical research and providing fresh insights into the workings and performance of the media industries. The book is not only of great value for academics and media scholars; chances are likely that policymakers and regulators, and by extension every citizen interested in informal economies, get inspired by reading the book. Public authorities often get confused by the friction between informal activity and (the inability of) formal regulation. However, this book makes clear that effective regulatory systems need to be grounded in a rigorous understanding of the dynamics of informal elements and how they shape, and are shaped by, formal economies. It therefore enriches how we think about contemporary (media) industries by providing a deeper understanding of the dynamics and possibilities of the informal media economy.