Digital Piracy and the Fragmentation Question

• In Event: Where and How is Television Being Revolutionized?

Abstract

This brief paper addresses the role of informal networks within television’s digital transformations. Specifically, it asks how we can understand P2P filesharing within the ongoing debate about television’s shift from a mass to a niche medium. It is widely argued that post-network television is characterised by personalisation, mobility, non-linearity, and a hitherto unprecedented fragmentation of TV audiences spread across an impossible plenitude of platforms and devices. The world of BitTorrent, in contrast, is distinctively open, flat and populist: the only constraint on availability is the demand of others (manifested through the number of “seeds”). So, is BitTorrent a driver of fragmentation or the ultimate mass platform? Does it further atomise the fragmented audiences of the post-network environment, or does it stitch them back together into a lumpy whole? Could it be that piracy is reconstituting the phantasmatic notion of a mass audience in the context of its inexorable decline?

Ramon Lobato is a research fellow at Swinburne University, Melbourne. His research explores how screen media circulates -- both legally and informally. He is the author of Shadow Economies of Cinema (BFI 2012) and The Informal Media Economy (Polity 2015, with Julian Thomas).

Author

• Ramon Lobato, Swinburne U of Technology