Martin Skladany

Very frustrating book. Argues that people are spending too much time as couch potatoes because big media are so addictive that we aren’t doing anything else, as if years of reception theory didn’t exist. (Late in the book, he acknowledges that creative fandom exists but suggests that it should be made socially productive by encouraging charity competitions among groups of fans, BtVS against Star Trek fans for who can donate the most/volunteer the most time; he doesn’t seem to think that actually making fanworks should be part of this process, because he wants us to stop overconsuming entertainment and get out of our basements and meet people in the physical world.) Overconsumption can surely be a problem, but he argues that getting rid of most copyright protection would remove the incentive to create addictive media, as if there weren’t all sorts of other motivations and as if cheap algorithmic generation of content wasn’t already being exploited on YouTube. (Chris Sprigman and Kai Raustiala have a paper on how they’re doing it in porn too, where copyright didn’t do much to protect the legacy industry. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3226566) As long as there’s some money to be made (or even a political payoff), the incentive to create addictive content will exist; copyright isn’t the key problem here. And he even acknowledges that when he suggests that social media could also kill Hollywood, but not in a good way because we’d all be talking nonsense among ourselves rather than making something real. He wants us to be creative, but not on Twitter. Which also ignores the Sturgeon’s Law point about creativity: 90 percent of everything is crap! You don’t get the good stuff without the crap! Relatedly, Skladany argues that we’re too used to high-quality content to be just as attracted to old/not well-funded stuff, so without copyright incentivizing new Infinity Wars movies we just won’t watch as much—but he lacks empirical support for this, and it’s probably worth noting that the production costs behind even Fortnite or most other popular games are much lower than those for blockbuster movies.… (més)