This chapter outlines the findings of online ethnographic-style research that explores the online dissemination of East Asian cinema through English-language filesharing forums. This chapter asks how these filesharing communities function and how filesharing activity is internally constructed and policed within this context. In doing so, I argue that an examination of these forums indicates that they are about far more than filesharing alone and are imagined and constructed through the perceived existence of a shared ethos of sampling and reciprocity. During the process of imagining, the object of fandom itself fades into the background as the ‘community’ takes centre stage. Furthermore, these communities maintain ethical codes and belief systems that contribute to their process of imaging themselves as distinct from the ‘pirates’ who are constructed as solely concerned with the for-profit distribution of tangible goods.
I argue that the codes and conventions that govern these forums correspond to
Anderson’s observation that ‘communities are to be distinguished…by the style in which they are imagined’.268 As such, the act of imagining the communities in question is simultaneously born of these rules and conventions and also shaped by them. That is, it is the presumed existence of a coherent ethical stance on specific issues on the part of the forum members that allows them to imagine the boundaries of their community. In turn, it is the fact that the community is imagined according to notions of shared goals that allows the imagining of the community to transcend the confines of the registered membership of the forums and extend to include anyone, amateur or professional, who the forum members deem to be engaged in active promotion and distribution of East Asian cinema.
However, it must be noted that it is those who have the ability to shape the community rules and conventions that hold the true power within the forums. Thus, through invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, this chapter also examines how certain individuals maintain their dominance within the community and dictate the boundaries through which their community is imagined through acts of ‘symbolic
violence.’269 According to Bourdieu, ‘symbolic power is that invisible power which can be
268 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1983), 6.
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exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it.‘270 The power of symbolic power lies in its ability to construct reality in its chosen image. Symbolic power is enacted within
symbolic structures or systems (art, religion, language), which ‘can exercise a
structuring power only because they themselves are structured.’271 So, art, religion and other ‘symbolic systems’ are ‘structured structures,’ that is, they are able to govern the shape and appearance of the social world.
The chapter is split into three sections that assist in the broad mapping of the ‘field,’ in this case, filesharing forums. Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘field allows us to understand these forums as ‘social arena[s] within which struggles or manoeuvres take place over specific resources or stakes and access to them.’272 Grenfell suggests that the
exploration of any field should begin with an examination of how it relates to other fields.273 Thus, the existence of the forums within a wider filesharing ‘community’ as well as their relationship to other forms of piracy must be considered. In order to elucidate exactly how these particular communities function, and how that might correspond or contrast with other filesharing actions and communities, the first section of the chapter provides a brief history of filesharing before the findings from the two specific forums are examined in more detail. In doing so, a context is provided within which we might examine how these particular forums may be similar or distinct from other methods of filesharing and/or filesharing communities. This involves illustrating how online distribution has been understood and defined within this thesis, as well as briefly outlining what filesharing forums are and how they operate more generally. In doing so, it is also necessary to touch upon how filesharing as a phenomenon developed and how it has evolved over time. In doing so, it becomes clear that the community-based form of filesharing in evidence in these forums is but one of a range of contexts for filesharing and thus plays a key role in shaping the enactment of such activities in distinctly social terms.
As well as considering the context of the field, it must also be mapped ‘in terms of its morphology, taxonomy, and the positions occupied within it.’274 Thus, the second section of the chapter considers how symbolic power and capital are distributed and controlled
270 Ibid., 164. 271 Ibid., 166.
272 Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 1992), 52.
273 Michael Grenfell, “Working with Habitus and Field: The Logic of Bourdieu’s Practice,” In Cultural Analysis
and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives, ed.Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde, (London: Routledge, 2010), 22.
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within the space. According to Jenkins ‘the existence of a field presupposes, and in its functioning creates a belief on the part of participants in the legitimacy and value of the capital which is at stake in the field.’275 Thus, drawing on Bourdieu’s work on symbolic power and capital it is necessary to establish what is, and is not, valued within the particular field as well as the amount of capital each individual holds, and the distribution of power and capital within the wider group.
In doing so, this section considers how membership data is recorded and displayed within the forums in order to express how interactivity and participation are understood within each community. Kozinets’s categorisation of forum members into tourists, minglers, devotees, insiders and lurkers276 is employed to critically examine the variety of forms and levels of interaction that exist within both communities.277 These
categorisations are then used as a starting point to develop a new set of categories for the Chinaphiles forum, where membership is understood in terms of each member’s written contribution to the forums rather than their presumed interest in the topic. The analysis of how members interact within each forum and how membership is
constructed differently gives a sense of how these communities function and how they are distinct from one another and also other filesharing contexts. Furthermore, we can see how the more dominant forum members have the ability to ‘structure the structure’ of the forums, thus further reinforcing their own privileged positions within the
community. Through policing the activity of others by restricting membership or
exhibiting hostility toward new members, they engage in acts of symbolic violence within their communities; thus effectively dictating the boundaries of acceptable and ethical behaviour.
The final section of the chapter explores the ‘perception’ that the forum activities act as a method of sampling East Asian cinema rather than offering a direct competitor to
legitimate channels of distribution. This understanding stems from the perceived existence of a community guideline that sharing within each community should be used as a form of ‘not-for-profit’ sampling of films rather than as a replacement for legal purchases. Furthermore, this perspective is presented by many of the more ‘outspoken’ community members as representative of a specific ‘not-for-profit’ ethical code that is
275 Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, 53.
276 As well as being one of Kozinets’ categories, ‘lurker’ is a commonly used term to describe individuals who
are members of forums or message boards but do not contribute to the discussions.
277 Robert Kozinets, “E-Tribalized Marketing?: The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of
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unilaterally supported within the community. Thus, as some forum members spend time and money supporting East Asian cinema and developing extensive film collections, they believe that others within the community would feel a similar sense of responsibility towards the object of their fandom, and therefore they imagine the existence of a community-wide ethical code.
This culminates in an examination of how the community members in question are able to imagine their wider community as transcending the confines of the specific group to which they have registered membership. This imagination of a wider community is achieved through the perceived shared goal of circulating East Asian films to as large an audience as possible. As such, the imagined community of fans of East Asian cinema can include anyone who might have membership of the range of East Asian cinema websites and filesharing forums that exist online, or indeed anyone who is perceived to share the objective of promoting and facilitating the dissemination of East Asian cinema. This broadening of the imagined community allows the online distributors to include the industry as well as the fans, thus strengthening the self-perception of community members that there is a unilateral belief within their communities that their filesharing activities are beneficial and in harmony with the ultimate aims of the industry.
However, it must be acknowledged that the aforementioned ‘outspoken’ individuals maintain control over the dominant discourse within these forums and thus ultimately control the structure of their ‘imagined communities’. In doing so, these individuals are able to present the illusion that reciprocity and sampling are dominant ideas within the community, regardless of whether or not they represent majority opinion on the issues. Thus, it is not with the accumulation of symbolic capital alone that power lies, but it is the action of using that capital to influence the ethics and mores of the community, that is to ‘structure the structure,’ that enables one to have true influence within the forum.
Before launching into these discussions it is important to briefly delineate what is meant by the term ‘online distributors; and how these individuals might differ from the more general membership of the filesharing forums. The term onlinedistributor is used here to refer to people who obtain copies of films (legally or illegally) and make them available to other members of online filesharing forums. This study refers to two types of online distributor that are active on the forums in question; autonomous and intermediary distributors. I have used the term ‘autonomous distributors’ to describe those who operate largely as individuals who rip, encode and share films within a specific
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community. They are autonomous in as much as they are not members of larger ‘release groups’ who specialize in spreading copies of films through filesharing
networks. ‘Intermediary distributors’, on the other hand, may be peripheral members of release groups, or more commonly, will simply share links to films that they have found on other forums. The process of being an autonomous distributor can be complicated, and the specifics of online distribution will be elucidated further in chapter six.278
However, in order to sufficiently map the field, it is necessary to explain in general what online forums are, and in particular how filesharing forums work. From looking at the context and then the forums themselves, it is possible to discern how these forums differ from each other whilst both providing a distinct social context for filesharing. As previous research into this area has tended to focus on music rather than movies, the following discussion of filesharing forums and the way they work is compiled from a combination of the academic work on music filesharing, various online how-to guides about Internet downloading and the findings of this particular piece of research into the area.
A Brief History of Filesharing: From Napster to Rapidshare
Online forums279 are particularly popular hubs for interaction over the Internet and filesharing is arguably becoming a mainstream activity. Indeed, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claims that ‘nearly a quarter of the world’s internet users have illegally downloaded a film at one time or another’.280 Internet forums are ordinarily sections of a website where people come together to ‘discuss’ a variety of issues that are relevant to the focus of the website. It is often obligatory to create a membership account to participate in forum discussions, although non-members will generally be free to simply observe. Upon gaining membership, an individual chooses a username or ‘handle’ and is either given, or selects, a password. A user will then need to log in to their account in order to post (leave messages) within forum discussions, start new discussions or send and receive private messages (PMs). However, as it is not always necessary to have a membership account in order to view the topics on the forum, many more individuals than those who actually participate in discussions often use such forums, and such people are typically referred to as 'lurkers’.281 When this research
278 It is also important to note that in order to share films within either forum, an individual must post a link onto
the forum. Therefore, lurkers (forum members who have never posted) cannot, by definition, fit into my category of autonomous distributors on either forum. Lurkers may have good ratios within the EL community by sharing a sufficient quantity of films. However, as they have not posted links to films that they have re- encoded or subbed by themselves, they have not contributed to the pool of films that are shared within the community and, as such, do not fall within the categories of the intermediary or autonomous distributors analyzed within this study.
279 Sometimes also referred to as messageboards.
280 “MPAA Says 24% of Internet Users Download Pirated Movies” The Guardian, July 9, 2007, accessed May
5, 2008, http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,1257726,00.html
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began it was necessary to have a membership account even to read the forums in question here. However, during the research, the membership rules on the CP forum were relaxed and the forum became viewable to anyone regardless of whether they were a member of the forum or not. Even after this change, it was still necessary to have a membership account in order to post a message to any forum thread or access the movie list. In general, both the CP and EL conform to the standard conventions of Internet forums and are not remarkable in terms of their general format and membership requirements.
A forum will generally have one or more administrators or moderators (commonly abbreviated to ‘admins’ and ‘mods’) who monitor the discussion threads and posts. Moderators deal with the day-to-day running of the forum and have the power to move or delete threads of conversation as well as to edit, remove or comment on posts. Administrators have the highest level of power: they have all the power of a moderator, but can also set permissions for other users, ban users or appoint moderators.
Administrators will interject in discussions if members are breaking the rules of the forum. Commonly they will move discussions that are 'off-topic' for one particular section of the forum to a more appropriate area or monitor offensive behaviour.282 There are five moderators and two administrators on the EL forum and these individuals are clearly indicated on an ‘admins’ page on the website. CP, on the other hand, does not advertise the identities of their admins and mods so explicitly, but such information is displayed under the user’s avatar when they post to the forum. From examining such information there appears to be one generic account named ‘admin’ followed by another user, Opilit, who holds the title admin; mods for the whole site, Luccio and Koil; and mods for each section of the site. Again, a combination of mods and admins on such forums is quite commonplace.
A filesharing forum is a website, or part of a website, dedicated to posting links to downloadable files. Similar to other online forums, discussions can concern an assortment of topics relating to the focus of the website. In this case, both the CP and
EL forums are split into sections, and more specific subsections, so the user can identify where to find and (if they wish) to participate in certain categories of discussion. First, both forums have a general discussion section that does not focus on any particular area of Asian cinema. CP contains subsections under the general discussion section,
Possibilities,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 42, no. 2 (1998): 175.
282 All information on the role of administrators and moderators obtained from forum discussions on The Admin
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which allow users to discuss requests they have for movie releases or to request help and advice from other users when they are experiencing technical problems. CP has four further sections: release, subtitles, music and miscellaneous. The release section is split into genres and is where links to specific movies are posted. The subtitles section is split into two subsections which contain links to subtitles for releases and requests for subtitles for films that have either been released without subtitles or for which the users require subtitles in an alternative language to those provided. The music section has its own general music discussion subsection and also subsections for score and
soundtrack releases, as well as East Asian pop music releases. The miscellaneous section covers everything that does not fit into the focus of any of the other sections such as anime and manga, East Asian television shows and games, and DVD extras and covers. EL has three further sections beyond its general discussion section: Asian media and entertainment, miscellaneous, and support. The media and entertainment section is split into music, movies, television, anime and manga, literature, games, and reviews subsections. The miscellaneous section is for mobile electronics, whilst the support section contains requests and technical support subsections.
Such a setup can be observed on other filesharing sites where a general discussion or introduction thread is followed by subsections relating to specific media or topics depending on the focus of the forum. Indeed, forums will quite often act as the gateway to connect individuals with the files that they wish to download. However, this is not always necessary, and, as the following discussion illustrates, there are a range of ways of downloading files from the Internet that do not involve accessing or participating in