Communication Networks, Cities and Informal Economies

Abstract

The global city is conventionally defined as a central hub in a network of flowsof capital, people, goods, and images. However, if we shift our focus away from the formal indicators of economic power and towards the grey and black economies, we encounter a rather different map of global connectivity and cultural provision. The chapter considers the relationship between informal media distribution and formal cultural policy, with reference to circuits of media piracy in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Long concerned with studying government support for and regulation of the arts, cultural policy analysis is undergoing a reorientation as scholars turn their attention towards entanglements of the governmental and the cultural that take place outside the realm of policy per se. As the gap widens between the 'cultural sector' (museums, galleries, libraries, heritage institutions and arts organizations) and everyday sites of cultural engagement (from football fields to Facebook), new directions for cultural policy analysis are emerging. One indicator of this shift is The International Journal of Cultural Policy's recent decision to complement its ongoing analysis of arts and culture policies with a focus on 'implicit' cultural management operating outside the realm of formal state programs. 1 For IJCP, there is something to be gained from 'reaching back behind the contemporary coining of the term 'cultural policy' to explore how sets of policies that could not be thematized in these terms can nevertheless be usefully understood as implicit forms of cultural policy' (Ahearne, 2009: 147). We can therefore add to the now-familiar list of objects of cultural policy analysis (arts and culture ministries, public service broadcasters, performing arts companies, heritage organisations) an array of other actors including religious institutions, media corporations, non-governmental organizations and industry bodies. This chapter is similarly concerned with implicit policy, by which I mean regulation, prohibition, subsidy and management that does not form part of official public policy programs. I want to push this line of enquiry a little further, however, by considering systems of regulation in informal rather than formal

Emergent Innovation through the Coevolution of Informal and Formal Media Economies

“…Following the reasonably settled understandings in the anthropological and sociological literature on informal economies (summarized in Lobato et al 2011; Lobato 2012), the formal lies within the legally sanctioned media economy on which production and distribution data are routinely based, while the informal encompasses grey markets (secondary markets, household-level peer-to-peer exchange) as well as organized or incidental piracy, which may or may not be defined as black markets. Informal media economics, this article argues, can also encompass emerging markets such as those based on the emergent commercialization of online user-generated content, on one hand, and the embrace by innovative professional content creators of arguably the informal sector par excellence , web 2.0/social media, on the other.…”

“…Much theorization of the role and value of informal economies, and a good deal of the innovation in general that informality impresses on the formal, has arisen in developing countries and regions where necessity is indeed the mother of invention (e.g., in the case of pharmaceutical patent busts in Brazil, or in Lobato’s 2012 account of “hybrid” media circuits intermeshing the licit and illicit). In this article, however, I stress mutually constitutive interrelationships of the formal and the informal as sources of innovation and renewal in media ecologies and focus on the stresses and forces of endogenous change within developed economies.…”