The problem is that you can’t reverse engineer the wide scale adaption of new technologies through dominance once social change has occurred. In trying to stop piracy, The RIAA spread it further by fragmenting the media landscape.

The Hypebot blog has a five-part thoughtpiece on p2p filesharing and ‘piracy’, from the perspective of a ‘digital native’, pointing out the irreversible cultural revolution that has taken place.

What the author tries to do in this recollection of the formative experiences of her youth, is to identify what is unique to her generation and ‘foreign to that of her parents’.

Part one starts here and has links to all the sections.

Some excerpts from Kyle Bylin:

From part two:

“The behavior patterns in music fans have visibly changed in large numbers and sustained, resulting in a social change. These changes in behavior patterns are seen as a deviance from culturally inherited values of The Record Industry and prosecution is deemed as the only option. Resulting in a rebellion against established industry, forcing change in the social order called iTunes. The problem is that you can’t reverse engineer the wide scale adaption of new technologies through dominance once social change has occurred. In trying to stop piracy, The RIAA spread it further by fragmenting the media landscape. By thinking about the technology first they began chasing something they couldn’t keep up with. Lawsuits against file sharers resulted in the obvious conclusion of piracy behaviors still existing and new services rising to meet those needs. Without a specific goal in mind, they failed at disrupting file-sharing through lawsuits and continued to burn relationship with their customers.”

From part five:

“As the experiences of music fans shifts from the offline world to those encountered online, Nancy Baym states in her keynote, ‘Online Community and Fandom,’ that, “The Internet has transformed what it means to be a music fan. Fans can and do build communities more rapidly and successfully now than ever before, with consequences not just for their own experience of music, but for everyone involved in the creation, distribution and promotion of music in any capacity.” Elaborating further that, “fandom is social interaction.” because it lets fans share feeling, build social identity, pool collective intelligence, and interpret collectively. Interaction in this domain not only creates the possibility for digital communities, but it enables fan empowerment. Highlighting these five qualities of the Internet, Nancy says that it has made fans powerful because it, “Transcends distance and extends reach, provides group infrastructures, supports archiving, enables new forms of engagement, and lessons social distance.”

And from the concluding paragraphs:

“From the prospective of a Digital Native, identity is not broken up into online and offline identities or personal or social identities. Because these forms of identity exist simultaneously and are closely linked to one another, Digital Natives almost never distinguish between the online and offline versions of themselves.”

Digital Natives are moving to online experiences, which seems inevitable because, “At a time when so much of the structure that holds together music culture has disappeared,” Eric Harvey of Pitch Fork writes, “fans could take the initiative to create a new one.” These natives have only just begun to shape and carve out their vision of what online culture should consist of. For the most predominate of innovators, were there instances of increasing dissatisfaction to the point where they strived to make these changes or were these creations simply extensions of themselves? Digital hands blurring the lines between their worlds, doing in some ways, what they were born to do. Whether you look at Shawn Fanning of Napster, Dalton Caldwell of Imeem, or Sam Tarantino of Grooveshark, the music experiences that they have envisioned and created are radically different from anything we could’ve imagined ten years ago.

“At a time when the music industry is reeling from changes it barely understands,” Nancy writes, “the sorts of activities fans are doing online have the potential to create culture in which you will all be operating in the future.” On the second day of MidemNet, Bruce Houghton and Terry McBride agreed, looking around the area that, “Some of the most interesting stuff wasn’t ever going to be at any conference because it was being created in a garage or dorm room somewhere.” All of this seems to bring me back to and coincide with the conclusion I made in Communization And The Rise Of The Music Fan, that the cultural inversion that professor Mike Wesch speaks of is a perfect example of how the way people interact with music has changed. Leaving me to wonder if in the last decade, the frame work for online music culture was laid, and in the next, this culture that we don’t yet understand will be built before our eyes.”