[p2p-research] Fwd: indepth Ph.D. thesis on sociology of swedish filesharing ...

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jonas Andersson <jonastics at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 3:23 AM
Subject: My Ph.D. thesis is now complete
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


Dear Michel,

I thought it would be nice to let you know that I have now passed my Viva
and had my Ph.D. registered at Goldsmiths, University of London. I have also
recently been the co-editor of a reader on The Pirate Bay, issued by the
Royal Library here in Sweden (together with Pelle Snickars). Read more about
it in my blog: http://liquidculture.wordpress.com


Anyway, I wanted to give you access to my approved Ph.D. *manuscript* in
full:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6562465/WHOLE%20THESIS_FINAL_new16.pdf
Please feel free to peruse it, but remember that it is purely academic, and
hasn't been published with any commercial publisher yet!

And here follows the same *brief summary* that I've now also posted on my
blog:

 My thesis is about Swedish file-sharers' own arguments and motives. I
analyze how they justify their habits, and what they refer to. I interviewed
Swedish file sharers and analyzed blogs, newspapers, debates and web
comments. I placed great emphasis on connecting the arguments to various
sociological theories of representation, agency, justification and morality,
as well as to the actual technical, economic, historical, demographic and
geographical conditions. As the actual p2p protocols (especially BitTorrent
protocol) are so central to the drama, the sociologist's role is to
determine: What *is* BitTorrent? How shall we understand the "nature" of a
network, and the way the users themselves constantly invoke this "nature"?
Ontology - how reality is described and defined - becomes the crux of the
debate.

The thesis is a monograph, but its different chapters address different
elements of the phenomenon. In my literature review I describe how the
"copyfight" - the alleged clash between "pirates" and "industry" - has been
established through the years, and how it has, in part, been reinforced by a
strong activist bias among the contemporary critics of copyright. I also
describe how copyright critique has tended to equate file sharing with gift
economy, which I argue is a somewhat unfortunate metaphor. I suggest some
better metaphors in its place, arguing for example that file-sharing is
better characterised by a de-personalised exchange rather than a dyadic
friend-to-friend exchange.

My historical and technical overview of file-sharing explains how the p2p
architectures work, and provides a historical overview of the various
networks, protocols and applications that have become popular. I discuss the
lack of transparency and the lack of demographic overview and describing the
phenomenon in simple metaphors. I place great emphasis on comfort and
acquisition as driving factors, and I note how the network architecture
precludes regulation in its entirety, allowing only for local crackdowns,
something which explains the file-sharers' own arguments about the
phenomenon being "unstoppable".

One of the chapters that my examiners appreciated the most was my discussion
of a typical Swedish late modernity, and the social contract that
file-sharing world in fact share with the Swedish Social Democratic model of
society: The fact that one's own personal freedom is directly dependent upon
and made possible by a universally over-arching collective. The "blind"
file-sharing network as well as the state's supposedly "blind" functionality
as a system is what allows the individual, molecular actors their
flexibility and choice. I also provide several historically based
explanations as for why file-sharing has been such a popular force in
Sweden, and what we can social trends we can discern in file-sharing, as it
allows for strong self-interest, expediency and personal independence
(something which the innovative system design "harnesses" in order to
benefit the overall collective).

My overall conclusion is that the file-sharers' own justificatory arguments
are based on ontological assumptions about the "nature" of the network. As
far as I can see and duly confirm in my technical and historical overview
above, several of these assumptions are well-founded, given the observed
network architecture. Interestingly, this also means that the question of
"blame" becomes distributed to fall on not only one, but a range of numerous
actors involved: the thousands of human users who participate, as well as
the non-human actors that the machinery, computer programs and protocols
comprise. This was also clear in Pirate Bay trial, in which the blame could
never be entirely attributed to the accused persons. Their involvement could
only be defined in terms of varying degrees of "complicity".

The difficulty of regulation "from above" leads me to conclude the thesis
with an argument for *self-regulation* among file-sharers. This increases
rather than decreases the need to further explore the norms and standards
that are emerging, and the personal moral considerations of Internet users.

Many of the arguments found in the thesis are found in a more brief form in
my and Pelle Snickars's introduction to our recent Swedish anthology, *Efter
The Pirate Bay*. In the reader, I contribute with a chapter on network
architecture ("The stupid net") which is based in part on my technical and
historical background chapter in the thesis. Further, much of what Lars
Ilshammar describes in his chapter in the same reader are confirmed in my
thesis chapter on Swedish late modernity.

---------------------------------------------

I hope this will all be of interest to you!

best regards,

// Jonas Andersson, Ph.D.
   http://www.luchini.co.uk
   http://liquidculture.wordpress.com/
   mob : +46 (0) 708 35 89 98
   j.andersson at gold.ac.uk

   (´-`) (·_· ) ( ’-’)




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