Recently, Google acquired the beloved video-sharing website YouTube for $1.65 billion, making the $580 million that Rupert Murdoch shelled out last year for MySpace seem like a paltry sum. Facebook, which is still in the hands of its college-age founder, if sold may be an even larger transaction, with a rumored price tag of $2 billion. (Shame on Yahoo for only offering $900 million). Such hefty figures show that megacompanies have recognized the value of these new repositories of popular culture, and have seized upon the opportunity to incorporate them. While commercialization of pop culture is nothing new, the acquisitions of these websites represents a worrisome trend: the pop culture of the online generation may have become inextricably linked to, and even created by, the corporate world.
In recent years, a number of pop trends have become drastically commercialized. Corporations have made activities that used to require at least a little bit of consumer effort much more convenient, but also further removed from the consumers' input. Napster, no longer the notorious peer-to-peer, stick-it-to-the-man file exchange website, has after a legal battle groveled back onto the Internet music scene as an online store. Urban Outfitters has for many replaced authentic thrift-shopping with online browsing for $300 imitations of items sold for $3 at true thrift stores. Similarly, iTunes has turned purchases that used to require a few minutes of effort and a visit to Amazon.com, or even -- God forbid -- a trip to the record store, into a ten-second series of clicks.
However, the acquisitions of YouTube and MySpace, and the potential future acquisition of Facebook, represent a different breed of corporate influence. These websites are not creations of big business, but are instead grassroots expressions of the culture of the online generation that have arisen from small beginnings. Just as you have probably never thought about the potential commercial value of the Green Book, it is improbable that Mark Zuckerberg, as enterprising as he is, had completely predicted the immense money-making success that Facebook would become when he put together the primitive version of the website in 2004. Since then, the site has become hugely popular, and its quaint image as a network created by college kids for college kids has been replaced by its more commercially appealing image as an open "social utility." The corporate world has acknowledged the growing popularity of such pop culture venues, and has tapped into them enthusiastically.
The original purpose of these sites was to enable users to conveniently "share information as they like with exactly the people they would like" (Facebook's own words), with little moderator regulation. The users were thereby largely free to determine the sites' content, creating pop culture in the process. For two reasons, it is questionable whether their freedom will persist after corporate acquisition. First, in terms of avoidance of indecency and of adherence to intellectual property law, corporations are held to stricter legal and societal standards than are individuals. Although this would somewhat constrain the individual users' freedom of expression, one could argue that thwarting copyright infringement is not necessarily a bad thing. The second reason, however, is more ominous: it is unlikely that corporations would be willing to spend billions of dollars on enterprises that they would not wish to manipulate to their advantage. Such control would likely restrict the sites' users to the frameworks set by the corporate owners.
It is the users themselves that put the "popular" in "popular culture." They are the people who consume it, engage with it and thereby create and re-create it. By restricting the users, corporations may come to manipulate pop culture, creating a vicious cycle of growing commercialization. This raises questions about whether there is an escape from such incorporation, or whether any construction of our pop culture will become a corporate pawn once it reaches a certain level of popularity. Furthermore, it leads us to wonder how much our creativity and freedom of expression have been covertly restricted or maneuvered by the business world.
It will take some time to reveal the broader implications of these trend. Until then, I will keep browsing the (as yet) independent Wikipedia, with the hope that it will not become a subsidiary of Time Warner anytime soon.
