Online File Sharing: Innovations in Media Consumption by Andersson Schwarz Jonas

Author:Andersson Schwarz, Jonas [Jonas Andersson Schwarz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135010560
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The question is, then, where to draw the line for essential Internet connectivity in a country where things like banking, tax queries, and national insurance are rapidly becoming almost exclusively dependent on Internet access. Early on in their history, Piratbyrån had a slogan that, in a perhaps exaggerated way, centered on this: “Welfare begins at 100 megabit.”

Recently, Sweden was ranked as number one in the global Web Index, which is a composite of factors indicating the role of the Internet to citizenship (WWWF 2012). While Sweden is world-leading regarding communications and institutional infrastructure, as well as political, economic, and social impact scores, the researchers conclude that in terms of the use and breadth of the Web—categories such as usage and content—Sweden has definite room for improvement, taking the twelfth spot on the global list. “While roughly 91% of Sweden’s population uses the Web, the information available to them is surprisingly low compared with other top-ranking nations” (WWWF 2012: 9). Taking a macroview, perhaps this relative lack of content services can help explain the remarkably rapid breakthrough of p2p-based sharing in Sweden during the last decade; the infrastructure and the civic disposition were in place long before legal content providers were able to catch up.

Sweden’s strong secularism is closely correlated with a reflexive self-image of efficiency, engineering, and optimization of societal functionality. Of course Sweden shares these features with many late-modern economies, but given the importance of export, R&D and engineering to the Swedish GDP, technical competence, and modernization are central concepts—the national self-image is in this sense likely to be more similar to, for example, Germany than to Greece. Educational levels are high, as is the general grasp of the English language; as a small nation highly reliant on innovation and export, there is an element of looking up to more culturally resonant countries, such as the United States. For many people, technical competence is conditional to everyday life. This might help to explain the currency that the argument of technological inevitability had among my respondents, as well as in the publicly mediated Swedish file-sharing debate. Of all the modes of justification that my respondents used to defend the phenomenon, the notion that it is—at least on a global level—unstoppable appears to be the most principal one.

Not only are high degrees of technical competence common among the general population. Typical modern values, such as secular belief in rationality and self-fulfillment, are more extreme in Sweden than in virtually any other country (Inglehart & Welzel 2005; Zuckerman 2008). Sweden ranks extremely high in surveys of so-called postmaterialist values (e.g., public concern for issues such as political participation, freedom of speech, and environmental protection) compared to older, materialist values reflecting greater existential insecurity (e.g., public concern for issues such as economic endurance, rising food prices, and crime rates). The more widespread postmaterialist values are, the more the citizenry tends to value personal autonomy (relative to income) as a source of subjective well-being. Further, according to some scholars, such values beget reflexivity.

The notion

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