Consumers vs. Citzens

IF YOU LISTEN very carefully you can probably catch the sound of me disappearing down a deep script hole. But in the meantime, you should all read Ken Girotti's take on how you approach culture defines you as a nation. (He's riffing off the CRTC hearings and an op-ed piece by the head of the CAB.) It's well thought out, and defines the essential problem without emotion. Jus'the facts.

I don't for a minute mean to suggest the opinion presented by Glenn O'Farrell (prez and CEO of the CAB) in the Globe & Mail's ROB today is the be all and end all. But he does begin his thesis with an intelligent analysis of what's been at stake over the last three weeks at the CRTC hearings in Gatineau, Quebec.

He poses the question in a succinct way:

"Do Canadians view their broadcasting system as consumers or as citizens?"

His use of collective nouns is what it's all about for me. If we're consumers, we are exactly what every major Hollywood studio wants us to be. Essentially we become shareholders without access to corporate dividends or profits. We're a mindless block controlled by promotion, swept along amidst the tide of the multitudes and God forbid we have a dissenting view or an honest criticism. If we're citizens we are everything they hate down there in La La Land. We're free thinking individuals with a multitude of opinions demanding access to diverse wares from a variety of sources. We become a major pain in the ass to their vertical integration, but we ensure choice for ourselves.

Okay, you think I'm reading too much into it. Here's why I'm not. The essential concept Peter Grant and Chris Wood illuminated in their book, "Blockbusters and Trade Wars" is this: cultural goods are different. Sure, you sell them on the market like other goods, but they are made differently, and for different reasons a lot of the time, and they don't behave like widgets or fly fishing rods or cars or toilet seats. When you make a widget (and I'm using the word widget the way my dad and yours would have used it) you spend some cash designing it and then you spend more buying materials and creating the assembly line to produce it. Here's why a film is different: we spend almost all of our money on the first copy. Millions of dollars go into the creation of a film, and outside of its theatrical release (a whole other story) all the subsequent copies -let's use DVD as the medium- are essentially worth pennies. So why does a DVD copy of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy cost nearly $40.00 when the plastic, paper and ink in the package is probably worth less than $1.00? Because we're not paying for the plastic and the paper. We're paying for what that stuff does, not what it actually is. Like books and pharmaceuticals, films and TV programs don't behave in the marketplace the way widgets do.

There's been a fight waging for quite a number of years over this difference with regard to cultural "thingies." Big movie studios, the ones that produce the tentpoles, want total market penetration everywhere all the time. That means things like indigenous content rules in countries like France, Germany, the UK and Canada are a big pain in the ass to organs like the MPAA. For years they fought in Washington to have cultural "thingies" treated in the international marketplace in exactly the same way widgets are. They've fought the wording of GATT at the WTO. (A very good overview of Canada's own confusing approach to cultural diversity can be found here). In the end (will it ever really end?) Canada was in the vanguard of the push to ensure cultural diversity through the cumbersomely titled UNESCO convention called, "Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions."

The rest of Ken's clear-headed take on the argument, and why neither Jim Shaw nor the broacasters are "heroes" in this, can be found here.

Now where did I put that magic scriptwriting elf?