Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy

Abstract

Brian Larkin teaches anthropology at Barnard College. He is coeditor(with Faye Ginsburg and Lila Abu-Lughod) of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (2002). He writes on media and urbanization in Nigeria.

Repairing and developing software infrastructures: The case of Morevna Project in Russia

“…In their ground, these 'infrastructures of creativity' are based on practices of distortion and breakdown. Larkin (2004) uses the term 'semiotics of distortion' to depict the constant condition of media corruption that surrounds the infrastructures of media piracy. Taking as an example the gradually degrading products of the Nigerian pirate media industry, Larkin shows vividly how starting from a low-quality film copy, video tapes and CDs are distorted ever more in the endless process of further reproduction, consumption and circulation of copies.…”

Beyond Representation

“…If infrastructures represent attempts to order, regulate and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their operation and the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures highlight both the failure of that ordering and the recoding that takes its place. When we subject the material operation of piracy and its social consequences to scrutiny, it becomes clear that pirate infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory perception, time, space and economic networks (Larkin 2004). Doing so also forces us to acknowledge the material linkages between content and infrastructure.…”

Small Media, Popular Culture, and New Youth Spaces in Nigeria

“…Elsewhere, Larkin (2004) also poses a challenge for a critical rethinking of the ways in which we make sense of media economies in the third world, arguing that when the whole media infrastructure of a nation-state are faulty and also exclude non-mainstream economic participants, it breeds an alternative ''shadow economy'' of media activities.…”