Hugh
One of the major downsides, from a societal-harm point of view, of having very few legal avenues for access to digital media is that you can’t control what anyone watches: you can’t regulate BitTorrent. This might be okay for an adult population, some of whom might argue that censorship should not exist at all – but what about parents trying to decide what their kids watch?
The Office of Film and Literature Classification has recently canvassed young people for their opinions of the classification system and its relevance to their lives, with particular reference to what types of content they deem suitable for regulation, what functions they believe age-restrictive ratings perform, and what perceived harms could come from viewing content (or playing video-games) at an ‘unsuitable’ age.
One of the subheadings in the report on perceptions reveals institutional dismay: “Young people are actively circumventing classification restrictions.” Netflix, Hulu, Amazon’s video-on-demand service, iTunes, and a myriad of other content providers all have “parental control” functions; illegally downloaded files, of course, have no such associated mechanisms.
Short of peering over their teenagers’ shoulders 24/7, and with many of those content providers (iTunes’ somewhat paltry offerings excepted) unwilling or unable to set up shop here, what are parents to do? Does the government have a responsibility to ordinary Kiwi mums and dads to create an environment in which Netflix et al. can thrive?
Adam
I think the best bet the OFLC has at remaining relevant is adapting to this and providing young people with more information to make informed choices.
You can see an interesting throughline across the three documents the OFLC released (the Literature Review, the Survey and the Discussion Group Findings) if you look at the ways that young people, their parents, and the classification system intersect.
The young people surveyed ranked their parents pretty high as reasons why they do and don't watch restricted content (27% said a contributing factor to them watching restricted content was their parents letting them, while 56% said strict parental control was a contributing factor against), and the Discussion Group remarked in the document outlining their findings that once young people have purchased or otherwise acquired restricted content, parents are commonly permissive about it -- and if they’re not, young people “can view it online, visit a friend’s house, or seek the assistance of an older sibling or friend.” The throughline is basically that young people feel they’re in the best position to police their own media consumption and will circumvent controls most chances they get.
The government may make things easier for parents and the OFLC by developing our internet and media infrastructure so that legal options like Netflix and Hulu Plus can thrive. After all, you’d probably see some downturn in illegal downloading in those houses where parents let their children watch restricted content, because now that content’s easier to access legally and thus easier to control.
But if the takeaway from the OFLC’s findings is that young people want to be able to police their own media consumption and to hell with their parents, then I’m not sure what an expansion of legal options would change. The films that the young people can’t hire from a video store today will just be put under parental lock tomorrow, and the cycle of circumvention will continue.
If that’s going to continue happening, then, I think the best bet the OFLC has at remaining relevant is adapting to this and providing young people with more information to make informed choices. In the Discussion Group Findings, one girl mentions that she would be fine with reading a paragraph of warning if it helped her avoid triggering material in a film. I think 18-year-old me would have been fine with that too.
Hugh
That finding stuck out for me too. One of the more interesting things that happens when you try to ban a film in 2013 New Zealand – the “Maniac” remake, starring Elijah Wood, being the most prominent recent example – is that it simply drives more interest in the film from viewers who were completely unaware it even existed. (Cue an uptick in film-festival ticket sales.)
Two other things then occur simultaneously: the difference from country to country in ratings and censorship reasoning is thrown into sharp relief, and, because the film is essentially made permanently unavailable (by legal methods), those newly interested consumers turn to other avenues to obtain it – and the film’s producers go uncompensated. We weren’t the only country to tamper with the film: Japan cut major portions and blurred many of the more graphically violent scenes specifically to allow teenagers to see it – but it went out uncut in the UK and, needless to say, the US.
There’s no way to get stats on how many 16-year-olds downloaded “Maniac” after one of their mates’ older brothers saw it at the film fest and raved to them about it, because very few teenagers would be upfront about that. But I think what we can say with some degree of certainty is that, had any of the myriad of services we’ve mentioned been available, and had the OFLC restricted the film with a long-enough descriptive note, the film would, I think, have a) made more money than it did through film-fest screenings alone, and, perhaps paradoxically, b) not created viewers who might be described as “content rubber-neckers”: people watching the movie primarily because it had been banned. There was no way that any local distributor would have taken a chance on a theatrical release, but could it have slipped quietly onto VoD services and made a bit of money, without any fuss? Probably.
That media censorship in the digital age is irrelevant isn’t the main point to come out of this research, I don’t think; what it shows is a willingness, a need, among viewers – particularly those whose consumption habits the classification system most directly affects – for detail on the effects, harmful or otherwise, of the media they’re consuming.
The necessarily haphazard nature of illegal downloading doesn’t allow for the provision of this context, and placing the onus for doing so upon collaborative databases such as the IMDb and Wikipedia would be unfair (or so they would likely argue). I mentioned the other week that it would be fascinating to see movie-listing aggregators such as Flicks.co.nz accomodate Bechdel-test icons; what would be more immediately useful to viewers, and just as necessary, I think, would be more context from the OFLC on how they arrived at a particular rating.
