ABSTRACT
Across the Internet, there are multiple locations for people to acquire entertain - ment content. Often, participants struggle through cumbersome processes in order to locate, watch, and interact with content. Their experiences are riddled with usability issues that create a deterrent for legal use. Such experiences lead many consumers to make choices between legal and illegal acquisition, watching advertisements in exchange for receiving free content, mistaking legal content for illegal, and surfing peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing systems for often illegal content. The purpose of this chapter is to trace these issues using methods drawn from Actor Network Theory (ANT) in order to illuminate the networks and usability concerns that participants confront as they look, view, or share content. As technical communicators, we are best situated to contribute to this con - versation because of our history of user advocacy and our involvement in the development process. Adopting and applying theories such as ANT provide us with methods for analyzing the various actors within communication networks, thus adding additional methods to our toolbox as both researchers and designers. In essence, ANT allows us to diagram the active people, organizations, activities, and technologies relevant to the user experience concerns surrounding key inter - national issues. As a result, technical communicators can use an ANT approach to better pinpoint breakdowns in experience as a call for improving the user experience associated with important international interactions. Within the context of this chapter, we can use the ANT approach to understand the decisions the entertainment industry has made with regard to digital rights management (DRM) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Examining these actor networks is of particular importance to technical com - municators who are responsible for the information design of these systems, for
these networks, and who influence the business rules that affect design deci - sions. By exploring and visualizing which actors are involved in a given experience, technical communicators can be better prepared to deliver the appropriate information to their audiences, and legal scholars can advise on potential cases concerning DRM and the DMCA. Drawing upon our rich scholarship in communication design and content strategy, technical communicators can contribute to these conversations by becoming more involved in the work of delivering, positioning, and distributing digital entertainment. By pinpointing instances of information exchange, knowledge diffusion, and community building, we, as technical communicators, can jointly inform legal scholars and content designers about the social, political, and economic issues affecting these situations. We can then map these instances, locating the networks of technologies, organizations, and people involved in these communication exchanges. Technical communicators must examine the connections between participants who seek content and the other people and technologies that surround partici - pants and form network relationships with them. Adopting theories such as ANT can aid in this work. Doing so allows technical communicators to better understand the interactions, systems, and processes that are necessary for designing more usable experiences in general and in DRM systems specifically in the cases discussed in this chapter. The various participants who form such networks, along with the technologies they use, are intimately connected to the legal and policy constraints intended to govern the ways participants use content. Yet these connections are not always clear. This situation affects not only the usability of DRM systems but also the types of activities that many participants may perform in order to access entertainment content. Because of the nature of our work, technical communicators are able to see across both these internal development processes and the resulting experiences of the users of these systems. As an extension of this work, we can influence the strategies of deployment and communication between these two parties in the digital entertainment field within global contexts. The approaches discussed in this chapter can aid technical communicators in addressing these complex legal issues by providing techniques and strategies that can contribute to the larger debate surrounding digital entertainment.
