| This dissertation analyzes the phenomenon of "regional lockout" in digital entertainment platforms. Resulting from the cultural industries' attempts to control the spatial distribution of intellectual properties, regional lockout refers to the use of digital rights management or other technological mechanisms that restrict or deny access to digital platforms in particular geographic locations. Focusing on regional lockout systems such as DVD, Blu-ray, and video game region codes and "geoblocked" online video and music platforms, I show how these systems come about through complex processes of industrial negotiation and standardization by many different stakeholders. I also highlight how users have hacked and circumvented these technologies and analyze the contextual and ambivalent cultural politics of these circumvention practices.;Drawing on critical discourse analysis, media historiography, and ethnographic interviews, I argue that regional lockout has shaped global media culture over the past two decades at three interrelated levels. First, as a form of technological regulation, it limits and fixes the affordances of digital media technologies. Second, it shapes the geographic distribution of entertainment media such as films, television programs, popular music, and video games. Third, it reasserts cultural differences and discrimination related to global hierarchies of media access. In making this last claim, I show that regional lockout is not just a technological or industrial phenomenon; it is also a cultural system. Therefore, this dissertation uses technological regulation and the political economy of media distribution as a back door into analyzing issues of cultural power and difference at global and transnational scales. Specifically, it investigates how regional lockout embeds global geographic and cultural differences into the technological tools we use to experience mediated entertainment. In order to pinpoint regional lockout's cultural impact, I develop the concept "geocultural capital" as a way of mapping how regional lockout perpetuates unequal distributions of cultural capital across broadly scaled geographies (e.g., nations, regions, and continents). By shaping access to cultural resources and figuring as a discursive space where users, industries, and regulators discuss, debate, and decide issues of global media access, regional lockout reflects and produces inequalities in geocultural capital. |
