Locked Out

A rare insight into how industry practices like regional restrictions have shaped global media culture in the digital era “This content is not available in your country.” At some point, most media consumers around the world have run into a message like this. Whether trying to watch a DVD purchased during a vacation abroad, play an imported Japanese video game, or listen to a Spotify library while traveling, we are constantly reminded of geography’s imprint on digital culture. We are locked out. Despite utopian hopes of a borderless digital society, DVDs, video games, and streaming platforms include digital rights management mechanisms that block media access within certain territories. These technologies of “regional lockout” are meant first and foremost to keep the entertainment industries’ global markets distinct. But they also frustrate consumers and place territories on a hierarchy of global media access. Drawing on extensive research of media-industry strategies, consumer and retailer practices, and media regulation, Locked Out explores regional lockout’s consequences for media around the globe. Power and capital are at play when it comes to who can consume what content and who can be a cultural influence. Looking across digital technologies, industries, and national contexts, Locked Out argues that the practice of regional lockout has shaped and reinforced global hierarchies of geography and culture.

‘Lockout’—the region code restrictions in DVDs and videogame consoles and geo-blocking in on-demand services—is at once a more insidious and banal form of control than that envisaged by critics of cultural imperialism. In this wide-ranging book, Evan Elkins has brought us up to date on the textured detail of such technological control, and bequeathed us the theory tools to understand its impact on culture, audiences, and producers., Locked Out effectively illustrates the complex cultural, technological, regulatory, and economic reasons why consumers’ access to media content remains so unequal on a global basis. Historically informed, methodologically rich, and fluidly written, Locked Out represents a significant contribution to work on global media flows, distribution cultures, and the cultural history of technology., Elkins quickly puts aside the staid dichotomy of critical-cultural and political economy approaches to the study of media industries, and instead engages both arenas to paint a more nuanced picture of how regional lockout shapes global media culture [...] Highly accessible, Locked Out would be a generative text in both undergraduate and graduate courses on digital media, media industries, transnational and global media, and cultural geography, as well as for scholars in these fields.

Evan Elkins is Assistant Professor of Media and Visual Culture at Colorado State University. He is the author of Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture (NYU Press, 2019).