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140 << Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

film or television corporations. David Marshall, for instance, writes about
the “intertextual commodity” that emerges through the cross-production
and marketing of film and television shows in the United States, and argues
that promotions serve to expand audiences’ “pleasure of anticipation” and
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“deepen the investment of the audience in the cultural commodity.” Build-
ing on this, Henry Jenkins uses the term “transmedia storytelling” to analyze
how storytellers use multiple media platforms to develop different aspects of
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a story world like The Matrix. While such analyses can certainly be used to
understand the promotional campaigns for Bollywood films, I wish to shift
the focus to explore how geographic proximity shapes the production and
flow of content online and more broadly, relations between new media com-
panies and an established film industry.
In The Rise of Network Society, Manuel Castells develops the concept of a
“milieu of innovation” to explain why the sociocultural and political dynam-
ics of specific geographic locations play a central role in decentralized, post-
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Fordist network economies. If we are to understand why Silicon Valley in
California emerged as the preeminent region of innovation in the late twen-
tieth century, Castells suggests we must pay attention to the value of spatial
proximity that roots the “space of flows” in specific places. He writes:

Although the concept of milieu does not necessarily involve a spatial
dimension, I argue that in the case of the information technology indus-
tries, at least in this century, spatial proximity is a necessary condition to
the existence of such a milieu, because of the nature of interaction in the
innovation process. What defines the specificity of a milieu of innovation
is its capacity to generate synergy, that is the added value resulting not
from the cumulative effect of the elements present in the milieu but from
their interaction. 56

How do spatial proximity and a “milieu of innovation” matter in the case of
cultural industries? In his work on the economic geography of Hollywood,
Allen Scott demonstrates how clustering in southern California “enhances
the availability of agglomeration economies and increasing-returns effect.” 57
He argues that by clustering in one region, companies are able to “economize
on their spatial interlinkages, to reap the multiple advantages of spatially
concentrated labor markets, and to tap into the abundant information flows
and innovative potentials that are present wherever many different skills spe-
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cialized by complementary producers are congregated.” Curtin builds on
Scott’s analysis of the “dense transactional networks” that shape an industry
like Hollywood to argue that media capitals like Los Angeles and Hong Kong