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HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

We envision three readerships for this book: media scholars, communication professionals, and people actively creating and sharing media content who are interested in how the media industries—and our culture(s)—are changing as a result. Spreadable Media has been designed to find common ground for conversation among these audiences and their perspectives. As you read through the book, however, you may find particular passages that speak more directly to one group than another. Bear with us in those cases, and perhaps even take it as an opportunity to consider these phenomena through other eyes. We want all three of our audiences (and others who may find this discussion beneficial) to use our argument as a provocation to ask some fundamental questions about how everyday people are producing meaning and value in a changing communication environment.

Many of this book’s core arguments were developed through our work at the Convergence Culture Consortium, a five-and-a-half-year academic research project (2005–2011) aimed at speaking to and facilitating dialogue among these three groups. The Consortium’s research was led by a team of faculty, staff, and graduate students at MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies. This core team worked in conjunction with a community of leading media studies scholars around the world and a diverse range of corporate partners that funded the project: television media companies (Turner Broadcasting, MTV Networks), Internet and digital technology companies (Yahoo!, Internet Group do Brasil, Nagravision), and major brands and marketers (Petrobras, Fidelity Investments, advertising agency GSD&M, and transmedia storytelling agency The Alchemists). The Consortium created a variety of forums—from the Futures of Entertainment and Transmedia Hollywood conferences to blog posts, newsletters, white papers, and corporate brainstorms—aimed at bringing these three perspectives together, and the project has fostered a community around the annual Futures of Entertainment conference dedicated to continuing such collaboration.

The Convergence Culture Consortium was created for several reasons. A growing number of media studies graduate students were seeking industry rather than academic jobs upon graduation, and the Consortium wanted to take even more seriously the charge to help students turn the thinking they do in the classroom into the “\thought leadership” (to use the corporate term) that might help transform the media and marketing industries. Our team recognized that a great many corporate communicators and media creators providing such thought leadership through their own publications and digital platforms were actively interested in the work being done inside the academy. Indeed, many of our corporate partners not only supported our research but also became collaborators. Our dialogue with these and other industry thinkers informed our work and, in return, helped them apply some of our thinking to their own companies and industries. The Consortium brought together a community of scholars and researchers from a range of disciplines interested in meaningful dialogue between “academy” and “industry.” Given how little dialogue often crosses academic boundaries (consider the disconnects between cultural studies and the social sciences or between the humanities and business schools, for instance), we have been particularly energized by this interdisciplinary collaboration enabled by our research initiatives.

Though all three of us once managed the Consortium together, our career paths have diverged, and we now bring our different vantage points to the range of issues discussed in this book. Sam Ford works for a strategic communications firm that consults with a variety of brands and media companies; Joshua Green, after managing an academic research program investigating the media industries, now works at a management consultancy that specializes in digital strategy; and Henry Jenkins serves as a professor of communications, journalism, cinematic arts, and education, calling himself an “aca-fan” to reflect the ways his life has straddled the worlds of academia and fandom.

Throughout, you’ll see references to the enhanced version of this book. If you visit http://spreadablemedia.org, you’ll find additional material by a range of contributors that shaped our argument and are referenced directly throughout the book—case studies and deep thinking that extends the work discussed here, along with counteropinions to some of the arguments we make. We have drawn liberally on these contributions in this edition, all of which were collected as we worked on this project over the past few years. Many, though not all, of these contributors have been part of the Convergence Culture Consortium, have spoken through our Futures of Entertainment or Transmedia Hollywood conferences, and have thus been part of the larger conversation out of which this book emerged.

We each have strong feelings about the issues we discuss here, but we have made great efforts to keep this book from being a polemic. Spreadable Media is fueled by our collective desire to foster conversation among media scholars, communication professionals, and citizens who create and share content, as well as by our frustrations with some of the ways each group engages with the issues we consider throughout.

In part, our work stems from disappointment with the way some companies have reacted to the “convergence culture” our research has examined. Some companies continue to ignore the potentials of this participatory environment, using their legal authority to constrain rather than to enable grassroots participation or cutting themselves off from listening to the very audiences they wish to communicate with. Worse, many marketers and media producers have embraced simplified notions for understanding these phenomena, notions that distort how they perceive their audiences’ needs, wants, and activities. Ideas such as “user-generated content” and “branded platforms” ignore the larger history and power of participatory culture in attempting to define collaboration wholly on corporate terms.

This book will best serve those readers from the media industries who strive to listen to their audiences more deeply and to understand the “big picture,” rather than those looking for easy ways to “exploit” or “leverage” the people their company purports to serve. Spreadable Media offers examples from many noncorporate media producers—nonprofit organizations, activist groups, churches, educators, and independent artists—who have developed strong relationships with their audiences and who often think as actively about people’s goals for circulating material as they do their own goals in creating it.

In short, this book argues that the companies that will thrive over the long term in a “spreadable media” landscape are those that listen to, care about, and ultimately aim to speak to the needs and wants of their audiences as crucially as they do their own business goals. The following chapters, among other things, will examine a range of emerging community and business practices which point toward ways companies might build more sustainable models through seeking relationships with audiences that find mutual benefit in a loss of corporate “control.”

Ours is a reformist rather than a revolutionary agenda, offering pragmatic advice in hopes of creating a more equitable balance of power within society. We accept as a starting point that the constructs of capitalism will greatly shape the creation and circulation of most media texts for the foreseeable future and that most people do not (and cannot) opt out of commercial culture. Our arguments are thus often directed toward corporations, recognizing that the policies that most directly impact the public’s capacity to deploy media power are largely shaped by corporate decision-makers—true in the U.S. in particular and increasingly so in a global context.

While great value comes from media studies academics acting as outside cultural critics of industry power and policy, this mode of discourse has historically made engagements between cultural and media studies and the creative industries contentious.¹ Instead, our intervention takes the form of fostering dialogue between industry and academy. As such, our rhetorical tone differs from many other works in critical and cultural studies. While we are certain our focus on transformative case studies or “best practices” throughout may be dismissed by some readers as “purely celebratory” or “not critical enough,” we likewise challenge accounts that are “purely critical” and “not celebratory enough,” that downplay where ground has been gained in reconfiguring the media ecology. We believe media scholarship needs to be as clear as possible about what it is fighting for as well as what it is fighting against. This book is unhesitatingly in support of expanding and diversifying opportunities for meaningful participation in the decisions impacting our culture and society. We feel that making this positive argument and contribution is essential, even as Spreadable Media points toward the tensions and unevenness of this new media landscape.

One of this book’s goals is to actively critique the neoliberal rhetoric that has emerged as marketing and business models take into account an increasingly participatory culture. Spreadable Media examines how current industry discourse masks conflicts between the interests of the media companies/brands and their audiences, drawing on a variety of powerful academic critiques of Web 2.0 logics and practices to focus on issues surrounding audience surveillance, free labor, and the inequalities of access and participation. In the process, though, we point out how industry logic and academic critiques alike focus too often on the value or sovereignty of the individual rather than on the social networks through which audience members play active roles in spreading material.²

Spreadable Media is a book about more than just how technology is changing culture. The champions of new technologies write frequently about how the next medium or tool will democratize communication, while media critics often focus on the loss of citizen control, as the platforms for distributing media content are concentrated in the hands of conglomerates. Meanwhile, corporate communicators and professionals in the media industries regularly write about how new platforms are destabilizing their business (and perhaps causing them to “lose control”). Yet new communication platforms do not determine some inevitable “end,” whether that be democratization or destabilization. What people collectively and individually decide to do with those technologies as professionals and as audiences, and what kinds of culture people produce and spread in and around these tools, is still being determined. Those media scholars, industry practitioners, and active media participants who care about seeking an inclusive, equitable, and robust media landscape cannot accept the evolution of media platforms and content creation as if it were the unalterable consequence of technological developments. Our hope is to examine the tensions among these various views but also to explore what is missing: the ways the activities of connected individuals are currently, or could potentially, help shape the communication environment around them. If these technologies and logics were not still subject to change, this book would be pointless.

Furthermore, a media system is more than simply the technologies that support it. Culture drives these changes; the realities of the current communication environment are far messier than any one of these perspectives can acknowledge. The growth of networked communication, especially when coupled with the practices of participatory culture, provides a range of new resources and facilitates new interventions for a variety of groups who have long struggled to have their voices heard. New platforms create openings for social, cultural, economic, legal, and political change and opportunities for diversity and democratization for which it is worth fighting. The terms of participation are very much up for grabs, though, and will be shaped by a range of legal and economic struggles unfolding over the next few decades.

This book is not designed as a handbook to teach the creative industries how to make more money by “leveraging” the growing platforms of Web 2.0. Similarly, rather than design a guide for viral media success, we question the cultural logic of “viral media” in ways that point out how such models harm audiences, content creators, and marketers. In each of our explorations, we will look at products and practices that will often be familiar to us, and yet we will question the easy answers and the overly simplistic ways of understanding culture that often come attached. Complex forces shape the flow of media, and we reject simple answers in favor of more sophisticated explanations.

We aim to help all our audiences better understand the shift from a culture shaped by the logics of broadcasting toward one fostering greater grassroots participation. We examine how people are playing a more active role in shaping the flow of media for their own purposes in an increasingly networked culture; the implications of these changes for all involved; and the significant challenges, frustrations, and complications of media production and circulation in a world of spreadable media. We will locate and defend the public’s collective right to meaningful participation. Spreadable Media proposes an approach to media production, promotion, and circulation which encourages a greater respect for the agency of grassroots participants, calling attention to the clashes occurring as media texts move between commercial and noncommercial spheres.

Spreadable Media is now literally and figuratively in your hands. Make of it what you will. Read it; debate it; critique it; trash it. Above all, expand the conversation we are starting here. Spread the word to others who you think may be interested. Transform these ideas through your conversations. Build on the arguments that resonate with you. Speak out against those that don’t. That’s how spreadable media works.