Since the day the first Monk decided to
copy his master's sermon onto a scroll the pace of change in our
media world has been changing. Gutenberg's invention of movable type
led to the Europe's becoming literate in a few centuries. Telegraph,
recording, film, and now all the forms of digital transmission and
creation have served not only to increase the speed, but to change
the nature of how communication spreads, reforms, changes. The world
has become one in which we may all participate in the production of
ideas, in the shape of media as well as in their consumption. The
comfortable world in which a relatively small elite of thinkers and
producers have “made” media while a vast horde of customers and
fans have bought and used it recedes further each day as in every
aspect of our lives we have the capacity to produce and comment upon
a world that changes even as we interact with it. The dizzying pace
of this change shows no signs of stopping as our world becomes one in
which trillions of images compete with each other for our attention
in a world no longer under anyone's control. We have gone from a
world where the producers competed with each other to attach fans to
their product, make them stick, whether it be a deodorant, a piece of
entertainment, a brand of automobile, a reference group of like
ethnic, racial, or linguistic similarity, a political party, or,
indeed, a nation or (perhaps) a world. New media moves from being
“sticky” to being “spreadable.” It welcomes new audiences in
strange and wonderful ways that both intrigue us and frighten us as
we begin to learn how we ourselves are empowered even in the course
of being overwhelmed. Such is the world that Spreadable Media: :
Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture
by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford & Joshua Green (New York University
Press, 2013, 352 Pages, $29.86) describes and seeks to explain in a
challenging and important new book. In line with living with the
creature they have described, the authors also are maintaining an
invaluable web site,
The web site is filled with blogs, essays, and other material about
this forthcoming book, serving at once to demonstrate the book's
thesis while giving the authors a forum and the world of creative
information consumers and producers a platform on which they may
comment and elaborate upon the book's thesis. In short, it's best to
read the book with some sort of computer by your side.
A new song is sung at a concert and
released as a recording on a CD. On the day of its first
performance, a person in the audience records it on an iPhone and
posts it to YouTube. Within hours thousands of people have viewed it
or heard it. The song enters the playlist of XM/Sirius radio and is
heard by more people. Hundred of people share the song with their
friends on Facebook by linking to the video. Someone is struck by the
song, rips it from the CD and sends it to countless others. A band in
Africa hears the song, changes the lyric slightly while adapting the
tune and its rhythm to a new setting and uploads the variation to
YouTube. Millions more hear the song, but few pay for it, while its
originator often doesn't even get credit for its composition. The
song has now spread worldwide to perhaps millions of consumers on a
dozen or more different platforms. This is “spreadability” which
creates problems and opportunities for each person interacting with
the song. Few of those people feel a moral obligation to credit or
pay for the creativity of the originators. Copyright has become a
word without meaning.
In often dense academic langugage, the
authors examine these phenomena of new media and trace their
implications for entertainment and media producers and fans, who they
posit as a different creature from the consumers of yore, largely
because the possess “agency,” the ability to act upon what they
hear or see, and by acting serve to change and adapt the original to
their own more idiosyncratic selves. The problem of delivering
consumers to the product through advertising and of paying residuals
for the “after life” of a product, whether it be a song, a
long-ago produced television program, a book, or an advertisement
have become increasingly complex. The consumer has become separated
into fan communities which feel themselves to be active participants
in not only the consumption, but the creation of entertainment. They
meet online in forums where they discuss plot lines, characters,
possible alternative story directions, and more. The current wave of
popularity for classic matches in World Wrestling Entertainment and
the British science fiction relic “Dr. Who” exist because fan
archivists have cobbled together old matches and performances to
create an archive which found its way to YouTube. Both the McMahon
family and BBC have been smart enough to repackage this detritus of
lost material to serve up to new fans and extend the life of the
performances. Yet who gets paid now?
Henry Jenkins
Sam Ford
Joshua Green
Henry
Jenkins
is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic
Arts, and Education at USC. Sam
Ford is
Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercomm Strategic
Communications, an affiliate with the MIT Program in Comparative
Media Studies and the Western Kentucky University Popular Culture
Studies Program, and a regular contributor to Fast
Company.
Joshua
Green
is a Strategist at digital strategy firm Undercurrent. With a PhD in
Media Studies, he has managed research projects at MIT and the
University of California.
Spreadable Media
is largely a scholarly book by and for media professionals published
just as the distinction between fan and producer, consumer and
performer is becoming ever more tenuous and the choices available to
viewers, readers, listeners, performers, writers, and artists have
become greater than ever, and increasingly unmanageable. It is
language, then, that separates the important concepts of this book
from the mass of potential readers it has. Simultaneously, though,
the enhanced version of it, through its web
site, makes it available to a wider constituency. In videos of
conference sessions, author Joshua Green discusses the change in the
nature of curation while in another video, Henry Jenkins explores the
changing face of copyright and intellectual property. Essays, blogs,
and digital links further broaden the conepts and the audience while
making the web site, and perhaps even the book, interactive. Such
repurposing illustrates precisely (or better, perhaps, muddily) what
Spreadable Media
posits in its arguments. The combination of the book and web site
make the contents of each fully accessible to a wide variety of media
creators, consumers, adapters, and archivists thus increasing the
utility of each.
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and
Meaning in a Networked Culture
by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (NYU Press, 352 pages,
January 2013, $29.95) is available from the publisher and all the
usual sources. It is heavily annotated while also presenting many
internal opportunities to find the examples presented. I read it in
an electronic galley made available to me by the publisher through
Net Galley.
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