I can think of very few examples of textbooks that have made original contributions to scholarship in media studies: Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art and Film History books may be the notable exception. I generally prefer not to use textbooks in my classes, exposing my students to cutting edge articles from books and journals, and increasingly to blog posts from key public intellectuals. Most textbooks homogenize and generalize, lacking the particularity and pointedness of other kinds of academic writing. They try to appeal to everyone, try to include everything that matters, and in the process, they mask the criteria which shape their construction of the field.
For these reasons, I was more than a little surprised to learn that Jason Mittell, who I consider to be one of the top thinkers in television studies, was tackling the task of writing a textbook for this field. Mittell has been working on late on the issue of complexity in television narrative, having already contributed to our understanding of genre and television. We share a common intellectual background -- both being alums of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications Arts Program. Mittell is involved in our Convergence Culture Consortium and recently posted some interesting thoughts on his Just TV blog which compliments my focus on "spreadability" with what he calls "drillability." You can learn more about Television and American Culture here.
I had a chance to read some of this textbook project in draft form and was excited by what I saw, so as soon as I heard Television and American Culture was being released, I contact Mittell to do an interview for this blog.
Let me be clear: Mittell has done what I would not have thought possible, creating a compelling, up-to-date wide-reaching, nuanced, readable, and engaging introduction to television studies, a textbook which does what we want a good textbook to do but doesn't read at all like a textbook. As you will see, I wanted to get the genre theorist Mittell to reflect on textbooks as a genre and on the ways he chose to reinvent that genre through this project. In talking about Television Studies textbooks, Mittell also offers some reflections on why we should study TV and what the current state of the field looks like.
You open the book with a consideration of the Janet Jackson flap at the Super Bowl. What does this incident teach us about the range of different ways television functions in relation to American culture?
This was the first section I wrote during the book proposal process. I knew that the book's core model would be to show how television, like all media, can be understood as spanning a number of facets that are often treated separately - this was based on the "circuit of culture" model emerging out of British cultural studies in the 1990s. For television, the six facets that I identified are commercial industry, democratic institution, textual form, site of cultural representation, part of everyday life, and technological medium - the first draft of the book actually had only six (very long!) chapters, each covering one of these facets.
In drafting the book's introduction, I needed to come up with an example that would literally sell the book - to publishers looking at the proposal, to faculty reviewing the book for adoption, and to students on the core concepts and engaging tone to keep them reading. This was in late 2004, so the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" was still a current event, with ongoing legislative and judicial processes. It struck me as a perfect example to demonstrate this circuit of television in action, comprising the full scope of issues within an example that was very easy to write about - you don't need to see the clip to understand the case study, while many other examples that I could have used required more familiarity with a program, channel, genre, etc. The only problem is that the writing process took long enough that what started as a hot-button contemporary example reads a bit dated for today's students - and in a few years, it will be old news. So I'm keeping an eye out for a newer example to plug-in for the book's revised edition.
Many textbooks strive for a "neutral" voice which balances out competing perspectives in the field. You do lay out competing arguments here, but as you note in your introduction, you also take sides, constructing your own arguments about key contemporary trends and programs. How do you see your book relating to the genre expectations surrounding the "textbook"?
When I decided to tackle a textbook, I spent some time reading through a number of textbooks on the market, both within media studies and other fields. What struck me most was how disengaging and dull the majority of them were. Even when they were written by authors who can be lively and compelling writers in their other scholarship, the genre of the textbook seemed to follow the edict of a lot of network television: provide least objectionable content. They present material in a seemingly objective, overly-simplified manner, and write without passion or personality.
I had no interest in writing such a book. And my experiences as a teacher suggests that forcing neutrality, oversimplification, and disengagement results in bad pedagogy and bored students. While I want students to grasp material such as the differences between broadcast networks and cable channels, that's not the core of education to me - instead, they should be thinking about the significance of these systems more than simply recalling them. So I made it clear to interested publishers that I wanted to write a textbook with a more engaging voice and distinct argumentation - to quote my proposal, "By explicitly offering arguments and challenging assumptions, the book will be designed to engage students and force them to question their own positions, rather than the more typical textbook goal of recalling factual information." Oxford University Press fully embraced this approach, encouraging me to write the book for a sophisticated and engaged reader, not the typical textbook model.
This approach is certainly forged by my experiences teaching at a top-flight liberal arts college like Middlebury. I work with students who are taking my course as part of a broader liberal arts curriculum, not a pre-professional track that typifies a lot of Communications departments. To fit into an institution like Middlebury College, I need to make the study of television an intellectually-engaging and interdisciplinary endeavor - I wrote this book in many ways to spread that approach of "television studies as a liberal art" more broadly to other types of institutions. I'm optimistic that a lot of faculty will find my book more engaging to teach because it "talks up" to students, rather than assumes that they need to be distracted by glossy photos and random sidebars. We'll have to see how it's received by both faculty and students, but I wrote the book that I want to teach from (or would have wanted to read as an undergraduate 20 years ago).
The cover of your book shows contemporary television projected across a range of different screens, some of which look like the boxes we've used for years, and
some represent mobile phones, computers, and other emerging platforms. Does the cover of the book signal the obsolescence of its content? At what point as we
explode the range of distribution options, does television cease to be television as a specific medium and begin to blur over into all of the other media around it?
When I started working on this book in 2004, YouTube didn't exist, iPods had no video capabilities, and networks had only just begun to experiment with putting their programs online. By the time the book came out in 2009, the idea of television as defined by the box in your living room had lost its centrality. And there's no doubt that the last five years are not the end of this core technological shift - honestly, I don't know what "television" will mean in another five years. But I'm certain that the history of the medium and its industrial and regulatory systems will still matter - whatever technological ecosystem we'll be living in during the 2010s and beyond, some remnant of television will matter, just as the lingering presence and influence of print, theater, cinema, and radio still matter today.
The cover was designed to signal the book's engagement with technologies and programming of the past, present, and future. I suggested the idea of "lots of different shows on a variety of devices" to Oxford, and they came up with a design that I really love. But I'm sure in another decade, it will look like a dinosaur! Of course, the very idea of publishing a "textbook" might be arcane by then as well, so clearly I've embarked on a project with a potentially short half-life for both content and form.
You could argue that many of the topics you deal with here - convergence, digitalization, globalization, branding, shifts in audience measurement - are impacting all media. What do you see as the relationship between television studies and a more generalized media studies? Can we read the title of your blog, "JustTV," as a statement of sorts about how you position yourself in the space between television and media studies?
I see television studies as both on the forefront of media studies, and in danger of being forgotten. In many ways, television studies has led the charge for a humanistic model of media studies, and it has really set the model for a mode of scholarship that is both theoretically sophisticated and accessibly written, socially engaged yet historically grounded. This is probably in large part due to the luck of the draw in its intellectual history, as the field came of age after the peak of high theory in film & literary studies, and was in the right place at the right time to introduce the British cultural studies model to America, in large part through the work of our mutual mentor John Fiske. When I look at the best of media scholarship today, whether it's about videogames, popular music, or transmedia narrative, I see the influence of television studies of the past two decades and the model it helped establish.
But the danger of convergence is an assumption that all media are the same. This is certainly a lesson that the industry has faced repeatedly, as with ill-fated devices like WebTV, and I've seen similar scholarly missteps when academics trained in literature or film try to study a different medium as if it were simply another textual form (I won't name names here...). Specific aspects of television, from regulation to ratings, help shape the medium to an extent that you can't simply disregard the industrial systems and viewer practices that are unique to television. So my fear is that as television becomes more diffused - either through technological transformation or dilution across media - media scholars will neglect the specific practices and systems that shape our understanding of the medium. The specific lessons and facets of television studies shouldn't be lost as the boundaries of the medium blurs.
As for the name of my blog, Just TV refers both to the dismissive reflex common to academics viewing television, and an attempt to delineate the blog's scope. I do embrace broader issues in media studies, such as gaming, fair use, fandom, etc., but try to tie it to the specificities of television whenever possible. I hope that work like mine and many of my TV-centric peers helps legitimize the medium in the eyes of academia, just as the programming itself is becoming more accepted and embraced by scholars across disciplines. But I'm reminded of a wonderful talk that Charlotte Brunsdon gave at Society for Cinema and Media Studies a few years ago - she warned that "poor old television" might get lost in the transition from cinema studies to a digital-centric media studies, and called for scholarly spaces that still privilege television. Hopefully Just TV fits that bill.
Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media
Culture, and Chair of Film & Media Culture, at Middlebury College. He is the
author of Genre & Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American
Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television & American Culture (Oxford UP,
2009), numerous essays in journals and anthologies, and the blog Just TV. He
is currently writing a digital book on narrative complexity in contemporary
Last Saturday, I spoke at a conference being organized by the Media Studies Program at the University of Virginia, Connections: The Future of Media Studies. Among the others speaking were Jeff Alexander, Michael Delli Carpini, Henry Jenkins, Eric Klinenberg, Marwan Kraidy, Sonia Livingstone, Robert McChesney, Paddy Scannell, Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Gitelman, and Eszter Hargittal.
I thought I would share my remarks for the "critical information studies" panel through the blog since they represent a pretty good summary of some of the things I've been thinking about and working on over the past few years.
Tim O'Reilly's concept of "web 2.0" was first promoted at a 2004 conference of key industry leaders and later spread via his "What is Web 2.0" essay. "Web 2.0" has become increasingly institutionalized as the definitive account of the business plans and cultural practices defining the digital realm in the early 21st century. O'Reilly's concept is now spreading into discussions about politics and government, education, and grassroots cultural practices, becoming increasingly defused as it travels. There have been surprisingly few attempts to seriously understand its core assumptions or propose other models for describing the shifting relations between media producers and consumers.
O'Reilly's original essay encoded the "best practices" of those companies (Amazon, Yahoo, Google, among them) which had survived the dotcom meltdown, offering advice for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who wanted to seize the next new business opportunity. O'Reilly describes a world where companies are able to "harness the collective intelligence" and circulate "user-generated content" from their consumers, where the key component of any new digital service or platform involves designing an "architecture of participation," and where user-led innovation fuels the ongoing innovation and retooling of new technologies. The term, "Web 2.0" arrived just in time to offer a handy explanation for Wikipedia, YouTube, Second Life, Facebook, and Twitter.
Initially, the discourse of "web 2.0" was embraced as offering a progressive alternative to the alienation of the consumer from the means of cultural production and circulation and these companies have been understood as enabling a more diverse media culture. Yet, over the past few years, struggles between users and owners (still operative distinctions in most web 2.0 companies), such as debates around FanLib (the attempt to commodify an existing participatory culture), Live Journal (the attempt to censor user-generated content), Facebook (shifts in privacy standards and the terms of service), and YouTube (automatic take-downs which impinge on fair use), are starting to reveal some of the contradictions and conflicts masked by O'Reilly's "architecture of participation."
There is an urgent need for serious reflection on the core models of cultural production, distribution, ownership, and participation underlying "web 2.0." Almost everyone involved sees our culture as moving in a more participatory direction, yet struggles over web 2.0 will help to determine the terms of our participation.
As we seek to complicate and modify the "web 2.0" model, academic theory needs to move beyond blunt critiques, which read these new developments as "business as usual" and reflect a knee-jerk distaste for consumerism, towards more nuanced accounts which understand the specific mechanisms being deployed and understands the public's stake in participation. The pitches of web 2.0 companies respond to real shifts in the ways that the general public understands their role in the culture or their political agency which need to be respected. The platforms represent a radical change in mechanisms for filtering and circulating media content which need to be acknowledged if we are to fully understand what's at risk in these discussions.
At the same time, those of us who have long advocated for a more "participatory culture" need to better define our ideals and identify and confront those forces that threaten the achievement of those ideals. This should be a moment for renewed communication across theoretical paradigms and political perspectives so that we may frame cogent responses. As we learn from each other, we need to adopt a multifront perspective: offering critiques of the corporate web 2.0 model, shoring up the alternative grassroots model of participatory culture, promoting educational and political reforms which may empower more people to meaningfully participate in the production and circulation of culture.
Theory -- both academic and vernacular -- becomes a key resource in these struggles, but only if we can build bridges between university researchers and those involved in other sites of media change. Academics need to be engaging with policy makers, media producers, fans, citizens, educators, and other constituencies who are part of the ongoing conversations which will redefine our cultural future. Right now, our theories are struggling to keep up with the change and falling far behind what's needed on the ground as people think through their own relationships to new cultural systems and emerging corporate practices.
Across a range of recent projects, I have been returning to a term I coined very early in my career, participatory culture, and seeking to refine it into what might be considered an alternative model for understanding the shifts in cultural production and economic relations. "Web 2.0" is not the same thing as "participatory culture," though its promoters often seek to absorb grassroots expression fully into its business model. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, I made the case that our current cultural landscape is being changed as much by bottom-up pressures from consumers and citizens as from top-down pressures from media conglomerates. Across the 20th century subcultural deployment of emerging technologies have paved the way for a greater public expectation that they will be able to meaningfully reshape the media they consume. The rise of digital networks is facilitating new forms of "collective intelligence" which are allowing groups of consumers to identify and pursue common interests. Alternative forms of cultural production, such as those surrounding fandom and other subcultural communities, are gaining much greater visibility as they move through emerging platforms. Skills acquired through participation in popular culture are spilling over into education, politics, and religion, reshaping the operations of other core institutions.
In Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, a white paper drafted for the MacArthur Foundation, I develop a framework for thinking about educational policy which reflects these changes, identifying eleven social skills and cultural competencies we believe need to be fully incorporated into educational practices if all young people are going to become full participants in this shifting media landscape. There, we offer one definition of participatory culture:
"A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement."
More recently, I have been seeking to better understand the mechanisms by which consumers curate and circulate media content, rejecting current discussions of "viral media" (which hold onto a top-down model of cultural infection) in favor of an alternative model of "spreadability" (based on the active and self conscious agency of consumers who decide what content they want to "spread" through their social networks. This work argues that what I am calling participatory culture might best be understood in relation to ideas about the "gift economy" developed by Lewis Hyde in The Gift. "Web 2.0" might then be read in terms of negotiations around value and worth which occur at the intersections between commodity culture and the gift economy. Richard Sennett's recent book, The Craftsman, offers a rich account of how cultural labor has historically been motivated by forces other than pure profit, reflecting desires for personal achievement and expression and for a "job well done," which might help explain what motivates the pro-am productivity within our current digital economy.
This new emphasis on "participatory culture" represents a serious rethinking of the model of cultural resistance which dominated cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Cultural resistance is based on the assumption that average citizens are largely locked outside of the process of cultural production and circulations; De Certeau's "tactics" (especially as elaborated through the work of John Fiske) were "survival mechanisms" which allowed us to negotiate a space for our own pleasures and meanings in a world where we mostly consumed content produced by corporate media; "poachers" in my early formulations were "rogue readers" whose very act of reading violated many of the rules set in place to police and organize culture. Increasingly, audience participation is factored into the business plans and are central to the design of media franchises; media companies alternatively seek to court and control an increasingly unruley audience as fans and other consumers recognize that collectively we exert much greater influence on the cultural agenda and are helping to generate the content that others are consuming.
As consumers and citizens have taken media into their own hands, they are becoming more aware of the economic and legal mechanisms which might blunt their cultural influence and are defining strategies for using these new platforms in ways that promote their own interests rather than necessarily those of their corporate owners. In this new context, participation is not the same thing as resistance nor is it simply an alternative form of co-optation; rather, struggles occur in, around, and through participation which have no predetermined outcomes. Both producers and consumers may now be understood as "participants" in this new media ecology, while recognizing that they do so from positions of unequal power, resources, skills, access, and time.
Next time: I will identify some of the core conflicts/issues which are shaping media policy and critical information studies in the early 21st century.
Last year, Eitan Glinert, former MIT student and currently the head of a Boston startup games company, Fire Hose Games, wrote his impressions of the innovation and diversity he saw at the Games Development Conference. He did such a great job that I asked him to write some follow up reflections at this year's event. Take it away, Eitan.
Hi Everyone! Henry, thanks for inviting me back for my annual round up of all the interesting things that happened this year at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC). For those of you who are reading my posts for the first time I'm Eitan, local Boston game nerd and developer. I used to be a grad student at MIT doing games research, and now I'm the founder and creative director of Fire Hose Games.
But enough about me, let's talk about games! This year I'll be doing two posts: Talking the Talk, and Walking the Walk. The first (today's post) will be all about interesting talks, lectures, rants, and totally inappropriate outbursts heard at the conference. The next post will be all about the amazing developers I was lucky enough to meet who are making things happen. So let's get started - what was awesome?
Usability, Motherfuckers!
Sure, it's a little self serving to talk about your own session first, but it was a damn good talk and I want you to hear about it. A lot of people out there can't play video games due to some sort of disability (this applies to computer systems in general). However, with a bit of extra thought and planning game developers can frequently make their titles work for many of these disabled groups, and in the process make their game more usable for everyone. This can even lead to increased sales, so spending money on making a game highly usable will often earn money! I covered a bunch of concrete tips for things that developers can do to make their games more usable, and pointed out examples of games that exemplify this behavior (like Half Life 2 and Peggle) and games that could do so much more (like Trespasser and Puzzle
Eric Zimmerman is a smart guy from New York who likes to make game developers think about how much more they could be doing. One of the neat ways he does this is with the annual Game Design Challenge, in which he goes "Iron Chef" on a panel of famous developers and asks them to propose a game with some sort of secret ingredient. This year the theme was "My First Time", and the panelists had to incorporate their own autobiographical first time having sex. Erin Robinson and Heather Kelley came up with a hilarious Wii title in which you start by point and click your way to make the first move with an especially awkward guy, and culminates with you counting the ceiling tiles in his room. Sulka Harro deviated a bit from the autobiographical nature and proposed a user generated game in which participants tell the world about their first time, like in post secret. Finally, Steve Meretzky was both hilarious and touching as he recounted how he was a late bloomer and it took coming to MIT to find other nerds that were sufficiently weird like him to finally meet girls, and proposed a Second Life text adventure in which users must navigate the isles of awkwardness in a three part act in which you finally, after a long time, get laid. The audience voted and Erin and Heather ultimately triumphed, who were rewarded with a deck of sex cards for their efforts. Lots of fun!
User Generated Content and the Soviet Space Program, 1978 -
1989
This was one of the weirder talks I saw, and that's really something after that sex panel. Chris Hecker started off by discussing user generated content in games, using Spore as an example. The talk was fairly straight forward, and Chris started walking through the "Sporepedia" to show examples of what people had come up with. Then the screen flashed, music started playing, and a slide with crazy spaceships was shown with the title "Russian Space Minute". Will Wright (famous for The Sims and SimCity) then gets up and proceeds to give a 15 minute presentation on the late years of the Russian space program, outlining in detail the counterpart to the US Space Shuttle and the design process that went into making it. He finished by showing how the space program fell apart with the demise of the Soviet Union, and then just as quickly as he started Will sat down and Chris Hecker got back up and continued discussing Spore. The whole experience was especially surreal, as Wright's appearance was completely unexpected and seemed to have nothing to do with anything. I later discovered that Will apparently likes to intersperse "Russian Space Minutes" into his talk because, well, he's Will Wright, and he decided to make a guest appearance in this talk because he couldn't in the next panel he was in, which was...
The (Positive) Future of Games
This star-studded panel featured Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Lorne Lanning, Bing Gordon, and Ed Fries. Just like the panel moderator I'm not going to introduce these guys since they're super famous and you have easy access to google if you don't know. The talk centered around whether or not developers have an ethical responsibility to their users, and if they do how the games that are made can be beneficial to society. The talk was especially hilarious, and the inappropriate comments flew. Among my favorites?
Paraphrased: "We should try to make the worst game possible. Perhaps a game about 72 Victoria's Secret models, and they're in heaven, and the game is in Arabic." and "I would love to see a game like Second Life, but good." The panel was all over the place, but generally they did seem to agree that it was important to make games that were useful in some way, whether by making people think more about the consequences of their actions or by encouraging positive behavior. On a related note, I went to a roundtable at the end of the conference on positive impact in games which was headed up by Rusel DeMaria, the panel moderator. I was pleasantly
shocked to see how full the room was, there were many more developers there than I would have expected. Seems like a lot of people are taking this message to heart!
Constraints are your Friends
Perhaps not as flashy as the other talks, but a challenging discussion all the same. Dylan Fitterer (creator of Audio Surf) spoke about the path he took to success, starting with releasing a small game every week for over a year just to find his muse. The games were free, made him no money, and he didn't get much acclaim, but it did serve to get his mind working about what he really wanted to do. One of the games, Tune Racer, was not especially popular on the site but Dylan felt it was likely one of the more interesting titles he came out with, and eventually it morphed into Audio Surf. He pointed out that unlimited freedom often
leads to unlimited failure, as it is very difficult to figure out where to go next. Constraints, on the other hand, makes design much easier as it gives you bounds to work within. He gave the example of famous song writers like Kurt Cobain cuttings words out of newspapers to help write lyrics with the constraint of only using words and phrases they could find. It's an interesting point, but I personally think that doesn't apply to everyone - some people like having unbounded room to come up with ideas.
How can historical perspectives contribute to our understanding of the current
moment of media change?
AP: As our contributor (and former WB network executive) Jordan Levin notes in his essay, executives immersed in the media industries often face strong institutional and economic pressure to "think in the now." Similarly, at times it can be easy for scholars to get caught up in the proclamations by the press and industry that what is happening in the present is unlike anything that has ever taken place before.
Both Jennifer and I have studied and written about media industry history, and thus recognize that the more you know about these histories, the more similarities and parallels you can find between past practices, behaviors and assumptions and present-day activities. From our view, an historical perspective is crucial because it forces you to more profoundly consider what is in fact new, or the specific ways in which something is new. Certainly policy shifts, the rise of new technologies, media consolidation, and the growth of niche markets have dramatically altered how media are produced, distributed and consumed. Yet we think it is important to move past the broad generalizations that are often made in top down approaches to consider more precisely how and why these changes have taken place.
On the one hand, looking closely at media industry history can lead one to look at the present more closely, forcing one to question the latest marketing or journalistic claims about how "this new technology will change the way media is produced" or how "this new corporate strategy will reshape how media is consumed." We can see that, in fact, much of what we take to be so novel has been around for years (if not decades).
On the other hand, contemporary developments can also lead us to reexamine and rethink historical processes in a new light. In recent years, talk of the rise of "convergence" has led many media historians to look back at what were previously conceptualized as "distinct" media forms (not just film and television, but also comics, music, radio, magazines and newspapers). This has led some, including Christopher Anderson, Michele Hilmes and Tom Schatz, to reassess the relationships between these different media forms (and the companies producing and distributing them). Michele Hilmes, in particular, was one of the first to do this in her book, Hollywood and Broadcasting. Her essay in our collection builds upon many of the ideas she proposed earlier in her career, considering how recent developments might lead to new directions in media industries scholarship.
What role can the study of media industries play in the creation of media policy?
JH: I think one way media industry scholarship can play a significant role in the creation of media policy is in the framing (or reframing) of certain issues. Academics from many disciplines have used their work to affect how issues like competition, diversity, violence and intellectual property can be understood and framed in policy discourse (e.g., Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, Mara Einstein, Robert McChesney, Henry Jenkins, and Phil Napoli to name just a few). Scholars like John McMurria and Thomas Streeter have written about the power structures, discourse and ideologies that have guided policy making at the outset, offering additional historical examples of how humanistically-oriented research can contribute to policy analysis. While it has traditionally been social scientists that have been the most visible in policy-making circles, there are a few notable exceptions; I think it is in the best interests of humanities scholars to increase these numbers, make it a priority to network and take a more activist role in affecting the parameters or at least the considerations of policy. Only then will terms like "access" and "competition" have more nuanced definitions that incorporate the critical social, political and cultural issues which can otherwise disappear from the discussion.
What do you see as the most important disagreements that emerge between the contributors to the book?
JH: I wouldn't necessarily see them as disagreeing with each other per se, but I did note some hostility by many writers towards a certain reductive tradition of political economy that paints the industry in particularly broad strokes. This goes back to a general resistance toward a "monolithic" perspective on the media industries Alisa mentioned above.
The reason we did not see much direct disagreement is in part because each author was given a specific task: to outline one critical modality, methodology or historical trajectory of media industries research. The essays were not written or designed to be in conversation with one another as much as they were intended to help establish the various components and contours of what a field called "media industry studies" might look like.
As part of that collective project, the essays remained somewhat contained and focused instead of debating the relative merits of different approaches to industry study. Some authors wound up putting themselves into dialogue with one another unwittingly, such as those writing the essays on the Global (Michael Curtin), the Regional (Cristina Venegas) and the National (Nitin Govil). However, even in those essays, I found that rather than disagreement, the pieces offered new ways to think about these concepts in relation to one another. Venegas, for example, theorized transnational and local media flows in relation to Latin American cinema. While looking at trade relations, economic alliances, cultural policies and industrial histories, she presented the regional as a valuable theoretical tool but also discussed the region in relation to the global, the national, and the local. Similarly, Govil offered a complex discussion of how "thinking nationally" actually creates avenues for thinking globally and locally as well. While their considerations were different - Govil looked at piracy, diasporic media and cultural citizenship and Venegas looked at government policies, industry initiatives and market behavior across Latin America, for example - they were pursuing similarly expansive conceptual projects that are tremendously useful for scholars of national, regional and global media industries.
Jennifer, you are in the process of finishing a book on regulation and media
ownership issues. What do you think is the most common misunderstanding in
current discussions of media concentration?
JH: I think that the media reform movement has done a great deal to educate the public about this issue, but we have a long way to go. One of the most common misunderstandings might be over the ways in which media concentration is "regulated." The standards for regulating concentration and vertical integration in the various media industries are widely divergent. Historically, they have been unevenly applied by the FCC, the FTC, the Department of Justice and Congress. When it comes to policing the business of entertainment, there is no one-size-fits-all policy.
Regulation also operates much differently than common sense would dictate. Regulatory policy currently lags far behind reality - something the financial markets have just visibly (and painfully) demonstrated. This also applies to our increasingly converged media landscape. New technologies continue to combine various products and sites of engagement with policy into one very fraught wire; so, as a result of technological advancements, marketplace innovations, industrial consolidation and rapidly blurring boundaries between media and telecommunication, the standards and goals of regulation have become outdated. Old media are being used in new ways, content and carriers no longer conform to their original borders or boundaries - and that has presented us with a regulatory crisis that has yet to be fully addressed by policymakers.
This divide between the present regulatory philosophy and industrial reality is a consequence, indeed a legacy, of how media industries (broadcast and cable, for example) have been unevenly and separately regulated as technology has converged.
As a result, the government is driven more by the concerns of the market as opposed to the public interest or by a philosophy that is relevant to current conditions; the size and scope of mergers has put regulators in the back seat, following the lead of market activity rather than setting the boundaries. Consequently, the reality of regulation is one in which the industrial economy has outgrown the dimensions and arbiters of current policy. So, while most people think that regulators are out in front of the industries, right now they are hopelessly behind, applying outmoded policy to a marketplace that is, in many ways, setting its own rules.
Alisa, you're finishing up a book on Miramax. What does the rise and decline of
this company tell us about the way Hollywood is responding to a rapidly changing
media environment?
AP: My study of Miramax focuses on how and why this company was both a product of - and took advantage of - tremendous industrial and cultural changes that occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The company was among the first to exploit the major studios' reorientation toward big budget event fare, effectively branding itself as the premier producer and distributor of niche-targeted "quality" product. The combination of savvy marketing, shrewd production and acquisition choices, and high-profile talent (not to mention lots of Disney money after 1993) all enabled Miramax to quickly rise to prominence.
However, as I explore in my book, to a large extent Miramax became a victim of its own success. By the late 1990s, the company's accomplishments had been widely emulated by a number of other companies, and, in an effort to remain competitive, Miramax began over-spending, over-diversifying and generally overestimating the market for certain types of niche-targeted material. The situation became further complicated by the tremendous changes taking place throughout the media industries on a much broader scale - changes that included the rapid rise of the Internet, the improving quality of fictional television series (e.g., The Sopranos, The Shield), the speedy diffusion of DVDs, and the growing availability of lower cost, higher quality digital production and postproduction technologies. All of these factors worked in tandem with a heightened emphasis by media conglomerates on developing material that could be easily exploited across as many of their platforms as possible. Cumulatively, by the early 2000s, there emerged a much different - and far less friendly - media landscape than that which was present when Miramax first grew to prominence. This landscape was much more difficult for indie companies to navigate effectively with their existing business models (a fact most recently borne out by the closure or downsizing of several different studio-based specialty divisions).
Studying Miramax (and indie subsidiaries more broadly) suggests the degree to which relatively self contained films - especially those lacking name talent and big budgets - face a challenging terrain in the contemporary industry. It seems quite likely that those types of media that cannot be easily imagined and exploited as multi-platform experiences are likely to face substantial challenges from now on. None of these developments, of course, seem to have had much of an impact on the number of people striving to make low-budget films for the theatrical market, dreaming that they may make the Next Big Thing. Yet the tale of the rise and fall of Miramax as an indie company can ultimately be viewed now as a cautionary one - a tale of the narrowing opportunities and possibilities for those seeking to make and release movies following a traditional theatrical distribution model. It remains to be seen how well low budget films will fare in the contemporary convergent media landscape, and what shape the next generation of independent cinema will take.
You explicitly focus this book around the audio-visual industries, yet as you
note, the concept of media industries is potentially much more expansive. What
would do we miss by focusing only on the audio-visual here? For example, can we
understand contemporary film practices without some grasp of developments in the
comic book industry?
AP: Choosing the proper scope proved to be one of the more challenging tasks in developing the book. There is no question that the media industries expand far beyond film, television and new media (the focal points of our collection). We chose the scope we did for a few key reasons: first, we thought that looking primarily at audio-visual media would offer a greater degree of coherence and specificity across the essays. Readers would not only be able to learn about concepts, but also about the operations of these industries in greater detail, from a variety of perspectives.
Second, we felt this approach would make the material more accessible for those undergraduate and graduate programs oriented toward film and television studies - programs that are often less likely to have extensive course offerings on the media industries than those based in communication departments, for instance. Third, this focus offered a means of differentiating our book from others already in print. The emphasis on audio-visual media enabled us to address a key tension in studying the media industries: namely, that these industries are at once distinct (in many respects, the film industry differs from the cable television industry, for example), and yet they also are and always have been deeply interdependent and interactive.
Thus, while focusing primarily on the audio-visual risks overlooking the important relationships and contributions of other industries such as comics, music and publishing to film, television and new media, were we also to examine all of those other industries as well, we would likely have a book both too general and unwieldy (not to mention several hundred pages longer!). We believe that the case studies offered by our contributors explore concepts that, though most directly applicable to audio-visual media, can also be extrapolated to other media as well.
It is worth adding that, on several occasions, our contributors do weave in examples from other media forms to make their points. Should we pursue a second edition of this book, one of our goals would be to further expand our discussion to other media. We see the current book as but an early step in what we hope to be a much more extensive conversation about what theories and methods are most productive when studying and writing about the media industries.
Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in film and television history, and media
industry studies. Her current research looks at regulatory policy in the age of
convergence. She has published articles in various journals and anthologies including
Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, Fifty Contemporary Film Authors and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. Her forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment examines deregulation and the media industries between 1980-1996 and will be published by Rutgers University Press.
Alisa Perren is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. Research specializations include media industry studies, television studies, and U.S. film and television history. Her forthcoming book, Indie, Inc. (under contract, University of Texas Press), traces the evolution of Miramax in the 1990s as it transitioned from independent company to studio subsidiary. Her work has appeared in a range of print and online publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, The Television History Book, and Flow.
What role have science fiction conventions played in fostering this amateur film
culture? Why has fan cinema been slower to emerge around other genres?
Science Fiction conventions are often run on a shoestring budget, so amateur films constitute free programming; at the same time, sci-fi fans are often attracted to technology-oriented hobbies--like filmmaking. Put them together and it's a tight fit. The modern pop culture and sci-fi conventions blossomed during the 1970s when 1960s sci-fi TV shows entered reruns, most famously Star Trek and Lost In Space. If you were a hobbyist filmmaker and you went to a convention, it was easy to see that a homemade sci-fi flick presenting new adventures of a beloved old franchise could find an appreciative audience at such an event.
Likewise--and I'm hardly the first to suggest this--men bond by 'doing,' so a group of male sci-fi fans getting together to explore their fandom through a group activity like filmmaking makes sense. Additionally, since many guys collect memorabilia as an expression of their fandom, a fan production provides a convenient way to rationalize some purchases: "Yes, Honey, I spent $700 on a Stormtrooper costume--but it's for my fan film!"
What place does the female fan practice of "vidding" hold in your account of fan
cinema?
To be honest, it's barely present in my book, which is not to imply that Vidding is insignificant. Rather, it's a very different art form, deserving its own in-depth exploration, such as the Vidding History project by the Organization of Transformative Works. I discussed Vids in passing a few times in the book, because to ignore them would be disingenuous; however, it would be presumptuous and insulting to that community for me as an outsider to attempt to tell Vidding's story.
The fan remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has generated much greater visibility than any other fan film in my memory. How typical is that production of fan filmmaking practice in general and what brought that film to such a high level of public consciousness?
There's a lot of elements at play when it comes to the (relative) success of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Primary among them is the fact that you can't see the film. Despite the fact that it has gained a high profile, it isn't readily available on the internet or home video; the only way to see it is to attend one of the scattered screenings held around the country each year by the filmmakers at non-profit cinemas and the like. By using the media to spread the word about the film--but not the film itself--the filmmakers have created a pent-up demand to see it...and fortunately, it is one of those rare cases where the movie actually beats audiences' expectations.
As far as fan filmmaking practice goes, the level of work that went into Raiders was unprecedented up to that point. For three pre-teens in the 1980s to spend seven years shooting a movie without any parental help is unusual enough; once you throw in the fact that they recreated all the major set-pieces of the original--Indiana Jones being chased by a boulder, getting dragged under a truck, fighting in a bar that's on fire, and so forth--it becomes astounding. Besides rooting for the kids--how are they going to pull off the next part?--I think many viewers relate to the film because everyone role-played as a child, whether it was "Cowboys & Indians," "Superheroes" or something else. These kids elevated that experience to the next level by videotaping it. At the same time, the sheer scope of what they achieved is inspiring--they had an impossible, idyllic dream as 11-year-olds and tenaciously made it happen, despite overwhelming odds. That's an experience anyone can get behind.
One of the things I talk about in Homemade Hollywood is how fan films are the offspring of scripted entertainment and Reality TV, and the Raiders adaptation is a great example of this, because you're seeing familiar scripted characters enacted by regular people in real-world settings without the perfect Hollywood sheen. When you see 13-year-old Chris Strompolos as Indy, trying to outrun a 100-lb. boulder made out of fiberglass or hanging off the front of a rolling truck, the look of terror on his face is undeniably real. It's a very analog, visceral experience to view the film and it sucks viewers in, because these days, that's something you often can't get from professional movies.
Ironically, Hollywood reacted to that analog, visceral experience by buying the life-rights to the filmmakers' story in a six-figure deal that made the front page of Variety. In a few years, you can expect to find a professional tribute movie about their amateur tribute movie about yet another movie at your local multiplex.
How has the web reshaped amateur film production, publicity, and distribution?
The web has certainly become the lifeline of the fan film community and has affected all the aspects you listed. Before the mid-Nineties mainstreaming of the internet, there were plenty of fan filmmakers out there, but they weren't aware of each other. In fact, the term "fan film" didn't exist because no one realized that this was a filmmaking movement instead of merely a few isolated movies mentioned in the back pages of enthusiast magazines like CineMagic.
In terms of production, sure, amateur filmmakers use the internet for obvious things like buying costumes or equipment (or, in some cases, pirating editing and effects software), but now they can build a virtual crew as well. For instance, the 2005 fan film, Star Wars: Revelations, was an ambitious, 40-minute effort covered by all the major news channels and downloaded over a million times in its first 48 hours on the web. Part of the appeal was its eye-popping special effects, which were created by a volunteer team of CGI enthusiasts around the world that used the web to recruit artists, exchange files and compile the finished effect shots.
The internet also provides varied levels of distribution, from simple YouTube clips to over-the-top efforts like Revelations, which was available in a variety of forms, from iPod-friendly MP4 files to a Bit Torrent package that that could be burned to DVD-Rs to create a two-disc set--one for the movie and one for the behind-the-scenes extras, naturally.
As for publicity, websites and the blogosphere are certainly the main forum for spreading the word about fan films today, because a simple link will get your work seen. I run a daily fan film blog called FanCinemaToday.com, and I get everything from illiterate emails ("Dude, U rite on my movie?") to professional-quality digital press kits. No press junkets or swag yet, but I can dream (just kidding). Like the films themselves, the publicity efforts range all over the map.
You describe a number of cases where studios have struggled with how to respond to fan films produced about their franchises. What factors have shaped their decisions in regard to fan cinema? How would you characterize the current perceptions in Hollywood towards fan films?
Hollywood has been fairly alarmed by them--and with good reason. While I'm an advocate of fan filmmaking, I think the studios are right to be concerned. If you owned a sleek Maserati and the 12-year-old next door took it for a joyride, you'd be furious even if it came through without a scratch. That's something like what's going on with the studios, because amateurs are basically hijacking these billion-dollar franchises and doing whatever they want with them.
Now, to be fair, 99.9 percent of all fan films are tributes in some form or another, they pose no real monetary threat to a studio's franchise and they don't impact the public consciousness when you compare the number of people who saw The Dark Knight last summer to 6,000 people watching Batman's Bad Day on YouTube. Studios realize this and I think that fuels the current take on such flicks--that they're relatively harmless. At the same time, going after fan filmmakers with IP lawsuits would be a waste of resources because they'd cost more than could be won, plus they'd be a PR nightmare similar to the travails that Warner Brothers experienced when it tried to shut down Harry Potter websites a few years ago.
On the other hand, the current state of things where most studios are looking the other way is going to end sooner or later. To make up an example, let's say you make a $20,000 fan film where Superman goes crazy because of Kryptonite and starts graphically killing babies with his X-ray vision. If it's a well-made film that grabs the eye of a cable news pundit on a slow news day, that could blow up into a serious problem and potentially damage the franchise.
A more likely scenario, however, is that studios will get involved with fan films simply because there's money to be made, whether it's through some form of licensing out characters to the filmmakers, or making the best flicks available on a studio-sanctioned X-Box channel for a buck apiece, or something else entirely.
Lucasfilm has taken an interesting approach to dealing with fan films with its annual Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. The contest is used to reach out to the fanbase, it appears to show fans great largesse because George Lucas is "allowing" them to make fan tribute movies, and yet it gives Lucasfilm indirect control over what material goes into such flicks, because if you're going to go through all the effort to make a Star Wars fan film, why wouldn't you follow the content guidelines so that you could enter it in the contest?
As you note, far fewer women than men have been involved in the production of
original fan films. Why do you think this pattern has emerged and are there
signs that more women are producing fan movies now than in previous decades?
There are lots of theories about this out there--for instance, that women are more interested in characters' internal lives--an aspect more easily explored through fan fiction--or the comment earlier that guys bond by 'doing' so they gravitate toward a group activity like film production.
I think one overlooked aspect is sheer momentum. Fan fiction took off in the 1960s and 70s with zines and quickly became an outlet for female fans. I suspect that since then, women looking to create new stories for a favorite franchise have looked at the fanfic community and said "That's where my peers are; I guess I'm going in that direction." It's self-perpetuating at this point.
Of course, I'm not a female fan filmmaker and never will be, so I can't speak from a place of authority. As a result, in Homemade Hollywood, I spent a chapter interviewing women filmmakers and a number of them spoke of women being uncomfortable with being in charge. One filmmaker who teaches film to girls noted that the idea of being a director never occurred to her students and when she suggested it, they couldn't envision themselves in that position at all.
With all that in mind, I don't see the current male-to-female amateur filmmaker ratio changing anytime soon. One thing I would like to see is more collaboration between the fanfic and fan film communities. Most fan films would benefit from better characterization and more fully rounded stories; who better to write them than fanfic authors? It's happened in a few cases--most noticeably the aforementioned Star Wars: Revelations--and I think both sides of the equation could benefit from it.
In the case of Star Trek, we are seeing increased collaboration between fans and some of those involved in the commercial franchise itself, including actors,
script writers, and technicians. What are the implications of this kind of collaboration for the future of fan cinema?
There are a number of high-profile fan efforts with sophisticated production values now, most noticeably Star Trek: Phase II, a fan series which sports a $100,000 Enterprise bridge set. They've been known to feature Trek alumni such as George Takei ("Sulu") and Walter Koenig ("Checkov") recreating their original roles, and have had original series writers script and sometimes direct their episodes
Quasi-pro efforts like Phase IIdo point the way towards a number of possibilities for fan films in the future beyond obvious things, such as that they may prove to be a "farm league" for tomorrow's professional casts and crews. For instance, fan productions may wind up being used by Hollywood to see if the time is right to bring back a shuttered franchise. Similarly, analyzing fan films based on properties that are still up-and-running may provide insight into what aspects resonate most with die-hard fans. Alternately, if fan films show a trend of including a specific characteristic not in the original--for example, many Star Trek fan films pointedly feature gay characters--they may provide insight into what would realign a troubled franchise with its fanbase.
And as noted before, studios are likely to eventually get involved with fan filmmakers simply because there's money being left on the table under the current arrangement of pretending they're not there. If fans are going to make an amateur production based on your IP, why not sell them a specialized set of rights, props, costumes, digital filmmaking "toolkits" customized to the franchise with trademark sounds, music and "greenscreenable" effects, and rent them space on a special website just for "official fan productions" based on your franchise? Once there are enough decent flicks, they can be repackaged as a TV special, a DVD, or some other product. There's a lot of way studios and fans can work together in a symbiotic fashion that would benefit all parties.
Getting into bed with the studios works for fan films primarily because most filmmakers in the hobby daydream of breaking into Hollywood; such a model would be far less successful if applied to other media like fan fiction, where similar efforts have failed.
Also, another concern is that high-end, high-profile fan productions are a lot of fun to watch, but they can be intimidating to potential fan filmmakers--"Why should I bother if that's what a fan film is supposed to be? I can't do that." Phase II, in particular, is far removed from the underground, "punk rock" aesthetic that has powered so many fan efforts throughout the years.
Ironically, that sheen of perfection is exactly what Hardware Wars parodied back in the 1970s, showing that a fan production didn't have to be perfect--much less made with professional help--to be enjoyable. Perhaps things are coming full-circle and we need a new low-rent flick like Hardware Wars to burst that bubble again. Who knows?
Clive Young is an author/lecturer covering the crossroads between high tech and popular culture. He is the author of the first book about fan films, Homemade Hollywood: Fans Behind The Camera (Continuum, 2008). He is also senior editor for Pro Sound News and has written for MTV, VH1.com, American Songwriter and numerous other outlets; additionally, he is the author of Crank It Up, an exploration into the world of rock concert roadies. Young has lectured extensively on film and music at many universities, libraries and conventions, and lives in New York with his wife and daughter. Visit his website,
This is part eight of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.
Conclusion: The Value of Spreadable Media
So far this white paper has:
criticized the vagueness of existing models of "viral media" or "memes"
outlined the differences between sticky and spreadable media.
identified those factors which have led to the rise of spreadable media
shown why spreadable media involves a collaboration between the gift economy and commodity culture.
discussed a range of different kinds of communities that are shaping the spread of media
pointed towards some properties shared by the most spreadable media content.
In this concluding section, we will return to the core question from the perspective of our clients: Is it a good idea to allow or enable my consumers to spread my brand message or my copyrighted content? We enter this discussion with some modesty. The situation we have described here is in flux. New examples of spreadable content, new business plans, and new policies regarding intellectual property are announced each day and so far, the verdict is still out. There's a lot we do not yet know about spreadable media's benefits and risks from a corporate perspective. In this transitional moment, we advise companies to proceed with caution but fear that those who remain totally outside this space may be running greater risks than those who make at least some modest steps towards embracing spreadability.
Certainly, one can point to some great success stories from companies who have been early to embrace this spreadable model. One such case is the Dove Evolution campaign that was released online with a 75 second clip showing an "ordinary" woman's painful transformation into an "object of desire". The ad boosted sales, received over 5 million views and cost nothing to distribute online. Dove also released another version of the spot on television during the Super bowl. Placing the ad cost the company $2.5 million and it received 2.5 million views. Granted, broadcast television provided them with an opportunity to reach a large number of viewers in a very short period of time, but the online version reached almost twice as many people at a fraction of the cost. One take-away here is that television may remain a stronger venue for "just in time" information, while the slower circulation of information online may ultimately result in much deeper saturation within the culture.
Or consider the success of the Cadbury Gorilla advertisement which we've cited several times already. In 8 weeks the ad received 5 million views, positioning Cadbury to grow 30% above the industry average that same year, increase it's sales by 7% and most importantly, detach itself from the chocolate recall-salmonella scandal that had greatly impacted the company's image in the UK.
Such success stories have inspired other companies to develop so-called "viral" marketing strategies, some of which have succeeded, many of which have not. The decentralized nature of the process, the lack of control over the flow of content means that there are no guarantees that such content will reach their desired market segments or for that matter, that they will circulate anywhere. If you want to guarantee the number of eyeballs which consume your message, nothing is going to replace traditional broadcasting methods anytime soon. Lowering the transaction costs, however, make it possible for companies to minimize their risks in trying out such strategies as an add-on to existing marketing approaches.
So what is spreadable media good for?
To generate active commitment from the audience,
To empower them and make them an integral part of your product's success,
To benefit from online word-of-mouth
To reach niche, highly interconnected audiences,
but most of all, to communicate with audiences where they already are, and in a way that they value.
Each of these factors suggest that such an approach may yield longer term rather than shorter term benefits:
Spreadability may help to expand and intensify consumer awareness of a new and emerging brand or transform their perceptions of an existing brand, re-affirming its central place in their lives.
Spreadability may expand the range of potential markets for a brand by introducing it, at low costs and low risks, to niches that previously were not part of its market.
Spreadability may intensify consumer loyalty by increasing emotional attachment to the brand or media franchise.
Spreadability may expand the shelf life of existing media content by creating new ways of interacting with it (as occurs, say, around the modding of games or the archiving of classic television content on YouTube) and it may even rebuild or reshape the market for a dormant brand, as suggested by Robert Kozinets writing on "retro-brands."
All told, those companies which have the most to gain from this approach are those who have the least to lose from abandoning traditional broadcasting models, those which have:
lower promotional budgets
who want to reach niche markets
who want to distribute so-called "Long Tail" content
who want to build strong emotional connections with their consumers.
Those who have the most to lose are those companies which:
have well established brand messages
have messages that are predictably delivered through broadcast channels
who are concerned about a loss of control over their intellectual property
who have reason to fear backlash from their consumers.
Even here, remaining outside of the spreadable model altogether may cut them off from younger and more digitally connected consumers who spend less time consuming traditional broadcast content or who are increasingly suspicious of top-down advertising campaigns.
Such considerations intensify when we move from brand messages, which one wants to circulate freely, towards content, which is expected to generate revenue. Right now, spreadability has proven more effective at generating buzz and awareness than as a revenue generator, though this may be changing. Consider, for example, the mobile sector. As many as 20 percent of mobile subscribers are listening to music on their mobile devices (Minney, 2008) with similar increases occurring with other media such as games and video. There is also a strong rise in mobile media sharing, either directly phone-to-phone or pc-to-phone, in either case mobile consumers are already embracing spreadable media by default and companies are discovering that there is money to be made by facilitating their activities.
So far, only a few companies are taking advantage of a potential Mobile Web 2.0, according to Sumit Agarwal, a product manager in Google's mobile division:
We're really at mobile Web 0.5, to be completely honest, the real thing about Web 2.0 is people introducing applications to each other. True viral applications, something sent from one person to another, will absolutely be a big part of mobile. (Salz, 2007)
One such company, MoConDi Ltd. announced in September of 2007 that its Italian based service, MeYou, had reached more than 800,000 registered users. By January 2008, that number had doubled. MeYou is a mobile phone application which supports distribution of a mobile content to end users. These users can then recommend content to additional users and receive credits for doing so. Users receive MMS recommendations which contain a message and download link for the content and a link to install the MeYou application. In this case, they are using the same marketing strategy that launched Hotmail in the 90s.
MeYou has implemented a hybrid model between the sticky and spreadable models, between content distribution and marketing. As such, users will receive certain content directly from MeYou or from their friends for free, but other content requires for direct payment. Users can still share such by sending the application for which the receiver has to then purchase the activation code. This model is particularly successful with games where after the applications are activated, users can play against each other, creating strong social incentives to expand its reach. MeYou works mostly with ringtones, images, videos, animations and games. Through its parent company, MoConDi generate mobile branded content and distribution strategies for other businesses. According to MeYou's public information 60% of users purchase content and 64% of users send recommendations with 24% of recommendations resulting in purchases.
We might contrast the relative success which MoConDi has enjoyed through enfranchising its consumers to spread content with the backlash which has come as a result of the tendency of major media companies to brand grassroots circulation as "piracy." For quite some time, Sony-BMG and all other music majors have opted for issuing take-down notices when content to which they hold rights to is posted on YouTube. It now seems that Sony-BMG is finding a way to move away from that prohibitionist model and is embracing a profit sharing, win-win philosophy based on building stronger collaborations with their fans. They have opted for inserting a link to the content's original site on the video post and eliminating its capacity to be embedded. So, on one end they've limited the spread of their content in favor of increasing the stickiness of their own site. But they also are allowing fans to share music and YouTube to make a profit. In the process, Sony-BMG is increasing the traffic to and visibility of its official sites, but most importantly, the company is no longer treating fans and potential consumers as criminals.
Such an approach is spreading across other industries and throughout other mediums. Peer-to-peer technologies have dealt with a bad reputation for years -- since the days of the Napster trials, P2P's original idea, to enable user share big files, has been demonized. The entertainment industry has pegged it as a tool for piracy. And recently, ISPs have blamed it for clogging their networks. Nevertheless P2P is the perfect example to illustrate some of the models of resource-lite, user-led, pull distribution that benefit from a spreadable mentality. Here company and user/distributors are building a completely new relationship where the company trusts the user with the safekeeping of its content. In spite of the bad reputation and lack of control, the same entertainment industry that one day attacked it, has now found, both in the bit torrent technology and in P2P, a powerful ally. NBC is working with Pando Networks, a P2P content-delivery-technology company, to revamp its NBC Direct service (Weprin, 2008). BBC and Showtime, amongst others, are now working with the bit torrent distribution platform Vuze. And Fox, Lions Gate and MTV are all working with the original BitTorrent company.
Media scholar Mark Pesce (2005) argues that many mainstream British and American television series are enjoying commercial success in international markets because -- and not in spite of -- their massive online circulations. Pesce argues that illegal downloads helped to promote the content, closing the temporal gap between domestic and foreign distribution, and increasing consumer interest. Pesce argues that what he calls Hyperdistribution is here to stay.
The clock can't be turned back, BitTorrent can't be un-invented. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. In the new, "flat world," where any programme produced anywhere in the world is immediately available everywhere in the world, the only sustainable edge comes from entrepreneurship and innovation.
Pesce's plea for innovation is made that more urgent by the fact that, according to a study performed in 17 countries, 29% of active technology users regularly write comments and blogs, 27% share free music and 28% access social networking sites.
Clearly, a significant portion of the public is embracing those technologies and cultural practices which support spreadable media. They want to play active roles in helping to shape the flow of media within their own social communities. This is part of what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff are calling the "groundswell", which is being fueled by the combined force of "people's desires to connect, new interactive technologies and online economics". They describe the groundswell as a movement that can't be stopped but must be joined in order to retain currency. It has changed the power relation between companies and consumers, and, in embracing the groundswell and the spreadable media model, companies are also redefining their relationships and their sense of self. This is might be a painful process, but at the end there will be more to be gained than lost. By ceding this power to its consumers companies are loosing much of the control over their distribution, but they are gaining the value of each user's personal ties.
We may not yet have reached the point where "If it doesn't spread, it's dead," but that time is coming and companies need to be rethinking their business models now in anticipation of these shifts which will even more fundamentally alter the media landscape.
Whew! That's it folks! This is very much a work in progress -- a sketch for a book we are just starting to write. There will be many more dimensions of the argument, not to mention concrete examples, developed in the book, so stay tuned. It's been fun watching news of "spreadable media" get spread by the Twitter community and more recently through the Blogosphere. We are just starting to get substantive responses after watching a first round of "look heres" which were designed to direct people's attention to this discussion as some place where something interesting was happening. I do hope you've found it interesting and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you make from these ideas. As our model suggests, you will continue to talk about bits and pieces of these posts if they generate worth for you in your social interactions or if they create value in your professional life. You in turn will generate both value and worth for us -- in terms of generating new insights as you talk about and apply these concepts and in terms of expanding the community of people who are talking about these ideas and thus broadening the market for the book when it appears. We've done our bit here, so I hope I can count on you to do yours. :-)
This is part seven of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.Spreadability: Aesthetic and Structural Strategies
Cadbury's "Gorilla" spot -- an ad featuring nothing but a life-size Cadbury-purple Gorilla belting out the drumline to Phil Collins classic "Something in the Air Tonight" -- didn't spread just because it was "producerly." It was also incredibly amusing. There is still truth in the notion that good, compelling content remains a crucial factor in the spreadability media. If a "producerly" openness is required in order for content to be adopted into the gift economy, not all gifts are equally valuable, and thus not all content is equally spreadable. Producerly engagement encourages individuals to take on content as their own and invest their own identity in it, making it a potential tool of communication. But, in thinking back to what we outlined as some of the key motivations for spreading content, we must remember that in order to become spreadable, the content has to be able to create worth. In other words, openness and an abundance of meanings and uses may make some advertising material a potential gift, but it has to be able to communicate something that is socially meaningful before someone will give it.
Humor
If one looks at the videos that have spread most successfully, a clear pattern begins to emerge: a lot of them, like "Gorilla," are really, really funny. The success of humor should come as no surprise -- we intuitively understand that sharing funny anecdotes or cracking jokes that everyone gets is an easy way to build camaraderie and put people at ease in formal situations. Conversely, making a joke that people don't understand is a fast way to inject awkwardness into any situation and induce a sense of alienation in those left out of the punch-line. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1991) has noted the very thin line which separates a joke from an insult: a joke expresses something the community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn't want to talk about. The act of recognizing a joke is an act of exchanging judgments about the world and thus the spread of jokes can strengthen social ties.
Humor, therefore, has the ability to define "insiders" and "outsiders" within a community: insiders may take pleasure in making fun of outsiders. Consider how jokes form around rivalries between colleges or companies: MIT folks don't really imagine that folks at Harvard are foolish but making Harvard jokes signals that we are all part of the same community and close ranks against those "up the river." But tell the joke in the wrong time or place and we can damage social relations, insulting those we sought to include, alienate those we sought to bring close to us. Humor, thus, is not simply a matter of taste: it is a vehicle by which we articulate and validate our tastes.
If we look more closely at the spread of videos, we can identify two extremely popular forms -- parody (often in partnership with certain elements of nostalgia, usually ironic) and humor that uses absurdity or shock/surprise. To be clear, these categories are by no means mutually exclusive, and successful videos quite frequently use a blend of both for added effect. Cadbury's "Gorilla" is a prime instance in which parody, nostalgia, and absurdity are blended in order to create an provocative and spreadable ad. To be fair, parody in general always has elements of absurdity, since its humor relies on the intrusion of unexpected elements into an "normal" or common situation. In "Gorilla," however, the dominant form at work is absurdity. This is established from the very beginning, by starting with a close-up of the gorilla, and pulling out to reveal the drum kit. The opening moment is one of surprise, emphasized with a sudden rise in the music, upending our expectations of what we would see following a series of shots of a gorilla's face. The strangeness of the set-up itself becomes the punch line, rather than forcing any complex interpretations or outside references as is more common in direct parodies.
This worked beautifully for Cadbury, resulting in a slew of remixes and mash-ups that helped promote the original and turn Cadbury into a sort of cultural benchmark in its own right. One user interpreted the video to be melodramatic and "cheesy," and thus created a response called "A glass and a half full of cheesiness" which redid the video using the over-the-top 80s ballad "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Another remix plays up the fact that the drummer is a gorilla, using "Welcome to the Jungle." Still more use artists ranging from Nirvana to 50 cent, the latter song not even having much by way of a traditional drum beat. Further spoofs went on to re-shoot the video with other unexpected drummers, from a tiny stuffed monkey, which plays off the fake primate aspect, to a model in her bra, which does a riff off of the strap line "a glass and a half full of joy," replacing it with "two cups full of joy." Both by depriving the video of a specific message and engaging forms that are primed for participation, "Gorilla" serves as an exemplar of a "producerly" text that spreads as more and more people have a go at remaking it for their own comic effects. Its absurdity creates gaps "wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them" (Fiske, 1989, p.104).
Parody's Promises and Perils
Another thing that "Gorilla" does well is provide different levels of engagement -- the video works whether or not you get the Phil Collins references. However, this is not always the case with humor. The strength of parody as spreadable media is the fact that it is a predominantly participatory form. That is to say, for something to be recognizable as parody requires certain cultural knowledge on the part of the viewer. This is precisely what makes parody valuable for spread -- it can express shared frameworks of reference within a community and, especially when it plays on nostalgic references, a shared history as well, thus marking those inside as those who "get" the joke. But as we mentioned briefly, this has the potential to alienate as well, and unless advertisers want the spread of their content to be siloed exclusively within small niches, they must be careful to build different levels of "insider" knowledge.
Two instances of well-executed parodies are the efforts by Coca-Cola and Toyota in addressing the gaming community, a large, but undeniably specialized interest group.
Though the message is almost painfully sincere, the spot works because of the combination of a broad message (turn bad things good by giving back, part of their "mycokerewards.com" campaign) and very specific details about the game world it was parodying. The narrative works whether or not the viewer knows anything about Grand Theft Auto, but if the countless mentions of the game in the YouTube comments were any indication, the fact that it spoofed the popular game inspired many to help spread the word. Those who "got" the video game elements, especially the more subtle ones like the fact that the character is able to pull a seemingly endless supply of random objects out of nowhere, were able to share and discuss their knowledge, as well as make further "in" jokes ("I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek of Grand Theft Auto: San Francisco").
Even beyond the different levels of gaming knowledge, there is yet another layer of cultural references -- the song used in the spot, 'You Give A Little', is from 1976 musical called Bugsy Malone, itself a parody of cinema representations of 1930s gangsters. In the comments, fans of the film lobbied to see the musical released on DVD and responded to one another, declaring their alliance to that particular fan group.
Yet another recent success was the Toyota World of Warcraft commercial. What made this one different from the previous spot (which, for all its infamy, did not reach nearly the same level of online circulation) or even the Grand Theft Auto spoof, is that it not only utilizes details and aesthetics of World of Warcraft, but refers to a very specific event in the online gaming culture's history. The 30-second spot features a group of warriors standing around planning and arming for an attack, when all of a sudden one of them goes rogue, transforms into a truck, and goes rushing off into battle.
This is a direct reference to the Leeroy Jenkins incident that became so widespread as a cultural reference that it was featured as a question on Jeopardy. Within the World of Warcraft community, the Leeroy Jenkins incident was so well-known that an add-on was created so players could "invoke the power of Leeroy Jenkins" and a play a sound-clip from the original battle video. The key to this parody was how it managed to remain faithful to the cultural cues of the game and the incident -- the deadpan, matter-of-fact voices of the players, the crazy, over-the-top aggro yelling of the "Leeroy" character, who at one point utters one of the lines from the original Leeroy Jenkins video.
There is also an additional layer of self-reflexivity, when one of the World of Warcraft players responds with an exasperated "No way. There's no trucks in Worlds of Warcraft!" All of these things work as winking invitations to those involved in World of Warcraft to get in on the joke, and as over-the-top as it is, the spot is never more over-the-top than the original, carefully avoiding coming off as a mockery. Companies must be careful, however, that in trying to address a wider audience with different levels of shared cultural knowledge that they do not make the parody itself so broad and lacking in culturally specific details that the spoof comes across as mocking, lazy, or disingenuous.
Additionally, it should be noted that the form alone will not do all the work. Take, for instance, the Mini Cooper film series "Hammer & Coop," which, despite being designed to "go viral" as a parody of 70s and 80s cop shows (Starsky & Hutch and Knight Rider), got no where near the attention of the most successful spreadable media. Despite some impressive numbers boasted by the advertising firm behind the series, the YouTube view numbers flatten out in the tens of thousands, instead of millions. As a parody, it lacked a clear interest community due to the broadness of execution. While it parodied the general aesthetic and the dominant tropes of the 70s and 80s cop genre, it failed to draw clear attention to any specifics, and in fact relied on references to other parodies of the genre at times by making the protagonist resemble Ben Stiller's character from the recent Starsky & Hutch remake. Though by no means a failure, the video's limited circulation when compared with the Coke, Cadbury, and Toyota ads, suggests that it is not only the parody form, but the quality and subtlety of execution that matters.
Information Seeking
Another characteristic of popular "viral" content is some level of ambiguity or confusion that encourages people to seek out further information. This act encourages the sharing of content as people enlist their network to help with the problem solving, an act typically known as "collective intelligence" or "crowd sourcing." In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins (2006) argues that a successful media franchise is not only a cultural attractor, drawing like minded people together to form an audience, but also a cultural activator, giving that community something to do. Figuring out such spots offer many different communities something to do and thus a reason to continue to engage with its content. Often, these spots force us to look twice because we can't believe, or understand, what it is we are seeing. We need to verify their authenticity, intent, or simply figure out how it was accomplished.
The Cadbury Gorilla spot, for instance, did this to a certain extent, with some discussion surrounding just who was in the Gorilla suit -- Phil Collins himself was cited as a possibility -- and, to a lesser extent, whether or not the Gorilla was real. The VW Polo also engaged this kind of participation , provoking questions of whether or not the ad was "real" or in any way affiliated with Volkswagen. With Volkswagen's denial of any connection to the commercial, people became wrapped up in a search for the origins of the ad, locating information on the creators, the director, and even the budget as clues to whether or not it was a publicity stunt.
Yet another interesting instance of this logic is the "homemade" Ford Mondeo "Desire" video. The ad itself is a whimsical, if somewhat ambiguous, television spot composed of a series of still and near-still shots of cars lifting off the streets of London attached to colorful bunches of helium balloons. The video was uploaded to YouTube and received a few hundred thousand hits, a decent, if unremarkable, showing. What makes the Ford Mondeo case so interesting is that almost six months after the original ad went up on YouTube, a video appeared of two guys from New Zealand tying balloons to a car until it lifted off. The video, posted by a user by the name of homeschooled2, claimed to be a "homemade" version of the Ford ad. It received far greater viral circulation than the original, clocking in over a million YouTube views and thousands of comments, as well as news media coverage, as people tried to prove whether or not what happened the video was physically possible.
Two days after the initial "homemade" video went up, homeschooled2 posted a couple of "making of" follow-up videos that showed that the video was made with aid of a crane and some clever digital editing effects, with acknowledgment of help from the "team from Ford" in the video description. Leaving the nature and extent of Ford's involvement ambiguous, the "making of" videos forced us to consider whether Ford had orchestrated the whole thing, making the original ad with the addition of a viral campaign in mind. Many of the comments surrounding the "homemade" ad were focused on determining whether it was "for real." Even after the follow-up videos that revealed both the crane and the Ford involvement were posted, clearly linked from the original, discussion continued along these lines, suggesting that it was not the answer to the question of authenticity that was the point, but the process of questioning. What is finally at stake is not knowing, but seeking answers. The "homemade" video thus spread by opening itself to this search for authenticity.
This search for authenticity, origins, or purpose can be seen as yet another way of actively constructing the meaning of content, another type of gap that encourages producerly engagement. Here, it is the process of uncovering the "truth" that is more important that what is found. Whether the VW ad is proven to be an intentional stunt or an accidental leak, whether Ford had planned the "homemade" ad from the beginning or not, whether it really is Phil Collins in the gorilla suit, the debate, allows individuals to create and justify their interpretations by asserting control over what information they have about the ad.
Unfinished Content
In all of the previous examples, the "gaps" are in the meaning of the content, whether due to general ambiguity within or hidden information surrounding the ad. Burger King's Subservient Chicken interactive video site, launched in 2004, literally engaged users in the creation of the video's content. Visitors to the site saw a video window with a man in a chicken suit standing in a room. Below, there is a text input box with the words "Get chicken just the way you like it. Type command here." Once a command is typed, it triggers a video of the man in the chicken suit performing the command. There are nearly 300 different clips in all, each set to respond to a variety of similar commands ranging from "jump" to "lay egg" to "moonwalk." Commands that the chicken doesn't understand might result in a clip expressing confusion or boredom, while commands deemed inappropriate, such as those that are sexually explicit, result in a clip of the chicken wagging his finger in disapproval. All of the video clips fit within an amateur video aesthetic, with a single, low resolution camera, pointing head on not unlike a webcam mounted atop a computer.
Unlike other so-called "interactive" video campaigns, such as the Guinness domino website in which a user solves a series of puzzles to reveal parts of the finished video, the Subservient Chicken site creates a more dynamic interaction, engaging the user in a process of actually creating the video. The site does nothing until a command has been entered. That is, the particular video (or series of clips) that is viewed, the actual output, is controlled and triggered entirely by the user. Whereas the Guinness campaign is a matter of engaging with content that is only retrieved interactively, giving up control to the participant only at the level of access, Subservient Chicken gives up control at the level of creation. Though the videos are pre-made, the content itself fundamentally incomplete. Not only is there no meaning, but there is also no action, no finished content until the user enters a command. Thus, by creating a partial work, an archive of incomplete, component parts, the Subservient Chicken campaign offered the user agency that went beyond just access and choice, but tangible participation in the work's creation.
Subservient Chicken becomes producerly by explicitly engaging the user in the creative process. It also triggers an information-gathering urge, much like the Mondeo or VW Polo ads. Users debate how its mechanism works as much as they reinterpreted its meaning or questioned its authenticity. Gamers often seek to test the limits of a game to see how much actual control and agency they can exert. Here, users wanted to push against the limits of the ad to see what flaws they could locate in its execution. Websites soon appeared when catalogued the various commands and their responses. People worked together to test the limits of application and in the process, spread the video to other interested parties, trying to expand the ranks of the puzzle solvers. According to Axel Bruns (2007), some of the key characteristics of "produsage" -- the "hybrid, user-and-producer position" occupied by participants in user-led spaces such as Wikipedia and YouTube -- include that content is "continually under development" and highly collaborative. Working together, they hoped to outsmart the original producers or at least figure out how it all worked and thereby "beat the system."
Nostalgia and Community
Earlier, we noted that commodity culture and the gift economy operate on the basis of very different sets of fantasy. We turn towards commodity culture when we seek to express our individuality, when we want to break free of social constraints, when we want to enjoy opportunities for upward mobility or shift our status and identity. The fantasies which shape the gift economy have more to do with social connectivity and especially with reaffirming existing values and preserving and promoting cultural traditions. The fantasies of a commodity culture are those of transformation while those of a gift economy are often deeply nostalgic.
When materials move from one sphere to the other, they often get reworked to reflect the values and fantasies associated with their current context. Jenkins (1992), for example, argues fan media production and circulation often centers around themes of romance, friendship, and community. These values shape the decisions fans make at every level, starting with the choice of films and television programs which seem to offer the best opportunities to explore these concepts. When fans rework program content through vidding (a genre of fan music videos) or fan fiction, they tend to draw attention to those situations where such relationships are most vividly expressed. A fan music video for Heroes, for example, centers around moments when two or more of the characters are interacting, even though the structure of the original program kept these characters apart for the better part of a season. The selected music further emphasizes the social bonds within the community and the emotional links these characters feel towards each other.
These themes surface most often in fan made media because, consciously or not, these works allow fans to explore the nature of the social bonds and emotional commitments that draw them together as a subculture. Fan-made media is media that is shared with others with common passions and often its exchange can be understood as a marker of friendship or at least sisterhood. In some cases, fans produces stories or videos to give to other fans explicitly as gifts. But in many other cases, they understand their works as a contribution to the ongoing life of their community. The community tends to nurture writers and artists, seeing each member as potentially making a creative contribution, but they value more strongly those whose works reflect the core themes of fan culture more generally.
Other content which is commonly "spread" within the gift economy has an explicitly nostalgic tone. For many baby boomers, there is enormous pleasure in watching older commercials or segments from children's programs of their childhood. This is a generation which is using eBay to repurchase all the old toys, comics, collector cards, and other stuff that their parents threw away when they went to college. The exchange of these retro or nostalgic texts helps to spark the exchange of memories, which are often bound up to personal and collective histories of consumption and spectatorship. Robert Kozinets (Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry, 2003) has explored how such "retromarketing" practices have helped to revitalized older brands, giving them greater currency in the contemporary marketplace. As Kozinets and his collaborators explain:
Long abandoned brands, such as Aladdin (lunchboxes), Beemans (gum) and Chuck Taylors (shoes), have been adroitly reanimated and successfully relaunched. Ancient commercials are being re-broadcast (Ovaltine, Alka-Seltzer) or brilliantly updated (Britney Spears sings "Come Alive" for Pepsi). On the Internet, sites devoted to marketing a variety of retro merchandise--from candy (nostalgiccandy.com) to fabric (reprodepotfabrics.com), games (allretrogames.com) to home furnishings (modfurnishings.com)--have popped up. Retro styling is de rigueur in countless product categories, ranging from cameras and colognes to telephones and trainers. Even automobiles and detergents, long the apotheosis of marketing's new-and-improved, washes-whiter, we-have-the-technology worldview, are getting in on the retroactive act, as the success of the Chrysler P.T Cruiser and Color Protection Tide daily remind us.
In many cases, the release of these retro products sparks enormous conversation wherever there are consumers old enough to have fond memories of their hay day. In other cases, online discussions of long retired brands has led to a greater appreciation of their potential within parent companies, as in the case of Quaker Oats' Quisp cereal, which had been introduced in 1965, entered the popular imagination thanks to an inventive ad campaign created by Rocky and Bullwinkle's Jay Ward and Bill Scott, and finally disappeared from national circulation in 1977, though it remained available in some regions of the country. Internet discussions and eBay transactions sparked growing consumer awareness of the brand, helping to pave the way for more aggressive marketing effort by Quaker, including the development and online sale of a gourmet sized package of the crunchy sugary cereal.
While online fans contest the authenticity of the re-issued product, they also share personal memories of their childhood enjoyment of the product and in the process, spread the news of its reissue to others in their social circles. In discussing the values which shape successful retro-brands, Kozinets and colleagues describe something very close to the animating fantasies of the gift economy:
Utopianism is perhaps the hallmark of the retro-brand. The brand must be capable of mobilizing an Elysian vision, of engendering a longing for an idealized past that is satisfied through consumption....Solidarity is an important unifying quality of the retro-brand. Whether as extreme as a cargo cult or as moderate as fictive kinship, the brand must inspire among its users the sense of belonging to a community.
References:
Brown, Stephen, Robert V. Kozinets, and John F. Sherry, Jr. (2003). "Sell Me the Old, Old Story: Retromarketing Management and the Art of Brand Revival," Journal of Consumer Behavior, June, 2. pp.85-98.
Douglas, Mary (1991) "Jokes," in Rethinking Popular Culture, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.291-311.
Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
This is part six of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.
Spreadable Content
Thus far, we have examined some of the technological and social conditions that allow for media to spread, but it remains clear that not all media content and materials are equally spreadable. Nor it is simply a matter of "good" or "interesting" content -- we do not pass on every bit of interesting information or every clever video. Content is spread based not on an individual evaluation of worth, but on a perceived social value within community or group.
Not all good content is good for sharing. In a gift economy, the gifts we share say something about our perceptions of the person we are passing them to as much as they express our own tastes and interests. Most importantly, the exchange of gifts serves to reinforce relations within the community and a badly chosen or ill-considered gift can cause hard feelings. Above all, we don't circulate gifts because advertisers ask us to do so -- and ideally, we'd like to minimize the hard sell contained in such gifts. We might well give someone a shirt with a designer label or even a T-Shirt which promoted a favorite film, but we are unlikely to stuff a catalog in the gift box in hopes that our friend will go back and buy more from the same company.
So, if we want to predict what content will "spread," we have to develop a fuller understanding of the ways that the circulation of information may strengthen or damage social relations. We must first come to understand what function the circulation of content and information serves within a social network -- that is, what is the relationship of the community to the materials that it circulates? From there, we can determine the necessary characteristics that advertising content must exhibit in order to have potential for use within a gift economy. We can then begin to draw out aesthetic and structural forms that lend themselves particularly well to this process.
What makes content worth spreading
There's a lot we can learn about how content circulates online by examining the existing literature on how rumors spread in face-to-face communities. Patricia A Turner (1994) has studied the circulation of rumors within the African American community. Turner makes the distinction between rumors, which are informal and temporary constellations of information, and contemporary legends, which are "more solidified rumors" (Turner 1994, p. 5) and maintain a reasonable consistency in narrative content as they are passed. Her description of such rumors bear a striking resemblance to what we've come to think of as Word of Mouth advertising -- testimonial accounts about a product or service -- and the circulation of advertising content itself that now most often characterizes "viral" media.
Many of Turner's cases center upon commercial products and corporations. In particular, the rumor that a number of different companies were owned by the Ku Klux Klan remained one of the most persistent and widespread in the African-American community during the period of her research. Various companies were implicated in such rumors, ranging from food and consumable products (Church's Chicken, Marlboro cigarettes) to clothing companies (Troop). Some were private enterprises and others public and none had any explicitly racist policies outside of marketing predominantly to African American populations. Church's chicken, for instance, managed to rally the support of the NAACP president at the time (Turner, 1994, p.96).
These rumors inflicted serious damage on these brands, resulting in "severe financial losses": Church's was forced to sell and Troop went bankrupt. (Turner, 1994, p.96). No sooner did one company collapse under the weight of the community's suspicions than new rumors of KKK associations were directed against other, similar companies. Though such claims may not have had much basis in fact, the accusations, Turner tells us, were far from random. In fact, the companies were linked by:
certain key elements . . . Namely, white-owned firms (with) . . . advertising directed solely at black consumers, that established nationwide franchises selling popular but nonessential commodities in primarily black neighborhoods (Turner, 1994, p.97).
Thus, what perpetuated the circulation of rumors about these companies had to do with what their products represented for their consumers. As Turner explains later in describing an instance in which the Church's Chicken rumor was successfully passed:
By sharing (the story) with my informant, (the person telling the story) was solidifying the bonds between them and, in a sense, bolstering their identity as potential victims of racist activity; in addition, a spotlight was trained on the potential aggressors, for one must never forget who the enemy is. My informant accepted the rumor because it functioned as a metaphor for the struggle he was facing in his attempt to establish himself as a man in American society (Turner, 1994, p.106-107)
By circulating the story, community members are able affirm their commonality and draw clear lines of who is friend and who is foe, express the shared concerns of that group (racism and discriminatory treatment) and bring their anxieties under control by responding to a symbolic embodiment of their concerns. These rumors reflect the reality of a world where racism often no longer takes the direct form of a KKK rally but may be implicit, tacit, and thus hard to locate or overcome. They are responding to what other social critics have called "enlightened racism" -- that is, racism which is recognized by its affects but not by its goals. Though clearly specific to this particular community, the example here offers valuable insight into the social factors that motivate sharing information and content within communities in general:
To bolster camaraderie and articulate the (presumably shared) experiences and values that identify oneself as belong to a particular community ("bolstering their identity")
To gather information and explain difficult to understand events or circumstances.
To establish the boundaries of an "in-group".
These same factors may come into play when fans advocate for a franchise or consumers promote a brand.
They are doing so because the brand express something about themselves or their community.
They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.
They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.
They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.
If the same content is passed between multiple communities, it is because that content serves relevant functions for each of those communities, not because it serves some lowest common denominator or universal function. Consider, for example, the campaign commercials produced by Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Starting as a dark horse with limited cash on hand, Huckabee sought to insure his content would spread to multiple communities of potential supporters. One such spot featured action star Chuck Norris. After an initially limited television buy, this spot spread through YouTube and ultimately became the focus for news coverage as a consequence.
What made Norris an inspired choice for such a spot was that his name recognition worked well in several radically different social networks. On the one hand, Norris had increasingly become a recurring reference point for jokes on late night comedy shows and had become a camp icon, inspiring sites such as Chuck Norris Facts. Here, deploying Chuck Norris showed that Huckabee was cool, that he understood and embraced some aspects of contemporary popular culture, and as a consequence, the spot helped to defer anxieties which might surround his status as a Baptist Minister, allowing him to escape the cultural war discourse that surrounded previous evangelical candidates.
On the other hand, Norris himself had a solid base of support among evangelical Christians. He writes a weekly column for the conservative news service WorldNetDaily on which he announced that were he to be president he would "Tattoo an American flag with the words, 'In God we trust,' on the forehead of every atheist." Norris is an outspoken Christian and has actually written several books on the subject. The Norris/Huckabee spots, thus, managed to speak to two very different communities, religious conservatives and an internet savvy young audience. Both saw something that spoke to them and many decided that it was content worth spreading.
To give a more immediate example, we might think of the way the VW Polo spoof ad was circulated. The spot itself featured a man of in determinant but Arabic descent pulling up alongside a cafe in a VW Polo. After muttering a few indistinguishable words, he presses his thumb down on a detonator, at which point we cut to an exterior shot that shows the Polo containing the entire explosion. The spot was never intended as a legitimate advert for VW, but rather part of a show reel that was leaked onto the web.
First, the spot was commented upon and passed among a number of different niche groups online, used as a way to express a number of different sentiments, but all with the purpose of articulating some form of value system or viewpoint. There were a number of blogs that posted the video in the spirit in which it was probably intended, citing its strength as an advertisement for being memorable and one discussion board post framed it with the saying that "anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of," aligning the video with the humor tactics of popular media like The Daily Show.
But a quick look at the trackbacks to one of the early posts on the blog Whizbang, which range from "disgusting" to "humor to the rescue," suggest that as the video spread more widely, it generated a wider range of interpretations of its message. Some blogs used it as a sort of war rally, with comments such as "perhaps we should start issuing (the Polo) to British forces" and "If only we could ship an entire fleet of these things to the Islamofascists world-wide." On the other side, it was framed as offensive and tasteless; It was pointed out on the Snopes.com article that the man in the commercial not only had a "distinctive middle eastern appearance," but was also wearing a checkered keffiyeh that was reminiscent of Yasser Arafat, suggesting a pointed political message at work.
One blog that specializes in media surrounding the Middle East juxtaposed a description of the video against an article about a poll which "highlights anti-Israeli feeling in Germany", while another site listed the video as the number one most racist commercial, even beating out ads from white supremacy organizations. The commercial was spread through a number of different interest communities with a range of opinions, but what they all have in common was that each used the ad to articulate specific values and agendas. The blog about racist commercials, for instance, was able to express anxiety over a long-standing pattern of negative stereotyping of various minorities. Other blogs that took a pro-war stance were able to use their attitude towards the situation portrayed in the video to create us/them distinctions on both a national level ("we" versus the "Islamofascists") and an ideological one, implicitly drawing a line between those who support the message and those who find the message offensive.
As we have seen, not all of these communities are as clearly defined as the African-American community Turner studied. Some communities may be pools, organized around shared interests, ranging from politics to pet care. Some may be webs, organized through the crisscrossing social affiliations of them members. And some may be hubs, structured around a central personality and their friends and followers. In some cases, the motives which shape the groups activities are clearly articulated and there is an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a member of such a community. They may be very aware of their shared agenda and have a critical perspective on what kinds of values shape their transactions. They may also have a vivid conception of the borders of their community and may aggressively police them against those who do not share their views.
They may have ambivalent or even hostile feelings about the circulation of meaningful content beyond the borders of their own community. Heather Hendershot (2004), for example, has documented the complex set of social negotiations which occur around the production and distribution of Christian music. She finds that this music is perceived as serving two very different goals -- reaffirming the shared values within Christian communities and serving as a vehicle for "witnessing" to those who have not yet accept Christ. Yet, as artists sought to insure their spread beyond the borders of the self-defined Christian community and thus reach potential new members, they often had to downplay those messages which signaled their membership, a process which often provoked ire from their most hardcore fans. The strategies which insured their circulation in the cultural mainstream might cause them to lose the support of their initial niche market.
Hendershot documents how different artists reconcile these contradictory pushes and pulls on their performance, making peace with the decision to remain within or move beyond their initial base of support. In each of these cases, though, the same core principle holds: the sharing of content with others is fundamentally an act of communication within and beyond cultural communities. When advertising spreads, it is because the community has embraced it as a resource for expressing its shared beliefs or pursuing its mutual interests. Community members have embraced the content because it allows them to say something that matters to them, often something about their relations to other community members. In that sense, it has acquired worth. But the worth of an advertisement may and often does differ from one community to another.
Spreadable Texts
As this circulation occurs, the original producer no longer is able to determine what a particular piece of content means because they are no longer able to control the context within which it is seen. Meanings proliferate as people pass the video on, inserting it into a variety of different conversations. Like an elaborate game of telephone, the message morphs and mutates as each successive viewer sees not the original intent, but the interpretations just prior to their own.
This kind of intervention, however, is not only the product of circulation, it is also the required precondition: content will spread only when it can serve the particular communicative purposes of a given community or group, and only community members can determine what those might be. Corporations cannot artificially build communities around their brands and products, but rather must allow their brands to be taken up by pre-existing communities by creating content that supports and sustains this kind of expressive appropriation. In other words, in the spreadable media landscape, companies must find ways not simply to motivate consumers to talk about their brands but also enable them to talk through their brands.
This is, of course, not a novel concept. Advertising, as Grant McCracken (1998) notes, has always been a tool for mapping generalized cultural meanings onto specific brands and those brands must be meaningfully inserted into the life-world of their consumers. Advertising may convince us that particular products may become good gifts because they convey shared values. Yet, in the spreadable media content, the advertisement may itself become a gift which we pass along to others we care about. As they do so, they remake the advertisement -- sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively -- to reflect their perceptions of themselves and of the people to whom they are giving it.
Right now, many companies fear this loss of centralized control over the circulation and interpretation of their brand messages. They want to hold onto the idea that a brand may carry a highly restricted range of meanings. But in doing so, they run the risk of removing the value of the brand as a vehicle for social and personal expression. They produce commodities which we can not consume and in the long run, they will become products we will not buy. So, the challenge is how to rethink advertising strategies to generate brand messages that support these processes of personalization and localization.
How to Make Content "Spreadable"
If sharing and spreading content is a sign of its popularity, then to understand what makes videos spread, we must first figure it out what it means for media to be "popular." In Understanding Popular Culture, media and communications scholar John Fiske (1989), draws a distinction between mass culture, that is culture which is mass produced and distributed, and popular culture, that is culture which has been meaningfully integrated into the everyday lives of consumers. This act of turning mass media into popular media involves "the active process of generating and circulating meanings and pleasures" (Fiske, 1989, p.23).
We must be careful here not to confuse messages with meanings. For the purposes of this discussion, messages refer to specific ideas that can be encoded into a media text by its creators, while meanings are the active interpretations of the audience, which may or may not align with the intended message. To return again to our previous example, in the VW Polo ad spoof, the intended message was that the creators were witty, creative, and irreverent. The meanings that were drawn from it were varied, ranging from patriotic to racist. Messages are encoded into a text; meanings are decoded from the text.
Fiske argues we produce culture when we integrate products and texts into our everyday life. When we hear a song in a music video, it is part of mass culture. When we sing it in the shower, we turn it into popular culture. When it is under the control of its producers, it is mass culture. When it is under the control of its consumers, it is popular culture. Fiske, thus, puts strong emphasis on the act of interpretation which occurs as a text gets embraced by consumers. He argues a text becomes part of popular culture when consumers recognize and embrace its potential as a vehicle for expressing their own meanings. To read this through the lens of the gift economy, it is at that moment when the commodity becomes a gift and when its worth gets recognized.
Cultural products or commodities, like videos, are simply what Fiske calls the "raw material" for the production of popular culture. What makes culture popular, both widely accepted by and belonging to the public, is the ability of people to use it to express, define, and understand their social and cultural relationships. To bring this to "viral video", the video itself can be seen as a cultural commodity, but its user-controlled circulation transforms it into a cultural resource. In other words, we cannot think of popular culture as a top-down process of mass marketing, but a bottom-up process of creative interaction with cultural commodities, a relationship with media that is neither simply consumption nor production, but an active negotiation between the two.
Producerly Texts: Cultural Commodities that become Cultural Resources
To imagine this simply, a video will become popular if it allows to consumers to participate in the production of meaning and is transformed into a cultural resource through which they communicate something that matters to other members of their community. This sharing of texts and meanings becomes the basis for social affiliations and often re-articulates or reconfirms the group's shared values. Fiske argues that some texts are more apt to produce new meanings than others. He calls such texts producerly, arguing that a producerly text:
offers itself up to popular production . . . it has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them -- it is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control" (Fiske, 1989, p.104).
In other words, a media product doesn't have to give up having a clearly defined message, but in so far as it limits its potential meanings, it also limits its potential circulation. Propaganda is not producerly because it sets too rigid a set of limits over its interpretation. A text which articulated an overly confusing or completely incomprehensible message might also not be producerly because it would not offer sufficient resources for consumers. The VW Polo ad, on the other hand, was highly producerly; It had an intent and a set of preferred meanings, but in the end it was left ambiguous enough, with enough open-ended details, that it could be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on the contexts into which it was spread and the ways it was deployed by consumers within localized conversations. A producerly video then is one that can be enjoyed and accessed on multiple levels. It can be taken at face value, but also leaves openings for deeper, more active interpretation.
Fiske's notion of the "producerly" introduces the general guiding principle for transforming cultural commodities into cultural resources: open, loose ends and gaps that allow the viewer to introduce their own background and experiences. Such openness allows them to convey something of themselves as they pass the content along, transforming the video into a resource for self-expression. While the media industries cannot themselves produce cultural resources, they can produce cultural commodities that are primed to be used as cultural resources. Such materials only become gifts when we choose to give them to someone else.
Advertising as "Producerly" Cultural Commodities
Such texts must be producerly, must be open to multiple interpretations and use, before they are spread. The tight control over the message doesn't just break down through the video's circulation. The loss of the producer's control over meaning is a precondition for the video's circulation. When people feel that they can have a stake in the content, when it can be used to represent themselves and their views somehow, they are inclined to share a video with others. We must keep in mind, however, that a commercial is not just any type of video. More so that general art or entertainment, commercials have an explicit functional purpose -- to help position material goods within a cultural context.
Publicity and advertising is used, for instance, to ensure that a particular brand of designer sunglasses evokes a sense of "coolness" within a particular niche of consumers. Historically, this has required much tighter control over their potential messages and thus the idea that consumers may appropriate and rework brand messages may generate a high degree of anxiety. Media producers worry about losing control. The reality is that they have already lost control; consumers can take their brands and do with them whatever they want. And the more producers do to reign in this grassroots creativity, the more they will take away the "worth" of their goods and devalue their content in the eyes of those consumers.
Therefore, in order to become cultural commodities that can be made "producerly," ads must sacrifice some of their functional purpose. We don't post and share clips just because of what we have to say about the ad, but also because of what it might have to say about us, so the ad must be capable of users express something beyond their affinity for the product it promotes. Only when commercials have enough ambiguity in meaning that they give up control of their promotional function can they develop the gaps and spaces to becomes producerly. When that happens, instead of giving meaning to a pair of sunglasses, the ad itself becomes a cultural commodity not unlike a pair of designer sunglasses that we can "wear."
We can post the video or the widget on our social network sites, say, and in so doing, signal something about ourselves. But in such a context, the brand messages does not entirely disappear. Each new viewer encounters it afresh and is reminded of the brand and its potential meanings for them. Users remain aware of the advertisement's sources and goals and thus they become part of the process by which meaning transfer occurs. We might consider, for example, what happens when the template created by the PC vs. Mac advertising campaign gets used as the basis for parody videos which apply its images to distinguish between other kinds of products, say, between Nintendo and Sony Playstation, between DC and Marvel, or between Republicans and Democrats. When we see these other uses of the template, we still recall, on some level, its original function as a way of promoting Apple. The repurposing allows the brand iconography to spread to new contexts, even as it offers us a way back to its original source.
References:
Fiske, John. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
Hendershot, Heather (2004). Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McCracken, Grant (1988) Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
This is part five of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.
Communities of Users
Rethinking the Individual Consumer
So, does it make sense any more to speak about media audiences or for that matter, consumers in this brave new world of spreadable media? Probably not. Witness the profusion of new terms which seek to describe "those people formerly known as the audience." (Rosen, 2006) Some call them (us, really) "loyals," (Jenkins 2006) stressing the value of consumer commitment in an era of channel zapping. Some are calling them "media-actives," (Frank 2004 stressing a generational shift with young people expecting greater opportunities to reshape media content than their parents did. Some are calling them "prosumers," (Toffler 1980) suggesting that as consumers produce and circulate media, they are blurring the line between amateur and professional. Some are calling them "inspirational consumers" (Roberts 2005), "connectors" or "influencers," suggesting that some people play a more active role than others in shaping media flows.
Recently Facebook was struggling with definitions such as these. In an aim to separate the users from the businesses, Facebook created a new profile category called 'pages'. When relating with a business' page, instead of becoming a friend, in usual Facebook fashion, the user becomes a fan. Six months after Facebook launched this new category, the terms are already starting to become murkier, and now in the users profile it no longer says "Jane is a fan of" but "Jane's Pages", the term is more open yet also more ambiguous. Andrew Lockhart, at the Thinking Interactive blog, suggests that companies might want to allow the user to define what type of relationship they want to have, between, for instance, fan, advocate, friend, coworker. Such a move would also give businesses a better understanding of how these users want to engage with them. Sometimes we just want to buy things which are adequate to the purposes we want to use them for but not so vital to our sense of ourselves that we want to proclaim them to other people. The Facebook interface offered too limited a range of options for expressing our diverse affiliations with brands. Even where consumers actively seek to spread your content or advocate for your brand, they want to do it on their own terms and may be very particular about the kind of language they use to describe this relationship.
For some time now it was thought that the way to insure this success was by reaching the so-called "influencers", this term comes from Malcom Gladwell's (2000) book The Tipping Point. As Gladwell puts it, "What we are really saying is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." Gladwell's "influencer" model has become almost an article of faith in most discussions of viral media. The most widely quoted example is the comeback made by Hush Puppies shoes, according to Gladwell, due to their adoption by specific Williamsburg tastemakers. He bases his theory on Stanley Milgram's 'Six Degrees of Separation' study, where 160 Nebraskans were instructed to send a letter to a particular stockbroker in Boston by giving it to someone they thought was socially closer to that person. As is now widely known, it took roughly 6 people for each letter to reach its destination. When Gladwell analyzed the study he discovered that it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link, and this is where the "influencers" theory comes from, determining that certain connectors are more important than others.
For the past seven years, network-theory scientist Duncan Watts (Dodds, Muhammad and Watts, 2003) has been studying these results and running other experiments of his own. After testing Miligram's theory with 61,000 people he confirmed the average length of the chain was in fact six links, but he did not find any evidence of "influencers". There were as many chances for a message to get passed by a "super-connected" person than by an average one. Messages move through society from one weakly connected individual to another. So the question now becomes, not how to reach the influencers, but how do individuals choose to behave in a networked society and what kinds of social structures best support the spread of content.
Yochai Benkler (2007) argues:
Human beings are and always have been diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification and social connectedness.
This seemingly simple statement further more complicates the idea of a networked society and hinders attempts to predict the way communities of users will act. On the other hand, this more nuanced vision allows us to have a deeper understanding of the diverse online behaviors. For instance, there are countless explanation for why people might join a particular social network or make the decisions they do when they come there.
According to Benkler, this shift into a networked information culture does improves the practical capacities of individuals in that:
It improves their capacity to do for and by themselves.
It enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others.
It improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.
It is because of these empowered individuals, their new capacities, and their desire for social interactions that spreadable media is possible. If the technology was available, but society hadn't undergone any cultural changes, we would still be operating exclusively under a sticky model. Benkler has observed that this new society gives "individuals a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make."
Consumers are choosing to be part of participatory culture in diverse and fluid ways. Forrester Research has developed a useful taxonomy of the types of participation that occur in networked environments; it starts with the most passive users and finishes with the most active participants that publish their own content at least once a month. It's important to note that while this ladder helps us visualize a complex process, users don't necessarily adhere permanently to these roles, and more than likely, behave in different manners within different communities. Moreover, seeing it as depicting a process of ever more intense engagement with media content may mask the degree to which it also describes an economy, with each rung of the ladder performing tasks which are needed to support those below and sometimes above them. So, even some one who is a lurker may provide a sense of empowerment to contributors by expanding the scale of the community and thus motivating them to put more effort into their work. Someone who is a critic may create value for creators but so may someone who collects what the creators create. And the interplay between these different kinds of cultural participants creates opportunities for communication to take place and thus for content to be transmitted.
Rethinking Communities
Such communities are also quite diverse in themselves. In fact, games scholar James Paul Gee (2004) has defined some of these groups as "affinity spaces," affinity that is, for a common endeavor. He argues that the romantic notions of community do not apply here as engaging with one another is a secondary objective, if it exists at all, in some cases, though it may be a primary objective in others. Gee is interested in the kinds of informal learning which takes place in the cultures of gamers, for example, which depend heavily on the sharing of knowledge towards common if sometimes contradictory goals. Such "affinity spaces" can provide greater motivation for the production and circulation of information, may offer a "hothouse" context where new ideas may emerge, may offer motivation for people to intensify their participation. We form non-exclusive relationships to these kinds of "affinity spaces": we may have multiple interests and thus we may engage with multiple different "affinity spaces" in the course of any given day. Older notions of community often started from assumptions of exclusive memberships, whereas this focus on social mobility and multiple commitments helps us to understand how content might spread quickly between different "affinity spaces" as members trade information from one site to another. Not all "affinity spaces" operate according to the same social dynamics. Lara Lee, from Jump Associates, has offered a promising typography for thinking about the social structures of different kinds of communities:
Pools: Here people have loose associations with each other, but a strong association with a common endeavor or with the values of the community. Most brand communities are pools, so are most political organizations.
Webs: Webs are organized through individual social connections, so the ties with each member are stronger and they operate in decentralized manner.
Hubs: In a Hub, individuals form loose social associations around a central figure, as in the case of fan clubs. Hubs may form around brands but they are more likely to form around dynamic figures who embody the values of their company -- a figure like Microsoft's Bill Gates, say, or Virgin's Richard Branson. Such strategies only work when there is a clear connection between the brand's values and the personality of this central figure.
Each of these social structures may be valuable from the point of view of a brand or a media franchise. Hubs are most likely to be influenced through dominant figures, whereas the other two may be shaped by any member. Media content which supports shared activities is most apt to circulate through pools, while that which sustains social connections is most apt to be valued within webs.
Lee's taxonomy seek to understand what motivates our membership in particular kinds of shared social spaces. Others have sought to explain the different barriers to entry which shape alternative kinds of communities:
Open: These spaces do not require any registration in order to participate. Users can leave anonymous posts, as is the case on some kinds of blogs or online forums. However, without some form of reputation system, the possibility of engaging in a common endeavor is more limited, resulting in short lived communal experiences. Members feel little or no strong emotional ties to such communities which they enter and exit on a whim. They may move through many such social spaces in the course of a single session online.
Free registration: This is the most common way of implementing a space for a community exchange, it's present in the majority of social networks (the ones that operate by outside selection are the exception) and most blogs and message boards. This model has given sites like Amazon the necessary data to customize itself to its community's and individual user's needs. It's in these open and free communities where the spread of media is possible and successful.
Purchase: These spaces function within the logic of a sticky model. They operate under the assumption that once you buy your way in, you will stay in. Evidently most of the content within these spaces is proprietary and its spread is limited. The transmission of desired content beyond its borders poses a threat to its subscription model, though closing off that content from wider circulation often makes it harder for potentially interested consumers to determine the value of what it has to offer. These spaces tend to be hubs with very little interaction between the users and it is this lack of strong social ties which has led to growing skepticism about so-called corporate communities.
Outside Selection: These are closed spaces with gatekeeper. Their value is in their exclusivity and specificity, but due to their closed off nature, they don't encourage the spread of media, although they might generate buzz.
Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted. Most brands will need to court a range of different communities and travel across pools, webs, and hubs if they want to reach the full range of desired consumers. To achieve that, they must embrace what filmmaker Lance Weiler calls "The Scattershot Approach." The idea is to be available for your users in whichever way and every way they deem appropriate, be it through a web site, widget, RSS feed or embeddable video, making the process of finding and communicating with you as easy and enjoyable as possible. That may be the strongest incentive for shifting from a sticky paradigm, which often is a one-size-fits-all model, towards a spreadable paradigm, which allows consumers with diverse interests to retrofit your content to serve their local needs and interest. Your job is to make it available to them in a form where they can deploy it and often to provide them with the tools or widgets required to make it accessible to others within their communities.
References
Benkler, Yochai (2007). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Networks Transform Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
This is part four of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.Lewis Hyde: Thinking Through the Gift Economy
Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983) represents perhaps the best guide on the ways that gift economies operate within the modern world. For that reason, we want to walk through some of his basic claims about the relations between commodity culture and the gift economy.
In a commodity culture, goods are traded as wages for labor or are purchased directly. Neither transaction shapes the circulation of materials within a gift economy: "A gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us." (p.xvi). Gifts depend on altruistic motivations; they circulate through acts of generosity and reciprocity. Their exchange is governed by social norms rather than contractual relations.
The circulation of gifts is socially rather than economically motivated: "Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved." Furthermore "when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges." (p.xx) The circulation of goods is not simply symbolic of the social relations between participants; it helps to constitute them. Hyde identifies three core obligations which are shared among those who participate in a gift economy: "the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate." (p.xxi) Each of these acts help to break down boundaries between participants, reflecting a commitment to good relations and mutual welfare.
Gift economies are relatively dynamic in terms of the fluid circulation of goods while commodity cultures are relatively dynamic in terms of the fluid social relations between participants. As Hyde explains, a "clean" trade within a commodity culture "leaves people unconnected," (p.29) since it involves no future obligation between the buyer and seller. Under such conditions, "wealth will lose its motions and gather in isolated pools....Property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases." (p.29) The commodity, he suggests, moves towards wherever there is a profit to be made, while a gift moves "towards an empty space," towards resolving conflicts or expanding the social network. (p.29) By contrast, he writes, "To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary." (p.105) In so far as the new media ecology depends on spreadability, it needs to embrace the fluidity of exchange which enables a gift economy rather than the stasis that emerges from commodity culture.
In a gift economy, 'status', 'prestige' or 'esteem' take the place of cash renumeration' as the primary drivers of cultural production and social transaction. Of course, even within a commodity culture, the production of cultural goods is rarely motivated entirely by profit. Artists also seek recognition for what they create; they seek to influence the culture; they seek to build reputations; they seek to express personal meanings. Only a complex set of negotiations within creative industries allow artist to serve both sets of goals at the same time. As Mark Deuze (2006) notes, anxieties about the free circulation of their output within a participatory culture are motivated both by a sense of losing artistic control and by the perceived economic threat to their livelihood.
Conversely, we seem to be seeing a series of misrecognitions between Web 2.0 companies and consumers as the companies misunderstand what motivates participation. On the one hand, consumers increasingly resent the ways that companies transform their labors of love into commodities which can be bought and sold for revenue. There is a growing recognition that profiting on freely given creative labor poses ethical challenges which are in the long run socially damaging to both the companies and the communities involved. On the other hand, many participants are frustrated when companies offer them financial compensations which are at odds with their understanding of the social transactions which are facilitated through the exchange of gifts. Fan communities, for example, have long-standing social taboos against "exploiting" other fans for personal gain, wanting to share their creative goods outside of commodity relations, rather than seeking rewards for what they produce. C3 research affiliate Abigail Derecho argues that the gift economy has gendered implications, with women traditionally associated with crafts in a gift economy and men associated with art within a commodity culture. Hyde would support this argument, suggesting that salaries tend to be lower within those professions which have historically been associated with the gift economy, not simply because they attract more women but also because they provide other kinds of social compensation.
Hyde sees commodity culture and the gift economy as alternative systems for measuring the merits of a transaction. He writes, "A commodity has value... A gift has worth." (p.78) By value, here, Hyde primarily means "exchange value," that is, the rate at which goods and services can be exchanged for money. Such exchanges are "measurable" and "quantifiable" because there are agreed upon measurements of value. By "worth," he means those qualities we associate with things that "you can't put a price on." Sometimes, we refer to what he is calling "worth" as sentimental value. It is not an estimate of what the thing costs but rather what it means to us. Worth is thus variable even among those who participate within the same community, even among those in the same family, hence the complex negotiations which occur around possessions when a beloved member of a family passes away. Worth can not be measured, though it can be negotiated, but in doing so, we have to take claims about worth at face value, since they have to do with internal emotional states.
Commodity culture and the gift economy are animated by different fantasies, which in turn shape the kinds of meanings which are going to be produced and transmitted around the exchange of goods. Hyde writes, "Because of the bonding power of gifts and the detached nature of commodity exchange, gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to others, while commodities are associated with alienation and freedom" (p. 86). The values which shape exchanges in a commodity culture have to do with personal expression, freedom, social mobility, the escape from constraints and limitations, the enabling of new "possibilities". We sometimes refer to such fantasies as escapism or social experimentation; they are closely associated with the patterns of "transformation" and "plentitude" which Grant McCracken has documented. The fantasies which animate the exchange of gifts are often nostalgic, having to do with the reassertion of traditional values, the strengthening of social ties, the acceptance of mutual obligations, and the comfort of operating within familiar social patterns.
Because the exchange of goods within a gift economy brings with it social expectations, not all gifts can be accepted. In that sense, there are goods and services which literally can not be given away, because even in the absence of an explicit value proposition, consumers are wary of hidden obligations, unstated motives, or hidden interests which come smuggled inside the gift, much like the classic myth of the Trojan Horse. Hyde describes some circumstances where gifts are inappropriate: "On the simplest level, we are wary of gifts in any situation that calls for reckoning and discrimination....A gift, no matter how well intentioned, deflects objective judgement" (p.92). Even traditional societies, then, distinguish between gifts which facilitate generalized good will and bribes which are designed to distort or corrupt process of judgment. At the same time, the translation of gifts into commodities can be socially damaging. Hyde writes:
We do not deal in commodities when we wish to initiate or preserve ties of affection....Emotional connection tends to preclude quantitative evaluation....When a decision involves something that clearly cannot be priced, we refrain from submitting our actions to the calculus of cost-benefit analysis (p.85).
Both sets of category confusions represent potential pitfalls for companies seeking to negotiate the boundaries between commodity culture and the gift economy. That said, Hyde does believe it is possible for there to be valued and meaningful transactions between these two social systems:
The boundary can be permeable....Put generally, within certain limits what has been given us as a gift may be sold in the marketplace and what has been earned in the marketplace may be given as gift. Within certain limits, gift wealth can be rationalized and market wealth can be eroticized (p.357-358).
Hyde's use of the word, "erotic" here is especially evocative, meant to refer to the ways that the exchange of goods gains emotional intensity as it mediates between two or more participants. If "diamonds are a girl's best friend," as the old song goes, it is both because they have extreme value within a commodity culture and because they are emotionally meaningful within a gift economy.
We might understand spreadable media as content which passes between the commodity culture and the gift economy. Each of the above contrasts between the two social systems are helpful in understanding what kinds of terms might best facilitate exchanges between them. Each also helps us to identify historic sites of conflict or misunderstandings between the diversely motivated agents involved in the flow of content across the current mediascape. Many of these contradictions surfaced in the controversy which surrounded the launch of FanLib, a Web 2.0 company which sought to capitalize on the circulation of fan fiction. Fan fiction had been a part of the gift economy of the web for more than a decade, representing a cultural practice which dated back to Star Trek fandom in the 1960s. Seeing their stories as a "labor of love" which was designed to be shared with the community of others who shared their interests, fans have reluctantly charged money to recoup the costs of printing zines but there was a strong prohibition against any attempts to profit financially from the exchange of stories.
Some fans welcomed the emergence of digital distribution because it lowered the costs of sharing stories and thus pulled fan fiction fully into the gift economy. There was also a perception that the absence of financial profit helped to protect fans from prosecution for what might otherwise have been seen as an attempt to capitalize on the original producer's intellectual property. FanLib, however, sought to pull the production and circulation of fan fiction more fully into the commodity culture: they wanted to monetize on the traffic that fan stories drew to their sites, a step which provoked strong backlash from those most committed to fandom's gift economy. They showed little grasp of what motivated the activities of the gift economy: at various times, they sought to compensate fans either through a share of the revenue or through giving them access to the media producers, neither of which reflected the system of status and reputation which had emerged within fandom.
The threat that fan fiction might be commoditized motivated some fans to create the Organization of Transformative Works, which would, among other things, create an alternative web portal for distributing fan created works totally outside of commercial imperatives. Yet, despite the controversy, FanLib did attract a significant number of contributors. C3 researcher Xiaochang Li (2007) discovered that many of those posting on the site did not feel strong ties to the existing fan community and did not understand their cultural production in terms of "gifts" to fellow fans. These fans did not see a conflict between what motivated their creative expression and the logic of a commodity culture. That said, it was not clear that such fans were as valuable to FanLib or the rights holders because they were less "connected" to the larger fan community, were less likely therefore to draw other fans to the site or to help expand the potential markets for the series being depicted.
Value, Worth and the Transfer of Meaning
For a good to move from commodity culture to a gift economy, there has to be some point where value gets transformed into worth, where what has a price becomes priceless, where economic investment gives way to sentimental investment. If we do not understand how this occurs, we probably cannot understand what motivates consumers to "spread" advertising and other media content within their social networks. When people pass along branded content, they are not doing so as paid employees motivated by economic gain; they are doing so as members of social communities involved in activities which are meaningful to them on either an individual or social level. Symbolic goods stop circulating when they take on such economic value that there is no longer an incentive to give them to someone else or where their exchange fails to serve social goals within a particular community. In other words, symbolic goods cease their movement when they assume too much value or too little worth.
In Culture and Consumption, Grant McCracken (1988) brought together anthropological and marketing literature to offer an account of the way "meaning transfer" shapes the circulation of goods. McCracken starts from the premise that the circulation of goods is accompanied by the circulation of meaning: "Meaning is constantly flowing to and from its several locations in the social world, aided by the collective and individual efforts of designers, producers, advertisers, and consumers." Both designers and advertisers draw on meanings already in the culture around them as they seek to construct offerings that will be valued by their potential consumers. Advertising, as seen by McCracken, helps to move both the products and the cultural claims being made about the products into the life world of consumers. Once consumers have purchased the goods and bought into the symbolic meanings that surround them, they perform a series of rituals which are designed to integrate both goods and meanings into their everyday social experiences. In a later revision of this argument, McCracken (2005b) writes "Consumers turn to their goods not only as bundles of utility with which to serve functions and satisfy needs but also as bundles of meaning with which to fashion who they are and the world in which they live." (p.102)
McCracken (1988) identifies four different kinds of consumer rituals which help us to adapt acquired goods into symbolic resources:
Exchange Rituals -- McCracken suggests that when we select a gift for someone else, we do so with an awareness of what makes this gift meaningful. A lover giving a gift seeks to symbolize something of their emotional investment in the relationship -- think about the difference between white and red roses, for example. A parent giving a gift to a child seeks to express and embody some of their hopes for the kind of person that the child will become -- think of the whole line of "Baby Einstein" products for example.
Possession Rituals -- McCracken argues that consumers spend a great deal of time asserting their claim on goods which enter their lives from the outside. We like to "perform" our ownership of those goods through "cleaning, discussing, comparing, reflecting, showing off and even photographing many...possessions." At a higher level, he describes a process of "personalization" where goods are altered to better express the personality of their owners.
Grooming Rituals -- McCracken claims that for some goods, meaning is perishable and certain practices need to be repeated in order to extract value and meaning from them. These practices often center around either practices of personal grooming or the grooming of the goods themselves.
Divestment Rituals -- For McCracken, these rituals need to be performed when goods change hands -- first, to exorcise the imprint of the previous owner so that they may be more fully one's own and then later, to strip aside any emotional investments we have made into goods which we now must dispose or "regift" to others.
Each of these claims may be useful in thinking about how symbolic goods -- such as spreadable media content -- functions in the new world of social networks. But to do so, we need to recognize some core differences. First, for McCracken (1988), goods are "an opportunity to make culture material" (p.88). That is, goods attach symbolic meanings to physical objects. To draw on a now tired but useful distinction, goods are atoms. Yet, the kind of cultural goods we are discussing throughout this white paper are much more often virtual rather than physical, bytes and not atoms. They may still render visible the often implicit assumptions through which we organize our culture: "The consumer system supplies individuals with the cultural materials to realize their various and changing ideas of what it is to be a man or a woman, middle-aged or elderly, a parent, a citizen, or a professional" (p.88). We can see the widgets on our profile pages, the links on our blogs, the refinements on our avatars, as doing a similar kind of social work -- as giving expressive form to our values and performing certain kinds of social identities.
It matters, though, that material goods are limited: they can only exist in one place at one time and to give them to someone else is to give them up yourself. Virtual goods, however, can be shared because they can be infinitely replicated. I can have my "cupcake" on Facebook and eat it too, or more importantly, I can share it with you without having to give it up myself. It is clear that personalization may play as strong if not a stronger role in such a system -- as a means of distinguishing between countless copies of the same cultural good. Yet, we may have to spend less time with divestment rituals because the good we receive is no longer a good taken from the hands of another.
For McCracken (1988), there remains something arbitrary about the assignment of particular meanings to particular goods, with advertisers involved in a series of competing bids for interpretation. Yet in the case of spreadable meaning, what we are circulating is often not the material good but the advertisement itself. It is involved in the exchange of meaning from its conception, though the meanings may change through the process of consumption just as goods may be altered, repurposed, or redeployed by consumers through the processes of possession, grooming, and divestment rituals.
Second, for all of his reliance on anthropological theory, McCracken (1988) holds onto the idea of consumers as individuals who are motivated by personal desires and goals, "engaged in an ongoing enterprise of self-creation," rather than as parts of larger social networks and cultural communities. Indeed, his account of consumption in the North American context stresses all of the ways that identity is optional -- that we choose which social categories are operative and which are irrelevant to our presentation of ourselves. Going back to Hyde (1983), then, the fantasies he sees expressed through consumer goods are those we associate with commodity culture -- those having to do with freedom and individuality -- rather than those of the gift economy-- having to do with tradition and social cohesion.
As we think about why we pass along media content, though, we need to recognize that we are both expressive individuals and social beings, that we seek both to personalize content and to share it with others. We might understand how this process plays out by thinking about the ways social networks change the process of taste-making and gate-keeping which McCracken describes in this essay's discussion of fashion. For McCracken, what counts as fashion gets defined rhetorically through journalists who "serve as gatekeepers of a sort, reviewing aesthetic, social and cultural innovations as these first appear." These professional gatekeepers "winnow" down selections before these options even reach the population of early adopters. In a social network, however, this power of evaluation and "winnowing" is dispersed. Each member potentially assumes the role of grassroots intermediary, contributing to a collective process which evaluates and ranks cultural goods and thus speeds or retards their circulation.
This is part three of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture
Spreadability and the Moral Economy
Consumers, both individually and collectively, exert agency in the spreadability model: they are not impregnated with media messages; they select material that matters to them from the much broader array of media content on offer. They do not simply pass along static content; they transform the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs. Content does not remain in fixed borders but rather it circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictible directions, not the product of top-down design but rather of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.
Consumers do not simply consume; they recommend content they like to their friends who recommend it to their friends who recommend it on down the line. They do not simply "buy" cultural goods; they "buy into" a cultural economy which respects and rewards their participation. Nothing spreads widely in the new digital economy unless it engages and serves the interests of both consumers and producers. Otherwise, the circulation gets blocked by one side or the other, either through corporations constructing road blocks (legal or technical) upon its spread or through consumers refusing to circulate content which fails to serve their interests. Nothing generates value in this new digital economy unless the transaction is seen as meaningful to all involved.
Too often, Web 2.0-era companies speak about creating communities around their products and services, rather than recognizing that they are more often courting existing communities with their own histories, agendas, hierarchies, traditions, and practices. So, rather than talking about the Saturn "community" as a "consumer tribe" (Cova, Kozinets, and Shankar, 2007), we might more productively analyze what the contemporary car company has done to capture the interests and win the loyalty of a hundred year plus history of motorist clubs. The first model implies that Saturn can set the terms for the consumers interactions with the brand. The second suggests the motorist culture created its own values and aspirations which Saturn has to address if it's car is to gain a central place in its social life.
The same is true of fandoms: we tend to discuss them in very limiting terms, often in relation to a single text as in "Trekkers" or "Potterheads," when in fact, fans tend to move nomadically from text to text in the course of their involvement within fan culture. They may be drawn into fandom by a given text but quickly their conversation broadens to include a range of other works also embraced by fellow fans and when their interest in a particular franchise ends, many will shift their fan loyalties to other programmes which satisfy similar needs and interests. As a rule, we are misled when we focus on what media does to people rather than trying to understand what people are doing with media and why. We start from the premise that consumers only help facilitate the circulation of media content when it is personally and socially meaningful to them, when it enables them to express some aspect of their own self-perception or enables valued transactions that strengthen their social ties with others.
Courting communities is tricky. Forcing communities to talk about a certain product is almost impossible. These obstacles were swiftly dealt with in the construction of the site "Being Girl" which belongs to the Tampax and Always brands. As Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff comment on their new book Groundswell:
Beingirl.com is not a community site about tampons. (Who would want to visit that?) It's about everything that young girls deal with. The site is very lightly branded and it's loaded with information about music, make-up, relationships and spaces for the girls to talk amongst themselves and with experts. Procter & Gamble had launched different versions of the sites in other parts of the world and also a Latina-geared version section of the US site called "Solo de Chikas: hot topic, cool musik and your place to speak out.
Tampax are courting a more specific community that is underrepresented in traditional marketing endeavors, undoubtedly hoping that this interest will entice the participants to become loyal Tampax/Always consumers. At the very least, though, P&G has opened a fluid communication channel with an elusive demographic. Bernoff and Li suspect that the site's success is due in part to the fact that P&G "solved the customers' problems instead of its own", the costumers were willing to share. Add subtle brand messages and free samples and P&G was able to become part of the dialogue from which it was previously excluded. A key takeaway here is that companies should figure out what existing communities are most likely to use their product and what they are doing with it; they should identify basic needs of that community and develop informational resources to support them.
Knowing that the community pre-exists the brand or franchises engagement with it means corporations need to legitimate their entrance into this space. In earlier white papers (Austin 2006), we have introduced the idea that participants in economic exchanges are governed by an implicit set of understandings about what is "right" and what is "legitimate" for each player to do. This is what social historian E.P. Thompson described as a "moral economy." The moral economy describes the set of social norms and mutual understandings which make it possible for two parties to do business with each other. In some cases, the moral economy holds in check the aggressive pursuit of short term self interest in favor of decisions which preserve long term social relations between participants. In a small scale economy, for example, a local dealer is unlikely to "cheat" a customer because they need to count on continued trade with this person over an extended period of time and thus need to build up their reputation within this community.
The measure of a moral economy is the degree to which participants trust each other to hold up their end of these implicit agreements. When there is a sudden and dramatic shift in the economic or technological infrastructure, as has occured with the introduction of digital media, it can create a crisis in the "moral economy," diminishing the level of trust within participating parties, and perhaps even wearing away the mechanisms which insure the legitimacy of economic exchanges. At such times, we can see all involved making bids for legitimation, that is proposing new models or frameworks through which parties may reach a new understanding of what should provide the basis for fair and meaningful interactions.
We can see, for example, notions of "file sharing" and "piracy" as two competing moral systems by which we might make sense of the circulation of media content, one put forth by consumers eager to legitimate their idea of the free exchange of content, the other put forth by the media industry eager to close off certain practices as "illegitimate" and damaging to their long term economic interests. The excessive rhetoric surrounding the circulation of music at the present time suggests just how far out of balance the moral understandings of producers and consumers have become. New technologies enable consumers to exert much greater impact on the circulation of media content than ever before but they also enable companies to police once private behavior as it takes on greater public dimensions. These shifts enable some to describe a crisis in copyright, others a crisis in fair use, and all sides to be more or less accurate in describing the tensions which have emerged.
Discussions of "viral media," or of what we are calling "spreadable" media, point to places where a new moral economy may be emerging. They allow us to map forms of audience participation which are seen as valuable to advertisers and media companies. Spreadable media represents an alternative framing of the free circulation of media content to the prevailing metaphor of "piracy."
Focusing on what we are calling here spreadability may thus offer us some tentative first steps towards renegotiating the social contract between media producers and consumers in a way which may be seen as legitimate and mutually rewarding to all involved. For this to occur, we need to understand that consumers and producers often follow different dictates, not simply because of competing economic interests, but because they have different motives, make different judgments about value, and follow different social obligations; in other words, they operate within separate and parallel economic orders. We might describe these two worlds as commodity culture and the gift economy. Certainly, most of us who have grown up in capitalist economies understand the set of expectations which shape the buying and selling of goods. Yet, we also operate in another social order which centers around the giving and accepting of gifts. One (commodity culture) places greater emphasis on economic motives, the other (gift economy) on social motives.
Something of the mismatch between these two worlds is suggested by Ian Condry (2004) in his discussion of file-sharing among music fans:
Unlike underwear or swimsuits, music falls into that category of things you are normally obligated to share with your dorm mates, family, and friends. Yet to date, people who share music files are primarily represented in media and business settings as selfish, improperly socialized people who simply want to get something -- the fruits of someone else's labor -- for free. In fact, if asked directly by a friend to share music, sharing is the only reasonable thing to do.
Within commodity culture, then, sharing music is economically damaging, whereas in the gift economy, the failure to share music is socially damaging. We are never going to resolve such conflicts until we develop a better model for thinking about the interface between the two.
Gift Giving and Reciprocity Online
In arguing that much of what goes on in cyberspace might be understood in terms of a gift economy, we are in fact making a claim which is at least as old as the web. Howard Rheingold's 1993 book The Virtual Community, for instance, mentions the gift economy as central to the relationships across the online world:
Reciprocity is a key element of any market-based culture, but the arrangement I'm describing feels to me more like a kind of gift economy in which people do things for one another out of a spirit of building something between them, rather than a spreadsheet-calculated quid pro quo. When that spirit exists, everybody gets a little extra something, a little sparkle, from their more practical transactions; different kinds of things become possible when this mind-set pervades. Conversely, people who have valuable things to add to the mix tend to keep their heads down and their ideas to themselves when a mercenary or hostile zeitgeist dominates an online community. In the virtual community I know best, elegantly presented knowledge is a valuable currency....Sometimes you give one person more information than you would give another person in response to the same query, simply because you recognize one of them to be more generous or funny or to-the-point or agreeable...A sociologist might say that my perceived helpfulness increased my pool of social capital. I can increase your knowledge capital and my social capital at the same time by telling you something that you need to know, and I could diminish the amount of my capital in the estimation of others by transgressing the group's social norms. The person I help might never be in a position to help me, but someone else might be.
Rheingold describes the gift economy operating in virtual worlds less in terms of a tit-for-tat exchange of value but rather as part of a larger reputation system in which one's contributions to the group are ultimately recognized and respected, even if there is no direct and explicit negotiation of worth at the time someone makes their contributions.
Richard Barbrook (1998), another early cybertheorist, argued that the gift economy trumped commodity culture in the world view of those who were the first to form online communities:
For most of its users, the Net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas. When they go on-line, almost everyone spends most of their time participating within the gift economy rather than engaging in market competition. Because users receive much more information than they can ever give away, there is no popular clamour for imposing the equal exchange of the marketplace on the Net. Once again, the 'end of history' for capitalism appears to be communism.
Such values were built into the infrastructure of the web which was designed to facilitate the collaboration of scientists and researchers rather than to enable the metered access expected within a commodity culture.
In the world of the web, companies were relative late-comers, even though they now represent the dominant users of digital networks. As commercial values have spread into the web, they have had to negotiate with the older web ethos: there still remains great resistance to "spam," for example, as unwelcomed advertising, whereas commercials are taken more or less for granted in traditional broadcasting. Similarly, Stewart Brand (1995), another key thinker in the early history of web culture, evokes the idea of a gift economy to explain how companies create valued relations to their customers within this new cultural context. In short, Brand argues that for any company or business to succeed online they need to join the gift economy that defines online relations. "It means often giving away content." Online success is based on the build up of good will which companies can convert into economic transactions through other channels.
Many of these same assumptions about the ways that digital communities are shaped by the norms of a gift economy surfaced much more recently in danah boyd (2007)'s discussion of Facebook's introduction of a "gifting" function. Facebook gifts operate within each person's profile. Gift-giving is completely decentralized so people can choose gifts directly from their own profile page and pay Facebook through their account. Most gifts cost $1 and every once in a while Facebook offers a gift for free. Now the system is in place, manufacturing and reproduction costs are negligible, and, even though they work under a direct payment revenue model, Facebook adds value to the users' experience by letting them be in charge of distribution.
Features such as these are what make successful social networks different from a more complete contact directory. As boyd explains, the popularity and value of gifts on Facebook come from their somewhat intangible nature:
They do not have the same type of persistence as identity-driven purchases like clothing in (World of Warcraft). I think that it is precisely this ephemeralness that will make gifts popular. There are times for gift giving (predefined by society)...People write 'happy birthday' and send glitter for holidays...These expressions are not simply altruistic kindness. By publicly performing the holiday or birthday, the individual doing the expression looks good before her peers. It also prompts reciprocity so that one's own profile is then also filled with validating comments.
Yet despite their intangibility and ephemerality, Facebook's gift-driven economy is valuable, meaningful and crucial to the participation of many members of the network. In evoking the gift economy to talk about gifts which are bought and sold via Facebook, even as they are given freely to those in our social networks, boyd is acknowledging a permeability in the relations between commodity culture and the gift economy.
This should not be surprising: most of us purchase Christmas or birthday gifts at stores rather than making them ourselves and do not necessarily fear that their origins as commodities diminishes the sentiments that are expressed through their exchange. Whatever our myths may be about "gifts of the heart" and "labors of love," most of our gifts these days are manufactured and store bought. Yet, once we have made our purchases, the gift economy takes over and so to understand how digital goods circulate within and between social networks we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of how gift economies operate.
References
Austin, Alec. with Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, Ivan Askwith, and Sam Ford, (2006). Turning Pirates into Loyalists: The Moral Economy and an Alternative Response to File Sharing. Report Prepared for the Members of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Cambridge.
Barbrook, Richard (1998). "The Hi-Tech Gift Economy," First Monday, Vol. 3, No. 12 (December), accessed 30 March 2007.
Bernoff, Josh and Li, Charlene. (2008) Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press
Condry, Ian. (2004) "Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan," International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, pp.343-363
Cova, Bernard, Robert Kozinets, and Avi Shankar (2007). Consumer Tribes. New York: Butterworth-Heinemann
Rheingold, Howard (1993) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Thompson, E.P. (1971) "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century." Past and Present, No. 50, pp.76-136.
This is part two of an eight part series. The report was written by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.Sticky and Spreadable - Two Paradigms
From Viral to Spreadability
It is not hard to understand why the idea of both memes and the media virus would be attractive to marketers. If the right meme was deployed, theory suggests, it would successfully acquire people, reaching more and more possible consumers as goes. Similarly, Rushkoff's notion of "viral" circulation appeals to advertisers because it allows them to give up control over little more than the specific path of dissemination. In this scenario, they are cast as purposeful agent zeros, unleashing a message that spreads through its own volition, the instructions of replication imbedded in the DNA of the campaign.
But if the rising anxieties over brand equity, appropriation of content, miscommunication, lack of communication, and the ultimate value of viral campaigns is any indication, many advertisers are well aware that this model of "viral" media, which doesn't account for individual or social agency, does not accurately reflect the present media landscape. The idea of the "media virus" breaks down because people are making conscious choices about what media they are passing along and about the forms within which they are circulating it. As we saw in the discussion of the LOLcat meme above, the core message may be manipulated or turned against the original authors as it spreads across the internet. Consumers have shown a remarkable ability to turn advertising slogans and jingles against the companies that originated them. Fans have highjacked popular stories to express profoundly different interpretations than those of their authors.
Metaphors of "viral media" and "memes" emerged during a period of transition in the relationship between consumers and producers: first, this terminology reflected a shift away from the push-based model of the broadcast era towards the pull-based model of the early internet (characterized by talk of "stickiness"); second, the teminology maintained use value as we moved from an era of personalized media towards the increasingly communal practices associated with the rise of social networks and the emergence of what industry guru Tim O'Reilly (2005) identified as "the architecture of participation."
It is somewhat ironic that the idea of the media virus emerged at the same time as a shift towards greater acknowledgment of consumers as participants in meaning making within the networked media space. Shenja van der Graaf, in her 2003 article "Viral Experiences: Do You Trust Your Friends?" maintains "the main feature of viral marketing is that it heavily depends on interconnected peers. Viral Marketing is therefore inherently social" (van der Graaf, 2003, p.8). van der Graaf uses "viral" to describe a condition of movement and distribution of content that is linked to network behavior, and cites participation within a socially networked system as a central requirement of "viral" behavior.
Each step along this process made media companies more dependent upon the active engagement of their consumers and increased the urgency of understanding how and why cultural content circulates. Talk of "memes" and "media viruses" gave a false sense of security at a time when the old attention economy was in flux, resulting in widespread uncertainity about what might motivate consumer "engagement" in this new context. Such terms promised a pseudo-scientific model for thinking about consumer behavior, one which kept power firmly in the hands of media producers. In practice, they simply mystified the process, limiting the industry's ability to understand the complex factors which now shape the creation of value through the circulation of content within these new social networks.
We believe that the confusion wrapped surrounding the concepts of "memes" and "viruses" are not going to be easily resolved. As we have seen, the terms are at once too encompassing and too limiting; they introduce false assumptions about how culture operate; they distort the power relations between producers and consumers at a time when media companies and brands need to learn to respect the increasingly empowered roles which their users are playing in the circulation and production of meaning around their products. Given these limits, these words mislead more than they clarify and need to be retired. To put it bluntly, the viral is not only sick; it's pushing up the daisies.
For that reason, we are proposing an alternative terminology, one which we think allows us to construct a more effective model that might inform future strategies. Rather than speaking about "viral media," we prefer to think of media as spreadable. Spreadability as a concept describes how the properties of the media environment, texts, audiences, and business models work together to enable easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a networked culture. Talking about spreadability invites us to ask four basic questions:
What aspects of the contemporary media environment support the spread of media across different communities?
How do consumers create value for themselves and for companies through their spread of media?
What properties of content make it more likely to be spread?
How do companies benefit from the spread of their content?
The concept of "spreadability" preserves much of what was useful about the earlier models -- the idea that the movement of messages from person to person, from community to community, over time increases their effectiveness, and expands their impact. It recognizes the ways that later theorists such as van der Graaf or Knoebel and Lankshear have revised the earliest, relatively static and passive conceptions of "memes" and "viruses" to reflect the realities of the new social web, while suggesting this emerging paradigm is so substantively different from the initial conceptualizations as to require a new terminology. This new "spreadable" model allows us to avoid metaphors of "infection" and "contamination" which over-estimate the power of media companies and underestimate the agency of consumers. In so far as these metaphors distort the actual factors shaping the spread of media content in a networked culture, they result in less than fully effective campaigns. In this emerging model, consumers play an active role in "spreading" content rather than being the passive carriers of viral media: their choices, their investments, their actions determine what gets valued in the new mediascape. Recentering the discussion on choices consumers make, rather than choices media companies make, forces advertising and entertainment companies to pay closer attention to consumer's motivations and thus to design content which better aligns with their interests; it will also allow companies to adopt policies which sustain rather than repress this desire to help circulate relevant material throughout their social networks.
While older models of "memes" and "media viruses" focused attention on how ideas replicate and propagate, a spreadability model assumes that value originates as much through the act of transformation as through direct circulation. Spreadability assumes a world where mass content gets repositioned as it enters into a range of different niche communities. When material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it necessarily imperfectly fits the needs of any given group of consumers. As content spreads, then, it gets remade -- either literally through various forms of sampling and remixing -- or figuratively via its insertion into ongoing conversations and interactions.
Such repurposing doesn't necessarily blunt or distort the goals of the original communicator. Rather, it may allow the message to reach new constituencies where it would otherwise have gone unheard. C3 affiliated researcher Grant McCracken (2005) points towards such a model when he suggests that the word consumer should be replaced by a new term, multiplier, to reflect the fact consumers expand the potential meanings that get attached to a brand by inserting it into a range of unpredicted contexts of use.
There is something in the term that invites us to ask whether the product, brand, innovation, campaign does actually give the "multiplier" anything he can, er, multiply.... Furthermore, "multipiers" also bids us ask, down the road, whether indeed the product, brand, innovation actually produced anything in the world. Did the multipliers multiply it, or is it still just sitting there? Finally, the term multipler may help marketers acknowledge more forthrightly that whether our work is a success is in fact out of our control. All we can do is to invite the multiplier to participate in the construction of the brand by putting it to work for their own purposes in their own world. When we called them "consumers" we could think of our creations as an end game and their responses as an end state. The term "multiplier" or something like it makes it clear that we depend on them to complete the work.
We might compare these brand "multipliers" to "lead users" (Von Hippel, 2006): lead users (Ford, 2006) enable user innovation, helping to find and fix flaws, identify new markets, or model new uses of manufactured goods once they have shipped to market; these "multipliers" perform some of this same work for cultural goods, taking them places and deploying them in ways that would not have been envisioned by the people who produced them. Some of those uses will be tangential to the goals of the media companies; some may generate alternative sources of profit; some may expand the potential audience for entertainment properties or open the brand message to new interpretations and uses.
Consumers in this model are not simply "hosts" or "carriers" of alien ideas, but rather grassroots advocates for materials which are personally and socially meaningful to them. They have filtered out content which they think has little relevance to their community, while focusing attention on material which they think has a special salience in this new context. Spreadability relies on the one true intelligent agent -- the human mind -- to cut through the clutter of a hyper-mediated culture and to facilitate the flow of valuable content across a fragmented marketplace. Under these conditions, media which remains fixed in its location and static in its form fails to generate sufficient public interest and thus drops out of these ongoing conversations.
Spreadable and Sticky -- Two Models of Media Contact
We can understand what we mean by spreadablity by way of a contrast with earlier notions of "stickiness." A review of the top ten hits on Google for "stickiness" offers us a fairly consistent sense of the word's current functional definition. The term "sticky" first and foremost refers to websites which "grab and hold the attention of your visitor" (Meredian, n.d.). Some writers argue that "(customers will) come back and buy more goods, get more advice, and see more ads" (Sanchez, n.d.). Most others measure stickiness in terms of how long the visitor stays on a single visit or how many different pages the visitors looks at in the course of their stay.
Stickiness reflected the assumptions of personalized media: its central unit is the individual consumer. As one writer explains, "Measuring stickiness means that you'll have to track what individuals do, not just mass movements on your site. So you'll have to have them register or place cookies on their computers if you really want to know that much detail." (Nemeth-Johannes, n.d.) And stickiness is associated with pre-structured interactivity rather than open-ended participation with games, quizzes, and polls seen as devices for attracting and holding the interests of consumers.
This emphasis on "stickiness" was closely associated with the ongoing discussion of "push vs. pull" technologies: stickiness reflects anxiety about attracting and holding viewer interest in a world where consumers have to actively seek out the content they desire. Under the stickiness model, value comes either through charging for access to information (through some kind of subscription or service fee), by selling merchandise to consumers through some kind of e-commerce catalog, or by selling the eyeballs of site visitors to some outside party, most often to advertisers.
Sites such as Amazon or eBay represent the triumph of this "stickiness" model -- both sites depend greatly on the return of highly committed and strongly motivated consumers and upon multiple transactions per visit. Yet, even these sites depend on word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers, who more often than not discuss their interactions in other contexts, thus helping "spread" the word to potential visitors. As early as 1996 Amazon launched its highly successful affiliate marketing program, which offers designated 'Associates' as much as ten percent in referral fees for purchases made by visitors they helped to attract to retailer's sites. Consumers are encouraged to link their homepages or blogs back to Amazon, providing incentives for them to help increase their community's awareness of the site's products and services.
This program reflects the core insight that different books would be of interest within different communities, that people were more likely to buy books when they were recommended by people they already trusted in other contexts, and that discussion of books emerged organically in the midst of a range of other conversations and interactions. The Associates program, thus, reflects the value which comes in "spreading" one's message across a range of niche communities rather than seeking simply to attract and hold the attention of site visitors.
Put schematically, we might map nine core distinctions between Stickiness and Spreadability:
Stickiness seeks to attract and hold the attention of site visitors; Spreadability seeks to motivate and facilitate the efforts of fans and enthusiasts to "spread" the word.
Stickiness depends on concentrating the attention of all interested parties on a specific site or through a specific channel; spreadability seeks to expand consumer awareness by dispersing the content across many potential points of contact.
Stickiness depends on creating a unified consumer experience as consumers enter into branded spaces; spreadability depends on creating a diversified experience as brands enter into the spaces where people already live and interact.
Stickiness depends on prestructured interactivity to shape visitor experiences; spreadability relies on open-ended participation as diversely motivated but deeply engaged consumers retrofit content to the contours of different niche communities.
Stickiness typically tracks the migrations of individual consumers within a site; Spreadability maps the flow of ideas through social networks.
Under stickiness, a sales force markets to consumers; under spreadability, grassroots intermediaries become advocates for brands.
Stickiness is a logical outgrowth of the shift from broadcasting's push model to the web's pull model; spreadability restores some aspects of the push model through relying on consumers to circulate the content within their own communities.
Under stickiness, producers, marketers, and consumers are separate and distinct roles; spreadability depends on increased collaboration across and even a blurring of the distinction between these roles.
Stickiness depends on a finite number of channels for communicating with consumers; spreadability takes for granted an almost infinite number of often localized and many times temporary networks through which media content circulates.
In short, for media companies to fully grasp the advantages of spreadability, they have to unlearn the lessons of "stickiness," lessons which may be less effective than they once seemed, as a consequence of the next phase of evolution in the media ecology.
Not surprisingly, many sites today struggle to balance between these two competing models, often resulting in disappointment. Consider, for example, the case of Sonific, an early experiment in adopting the spreadable media model within the music industry. In 2006, Sonific offered 'customizable, flexible, Flash-based music widgets' enabling users to stream one or more songs from the Sonific catalog to almost any webpage. Material from Sonfic's catalog could be included in nearly any web-based application -- from modest blogs to social network pages and slideshows. Users could customize playlists and embed music from the catalog into their sites.
Sonfic offered full-length-tracks as free, promotional streams, operating under the "You hear, you like, you buy," rule proposed by UCE Birmingham Professor Andrew Dubber. By early 2008 Sonific had licensed over 200,000 tracks and had 80,000 users, but as of May 1 the service has closed operations citing unworkable licensing with the major record labels.
It seems that the industry's major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.
- Sonific's CEO Gerd Leonhard, 2008.
The service's demise is certainly due, in part at least, to the recording industry's resistance to a spreadable model, a model that would actually encourage music fans to distribute content through decentralized networks. The music industry's anxieties about piracy lead them to want to lock down content rather than encouraging consumers to shape its circulation. All of this suggests a moment of transition: old assumptions are going to be hard to displace. For some industries and for some purposes, the sticky model will maintain even as other sectors of the branded entertainment sector are moving towards a more spreadable model. In the short term, we argue that companies need to know what model they are choosing and why.
The focus on spreadable media requires greater attention be paid to the social relations between media producers and consumers. There are significant differences between what motivates consumers to spread content and what motivates producers to seek the circulation of their brands. These differences can be understood in terms of the contrast between commodity culture and the gift economy.
References
Ford, Sam, with Henry Jenkins, Grant McCracken, Parmesh Shahani, Ivan Askwith, Geoffrey Long and Ilya Vedrashko (2006). Fanning the Audience's Flames: Ten Ways to Embrace and Cultivate Fan Communities, Report Prepared for the Members of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, Cambridge.
Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin (2007). New Literacies: Everyday Practices & Classroom Learning. Open University Press
Leonhard, Gerd. "Sonific Goes Offline on May 1 2008", Sonific.
van der Graaf, Shenja. "Viral Experiences: Do You Trust Your Friends," (author version), in Sandeep Krishnamurthy (ed.). Contemporary Research in E-Marketing, University of Washington. ed.. Pennsylvania: Idea Publishing, pp.166-185
Von Hippel, Eric (2006). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Over the next eight posts, I am going to be serializing a white paper which was developed last year by the Convergence Culture Consortium on the topic of Spreadable media. This report was drafted by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, and Ana Domb Krauskopf With Joshua Green. Our research was funded by the members of the Convergence Culture Consortium, including GSDM Advertising, MTV Networks, and Turner Broadcasting.
I was able to share some of the key insights from this research during my opening remarks at the Futures of Entertainment conference last fall, where they have sparked considerable discussion within the branded entertainment sector. We are hoping that sharing this work in progress with you will spark further debate, allowing us to tap the collective intelligence of our readers. Green, Sam Ford, and I are developing this research into a book, which will further map how information circulates across the emerging media landscape.
Introduction: Media Viruses and Memes
Use of the terms "viral" and "memes" by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers. Definitions of 'viral' media suffer from being both too limiting and too all-encompassing. The term has 'viral' has been used to describe so many related but ultimately distinct practices -- ranging from Word-of-Mouth marketing to video mash-ups and remixes posted to YouTube -- that just what counts as viral is unclear. It is invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerilla marketing, exploiting social networks, and mobilizing consumers and distributors. Needless, the concept of viral distribution is useful for understanding the emergence of a spreadable media landscape. Ultimately, however, viral media is a flawed way to think about distributing content through informal or adhoc networks of consumers.
Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication -- that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry. A close look at particular examples of Internet "memes" or "viruses" highlight the ways they have mutated as they have traveled through an increasingly participatory culture.
Given these limitations, we are proposing an alternative model which we think better accounts for how and why media content circulates at the present time, the idea of spreadable media. A spreadable model emphasizes the activity of consumers -- or what Grant McCracken calls "multipliers" -- in shaping the circulation of media content, often expanding potential meanings and opening up brands to unanticipated new markets. Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of "memes," a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain 'purity' of message.
In this section, we will explore the roots of the concept of viral media, looking at the concept of the "media viruses" and its ties to the theory of the "meme." The reliance on a potent biological metaphor to describe the process of communication reflects a particular set of assumptions about the power relations between producers, texts, and consumers which may obscure the realities these terms seek to explain. The metaphor of "infection" reduces consumers to the involuntary "hosts" of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream." While attractive, such a notion doesn't reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes. A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations.
In the following, we will outline the limits of these two analogies as part of making the case for the importance of adopting a new model for thinking about the grassroots circulation of content in the current media landscape. In the end, we are going to propose that these concepts be retired in favor of a new framework -- Spreadable Media.
Definitional Fuzziness
Consider what happened when a group of advertising executives sat down to discuss the concept of viral media, a conversation which demonstrates the confusion about what viral media might be, about what it is good for, and why it's worth thinking about. One panelist began by suggesting viral media referred to situations "where the marketing messaging was powerful enough that it spread through the population like a virus," a suggestion the properties of viral media lie in the message itself, or perhaps in those who crafted that message. The second, on the other hand, described viral media in terms of the activity of consumers: "Anything you think is cool enough to send to your friends, that's viral." Later in the same exchange, he suggested "Viral, just by definition, is something that gets passed around by people."
As the discussion continued, it became clearer and clearer that viral media, like art and pornography, lies in the eye of the beholder. No one knew for sure why any given message "turned viral," though there was lots of talk about "designing the DNA" of viral properties and being "organic" to the communities through which messages circulated. To some degree, it seemed the strength of a viral message depends on "how easy is it to pass", suggesting viralness has something to do with the technical properties of the medium, yet quickly we were also told that it had to do with whether the message fit into the ongoing conversations of the community: "If you're getting a ton of negative comments, maybe you're not talking about it in the right place."
By the end of the exchange, no one could sort out what was meant by "viral media" or what metrics should be deployed to measure its success. This kind of definitional fuzziness makes it increasingly difficult to approach the process analytically. Without certainty about what set of practices the term refers to, it is impossible to attempt to understand how and why such practices work.
As already noted, the reliance on a biological metaphor to explain the way communication takes place -- through practices of 'infection' -- represents the first dificulty with the notion of viral media. The attraction of the infection metaphor is two-fold:
It reduces consumers, often the most unpredictable variable in the sender-message-receiver frame, to involuntary "hosts" of media viruses;
While holding onto the idea that media producers can design "killer" texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural "bloodstream."
Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book Media Virus may not have invented the term "viral media", but his ideas eloquently describe the way these texts are popularly held to behave. The media virus, Rushkoff argues, is a Trojan horse, that surreptitiously brings messages into our homes -- messages can be encoded into a form people are compelled to pass along and share, allowing the embedded meanings, buried inside like DNA, to "infect" and spread, like a pathogen. There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that this spread of ideas and messages can occur not only without the user's consent, but perhaps actively against it, requiring that people be duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content. Douglas Rushkoff insists he is not using the term "as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses . . . (such as) the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS" (Rushkoff, 9, emphasis his).
Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The "protein shell" of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero -- as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code -- not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call "memes" (Rushkoff, p.9-10).
The "hidden agenda" and "embedded meanings" Rushkoff mentions are the brand messages buried at the heart of viral videos, the promotional elements in videos featuring Mentos exploding out of soda bottles, or Gorillas playing the drumline of In the Air Tonight . The media virus proposition is that these marketing messages -- messages consumers may normally avoid, approach skeptically, or disregard altogether -- are hidden by the "protein shell" of compelling media properties. Nestled within interesting bits of content, these messages are snuck into the heads of consumers, or wilfully passed between them.
These messages, Rushkoff and others suggest, constitute "memes", conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 as a sort of cultural version of the gene. Dawkins was looking for a way to explain cultural evolution, imagining it as a biological system. What genes are to genetics, he suggested, memes would be to culture. Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics:
Fidelity -- memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind;
Fecundity -- memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves;
Longevity -- memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.
The meme, then, is "a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds" (Brodie, 1996, p. 32). They are the ideas at the center of virally spread events, some coherent, self-replicating idea which moves from person-to-person, from mind-to-mind, duplicating itself as it goes.
Language seems to 'evolve' by non-genetic means and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation (Dawkins, 1976, p.189).
Dawkins remained vague about the granularity of this concept, seeing it as an all-purpose unit which could explain everything from politics to fashion. Each of these fields are comprised of good ideas, good ideas which, in order to survive, attach themselves to media virii -- funny, catchy, compelling bits of content -- as a vehicle to infect new minds with copies of themselves.
We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. (Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992, p.399)
Though imagined long before the rise of the Internet and the Web, the idea of the meme has been widely embraced as a way of talking about the rapid dispersion of informationn and the widespread circulation of concepts which characterize the digital era. It has been a particularly attractive way to think about the rise of Internet fads like the LOLcats or Soulja Boy, fads considered seemingly trivial or meangingless. The content which circulates in such a fashion is seen as simplistic, fragmentary, and essentially meaningless, though it may shape our beliefs and actions in significant ways. Wired magazine (Miller, 2007) recently summed it up as a culture of "media snacks":
We now devour our pop culture the same way we enjoy candy and chips - in conveniently packaged bite-size nuggets made to be munched easily with increased frequency and maximum speed. This is snack culture - and boy, is it tasty (not to mention addictive).
This description of snacks implies that they are without nutritional value, trivial or meaningless aspect of our culture, a time waste. And if this meaningless content is self-replicating then consumers are "irrational," and unable to escape their infection. Yet these models -- the idea of the meme and the media virus, of self-replicating ideas hidden in attractive, catchy content we are helpless to resist -- is a problematic way to understand cultural practices. We want to suggest that these materials travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them. At the most fundamental level, such an approach misunderstands the way content spreads, which is namely, through the active practices of people. As such, we would like to suggest:
That "memes" do not self-replicate;
That people are not "susceptible" to this viral media;
That viral media and Internet memes are not nutritionally bereft, meaningless 'snacks'.
The Problem of Agency
Central to the difficulties of both the meme and the media virus models is a particular confusion about the role people play in passing along media content. From the start, memetics has suffered from a confusion about the nature of agency. Unlike genetic features, culture is not in any meaningful sense self-replicating -- it relies on people to propel, develop and sustain it. The term 'culture' originates from metaphors of agriculture: the analogy was of cultivating the human mind much as one cultivates the land. Culture thus represents the assertion of human will and agency upon nature. As such, cultures are not something that happen to us, cultures are something we collectively create. Certainly any individual can be influenced by the culture which surrounds them, by the fashion, media, speech and ideas that fill their daily life, but individuals make their own contributions to their cultures through the choices which they make. The language of memetics, however, strips aside the concept of human agency.
Processes of cultural adaptation are more complex than the notion of meme circulation makes out. Indeed, theories for understanding cultural uptake must consider two factors not closely considered by memetics: human choice and the medium through which these ideas are circulated. Dawkins writes not about how "people acquire ideas" but about how "ideas acquire people." Every day humans create and circulate many more ideas than are actually likely to gain any deep traction within a culture. Over time, only a much smaller number of phrases, concepts, images, or stories survive. This winnowing down of cultural options is the product not of the strength of particular ideas but of many, many individual choices as people decide what ideas to reference, which to share with each other, decisions based on a range of different agendas and interests far beyond how compelling individual ideas may be. Few of the ideas get transmitted in anything like their original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs. Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process reveals little about the spread of these concepts.
By the same token, ideas circulate differently in and through different media. Some media allow for the more or less direct transmission of these ideas in something close to their original form -- as when a video gets replayed many times -- while others necessarily encourage much more rapid transformations -- as occurs when we play a game of "telephone" and each person passing along a message changes it in some way. So, it makes little sense to talk about "memes" as an all-purpose unit of thought without regard to the medium and processes of cultural transmission being described. Indeed, discussing the emergence of Internet memes, education researchers Michael Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2007) suggest Dawkins' notion of memetic 'fidelity' needs to be done away with altogether. Defining the Internet meme as the rapid uptake and spread of a particular idea, presented as a written text, image, language, "'move' or some unit of cultural "stuff", Knobel and Lankshear suggest adaptation is central to the propogation of memes:
Many of the online memes in this study were not passed on entirely 'intact' in that the meme 'vehicle' was changed, modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources, and regularly given idiosyncratic spins by participants...A concept like 'replicability' therefore needs to include remixing as an important practice associated with many successful online memes, where remixing includes modifying, bricolaging, splicing, reordering, superimposing, etc., original and other images, sounds, films, music, talk, and so on. (Knobel and Lankshear, 2007, p.208-209)
Their argument is particularly revealing as a way to think about just what comprises the object at the heart of the Internet meme. The recent "LOLcat" Internet meme, built so heavily upon remixing and appropriation, is a good case study to illustrate the role of remixing in Internet memes. "LOLcats" are pictures of animals, most commonly cats, with digitally superimposed text for humorous effect. Officially referred to as "image macros," the pictures often feature "LOLspeak", a type of broken English that enhances the amusing tone of the juxtaposition. On websites such as icanhascheezburger.com, users are invited to upload their own "LOLcats" which are then shared throughout the web.
Over time, different contributors have stretched the "LOLcat" idea in many different directions which would not have been anticipated by the original posters -- including a whole strand of images centering around Walruses and buckets, the use of "LOLspeak" to translate religious texts (LOLbible) or represent complex theoretical arguments, the use of similar image macros to engage with Emo culture, philosophy (loltheorists), and dogs (LOLdogs, see: ihasahotdog.com).
So just what is the "meme" at the centre of this Internet meme? What is the idea that is replicated? More than the content of the pictures, the "meme" at the heart of this Internet phenomenon is the structure of the picture itself --the juxtaposition, broken English, and particularly the use of irreverent humor. Given the meme lies in the structure, however -- how to throw the pot rather than the pot itself -- then the very viability of the meme is dependent on the ability for the idea to be adapted in a variety of different ways. In this sense, then, it is somewhat hard to see how contained within this structure is a "message" waiting to occupy unsuspecting minds.
The re-use, remixing and adaptation of the LOLcat idea instead suggest that the spread and replication of this form of cultural production is not due to the especially compelling nature of the LOLcat idea but the fact it can be used to make meaning. A similar situation can be seen in the case of the "Crank Dat" song by Soulja Boy, which some have described as one of the most succesful Internet memes of 2007. Soulja Boy, originally an obscure amateur performer in Atlanta, produced a music video for his first song "Crank Dat", which he uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube. Soulja Boy then encouraged his fans to appropriate, remix, and reperform the song, spreading it through social networks, YouTube, and the blogosphere, in the hopes of gaining greater visibility for himself and his music.
Along the way, Crank Dat got performed countless times by very different communities -- from white suburban kids to black ballet dancers, from football teams to MIT graduate students. The video was used as the basis for "mash up" videos featuring characters as diverse as Winnie the Pooh and Dora the Explorer. People added their own steps, lyrics, themes, and images to the videos they made. As the song circulated, Soulja Boy's reputation grew -- he scored a record contract, and emerged as a top recording artist. -- in part as a consequence of his understanding of the mechanisms by which cultural content circulates within a participatory culture.
The success of "Crank Dat" cannot be explained as the slavish emulation of the dance by fans, as the self-replication of a "compelling" idea. Rather, "Crank Dat" spread the way dance crazes have always spread - through the processes of learning and adaptation by which people learn to dance. As CMS student Kevin Driscoll discusses, watching others dance to learn steps and refining these steps so they express local experience or variation are crucial to dance itself. Similarly, the adaptation of the LOLcat form to different situations -- theory, puppies, politicians -- constitute processes of meaning making, as people use tools at their disposal to explain the world around them.
Next Time: We will compare and contrast "stickiness" and "spreadability" as competing paradigms shaping the practices of web 2.0.
References
Brodie, Richard (1996). Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme, Seattle: Integral Press
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Knobel, Michele & Lankshear, Colin (2007). New Literacies: Everyday Practices &
Writing in 1991, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio (the co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program) used the Batman as an example of the kinds of pressures being exerted on the superhero genre at a moment when older texts were continuing to circulate (and in fact, were recirculated in response to renewed interests in the characters), newer versions operated according to very different ideological and narratalogical principles, a range of auteur creators were being allowed to experiment with the character, and the character was assuming new shapes and forms to reflect the demands of different entertainment sectors and their consumers:
Whereas broad shifts in emphasis had occurred since 1939, these changes had been, for the most part, consecutive and consensual. Now, newly created Batmen, existing simultaneously with the older Batmen of the television series and comic reprints and back issues, all struggled for recognition and a share of the market. But the contradictions amongst them may threaten both the integrity of the commodity form and the coherence of the fans' lived experience of the character necessary to the Batman's continued success.
(See The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media)
The superhero comic, they suggest, may not be able to withstand "the tension between, on the one hand, the essential maintenance of a recognizable set of key character components and, on the other hand, the increasingly necessary centrifugal dispersion of those components."
Retrospectively, we can see Pearson and Uricchio as describing a moment of transition from continuity to multiplicity as the governing logic of the superhero comics realm. Rather than fragmenting or confusing the audience, this multiplicity of Batmen helped fans learn to live in a universe where there were diverse, competing images of their favorite characters and indeed, to appreciate the pleasures of seeing familiar fictions transformed in unpredicted ways. In an article which I previewed in draft form on the blog and which recently was published in Angela Ndalianis's The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, I describe the multiplicity paradigm at play in contemporary comics:
Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchise, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of their relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth. So that in some storylines, Aunt May knows Spider-man's secret identity while in others she doesn't; in some Peter Parker is still a teen and in others, he is an adult science teacher; in some, he is married to Mary Jane and in others, they have broken up, and so forth. These different versions may be organized around their respective authors or demarked through other designations - Marvel's Ultimate or DC's All Star lines which represented attempts to reboot the continuity to allow points of entry for new readers for example.
We can see this principle of multiplicity at play in Batman: Gotham Knight, an anthology of animated short stories about the Caped Crusader, which was released last summer as a bridge between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I had a chance to watch the film during my Christmas break and given this blog's ongoing interest in transmedia storytelling, I thought I would share a few reflections.
There are clear connections between Gotham Knight and The Animatrix, which I discuss in Convergence Culture. These new animated shorts were released direct to dvd as the third in the line of DC Universe Original Animated Movies released by Warner Premiere and Warner Bros. Animation. Warner was also the distributor of the Animatrix, which was similarly released between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded as part of the Wachowski Brothers' larger transmedia strategy. The studio seems to have learned a few lessons since The Animatrix, which are suggested by two key differences between the two productions.
First, the information communicated about the franchise through The Animatrix was crucial to our understanding of the Matrix films, helping to introduce new characters (The Kid) and motivate major plot shifts (the relations between the humans and the machines). The Wachowski Brothers took transmedia principles much further than their audience was ready to go and the result was confusion and disappointment in those who had paid to see the films at the box office but hadn't engaged with the anime, comics, or games extensions.
Gotham Knight is far more conservative in the ways that it seeks to integrate these shorts into the over-all flow of the revamped Batman film franchise -- too much so in my opinion because it's hard to understand in what sense these stories fit into the narrative structure of the film series and they certainly don't add any concrete information that helps us make sense of the plot of Dark Knight. They do include an encounter with the Scarecrow, who was a featured baddie in Batman Begins, as well as with villains, such as King Croc and Deadshot, who have so far not appeared in the film series. They do give us some additional insights into Batman's psyche (through flashbacks to events which occur within the timeline of his early life introduced in Batman Begins) and glimpses into his dealings with the secondary characters (Commissioner Gordon, Lucius Fox) who figure in the Batman film franchise.
Given the way Gotham Knight was marketed, there were no doubt fan expectations that these shorts might foreshadow developments in Dark Knight or even better, give us some inside dope which might add to our experience of the feature film. I am certain this video might have frustrated anyone who bought it with those hopes. Don't get me wrong -- each of these shorts is well made, engaging, and thoughtful. A lot depends on whether we think of transmedia storytelling as a structure of information (offering bits of data which add up to constitute a larger story world) or a structure of feeling (shaping how we feel about the characters and our appreciation of what makes them tick).
My favorite of the shorts, "Have I Got A Story For You," might be read as a paean to the new era of multiplicity as a series of skater punks describe, in very different terms, each of their encounters with the Batman as he does battle with the "man in black." Each pulls the Batman into a different genre -- in one, he is a shadowy figure who appears and disappears as though by magic; in another, he is a flying monster; and in another, he is a robot or cyborg. As they try to top each other's stories, we gradually realize that each has glimpsed a single moment in a much more extended conflict which culminates in a final showdown right before their astonished eyes, in which a fourth kid sees Batman as a very human figure who requires his help to overcome the bad guy. We can read this piece as a hint of the very different ways that the Batman will be depicted -- not only stylistically but also thematically -- across the rest of the shorts, each produced by a different creative team.
In terms of franchise building, the strongest of the shorts may be "Working Through Pain," which shows us a young Bruce Wayne as he seeks a better way to cope with the traumatic aftermath of the murder of his parents. Batman Begins had shown us one part of a trip around the world as the young man sought mentors who might further his training; this one shows two other stops in that personal journey -- one to a hospital in what looks like Africa as he tries to help a medical relief effort which lacks adequate supplies for the problems it is confronting; the other, told more extensively, takes us to India where a young woman teaches him how to "work through pain" and how to operate on the fringes of the social order.
Second, as with Animatrix, Gotham Knight hired artists from the Japanese anime tradition to work with a western media property in hopes of bringing a fresh look and perspective to the material. The Wachowski brothers chose artists who already were auteurs in Japan and gave them a relatively free hand to do with his characters what he chose. DC Comics went with younger animators, many of whom had worked on cult franchises (including Giant Robo, .Hack, Tekkonkinkreet) but who had yet to create their own feature films or television series, and he paired them with distinguished talent already associated with DC either through work on Batman comics or animated series.
The result is a blending of western style character development (contemporary American comics at their very best) with the visual style we associate with anime. As a fan of American comics, I was delighted, for example, to see the "Crossfire" segment, where Greg Rucka (one of my faves) returns to characters he helped to flesh out in the Gotham Central comics he co-authored with Ed Brubaker. Crispus Allen and Anna Ramirez are two beat cops debating the relationship of the Gotham police force to the caped crusader.
The making of video suggests that DC was drawn to the anime directors because of their skills at world building and indeed, the most spectacular elements of these films have to do with fleshing out Gotham City. Each short has a slightly different perspective on the city -- which emerges as a complex, fully realized urban environment, especially when we put all of these glimpses together. The various shorts take us to Arkham Asylum, through the sewers, along the skyline, along the water front, and through the nightclubs of the rich and powerful. There is also a recurring fascination with the technology associated with the hero and his challengers -- including "Field Test" which, as the title suggests, involves the protagonist trying out a high tech gadget which he concludes provides too much protection against the forces of evil. Perhaps most pervasively, the cartoons give us a sense of Batman's vulnerability and humanity: I am pretty sure we get to see Batman and/or Bruce Wayne bleeding in pretty much every segment here and thematically, many of them struggle with how he deals with the pain or human loss he confronts as he takes on the mask to battle crime.
As with The Animatrix, the Batman shorts allow a broad array of different experiments in visual expression: The Batman looks radically different from short to short as each artist is allowed to tell his story through their own stylistic lens. It is on the visual level, far more than on the narrative level, that the film satisfies the pop cosmopolitan's search for a Japanese perspective on the characters. What comes through here, then, is a complex melding of Eastern and Western modes of storytelling, which in turn does push and pull the Batman in some new directions I hadn't seen on the screen before.
It's interesting that we get this anime-inflected version of the Dark Knight at about the same time as designer Chip Kidd has published Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, which consists primarily of reprints from low budget and long forgotten manga produced by Jiro Kuwata for Shonen King following the success of the 1960s television series. Kidd reprints what he has been able to relocate of this original manga -- lots of interesting fragments -- alongside a collection of advertisements for Batman related toys released in Japan during this same giddy period. Kuwata confesses to having a very limited knowledge of the character and very little time to work.
The result is a series of stories which draw on the iconography of Batman, at least of the television series, with very few of the genre conventions. So, for example, the first story has Batman and Robin doing battle with Clayface (False Face on the television series) whose remarkable ability to transform his identity doesn't stop at the human form but allows him to magically transform himself into a terradactyl and a range of other giant monsters. Another story centers around a character with a near endless capacity to return from the dead. However fanciful the villains were on the Batman TV series, and however many times they seemed to survive what at the time looked like fatal accidents, they were still understood as having the limitations of any other mortal being. But here, Batman exists in a magical realm where anything can and will happen. This narrative flux goes alongside the stylistic transformation which occurs when Batman and Robin are being depicted through Manga conventions. Bat-Manga is a fascinating read for anyone interested in understanding globalization.
Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it's not going away. We're your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we'll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don't treat us like criminals. -- WeAreSterlingCooper
This is a pretty good statement about the contradictions many fans are experiencing
as they try to interact with media producers in what we've been promised is a
new era of "interactive media". This was written by Bud Caddell, a strategist for
a New York based digital think-tank, Undercurrent, who is also a fan of the AMC
television drama, Mad Men, and "tweets" under the name of Bud Melman, a mailroom clerk at Sterling Cooper advertising. In short, he's an industry insider who is also a fan and someone who consults in advertising who in his spare time enjoys pretending to be a mail clerk at an advertising firm in the 1960s.
Got that? Good. Don't make me repeat myself.
Seriously, the fact that Caddell can be both an industry insider and a fan simply demonstrates the degree to which those lines are blurring from all sides in our contemporary convergence culture; the fact that his fantasies have something to do with his real world identity should also not be a shock to anyone who understands the
psycho-sociology of fandom. Some have argued that Caddell is not a "true
fan" because he's also a "marketer," but that's like saying one can't be both an academic and a fan at the same time. For the record, I'd also call myself a fan of Mad Men! We're all all multitudes within ourselves.
In his 'mundane' guise as Bud Caddell, media consultant, he's posted a fascinating account of how fan fiction emerged around Mad Man through the unlikely channel of Twitter and how this fandom, like so many others, faced legal challenge from the producers of the program they were hoping to help promote.
I am sure that I will lose cool points if I confess that the joys of Twitter have largely escaped me. Anyone who reads this blog knows that brevity is a virtue I do not possess and the idea of blogging at 140 characters at a time is not a hobby I plan to embrace anytime soon. I like to tell people that I am a marathon runner, not a sprinter, but the reality is I just don't know when to stop. But I've been following this story peripherally for a while and was glad to finally get a more detailed and systematic account of what happened. Caddell's account should be required reading for all fans and aca-fen but also for all brand executives and content producers.
As Caddell explains, sometime around the start of the second season of Mad Men, fans began to use the blog platform, Tumblr.com, to post a kind of advice
column, written in the voices of the program's characters, responding to questions from fans, capturing the twisted sexual and interpersonal politics of the early 1960s. Soon, some of these same fans migrated, in character, to Twitter. With a few days after Don Drapper (the ad man protagonist of the series) began tweeting, he had some 3000 subscribers to his update, and his Twitter feed was soon joined by others written by Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, Betty Draper, Roger Sterling, and a dozen or so other characters -- primary and secondary -- from the series.
We can think of these tweets as fan fiction in its most spared down form -- these tweets
represented attempts to get inside the heads (or inhabit the bodies) of fictional characters and see the represented events from their perspective. Francesca Coppa has made the provocative argument that fan fiction might be understood as much as a kind of theater performance as it is a prose genre. (See her essay in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet). So, lets think of what was going on here as a kind of performance art.
Initially, many assumed that the tweets were a new promotional device launched
by AMC and their digital advertising agency, Deep Focus. Deep Focus CEO
Ian Schaffer, after all, runs a blog which has enlightened things to say about social media and audience engagement around brands.
Caddell says that he himself initially believed the activity was a deft example of what brand guru Faris Yacob calls "transmedia planning" (Check out this blog post
where I account how the concept of "transmedia planning" has emerged in the brand realm in response to Convergence Culture's account of "transmedia storytelling.") Caddell created his own character, Bud Melman, so he could join the fun:
As an employee in the mailroom, he could have the curse and the good fortune of being invisible, which means I could tweet about what happened before or after the scene you saw on television.
Caddell, the industry insider became an unlikely fan advocate, when Twitter suspended the accounts of nine of the primary Mad Men characters, including Draper, Olson, and Joan Holloway, in response to a Digital Millennium Copyright Act "cease and
desist" notice from AMC's lawyers. Caddell created the website, WeAreSterlingCooper.com, (and the manifesto quoted above), in order to call attention
to this conflict between the fans and the network, not to mention to aggregate the various Mad Men feeds.
As an industry insider, Caddell notes, he was deeply confused by the industry's response to these practices. Mad Men's viewership had been declining sharply during the second season and there was every reason to think that these activities, small scale though they might be, were helping to generate fan interest and buzz again. The fans involved had offered to work with the series producers and promoters, seeking to better coordinate their efforts rather than creating brand confusion. As Caddell explains:
One element of entertainment and media that consumed me at the time as a marketer was the idea of what to offer fans to consume between commercial breaks, episodes and seasons. The twitter characters could provide other fans a way to play and interact between Sundays when the show aired. From a practical perspective, each single character by themselves was a novelty, but together they could weave an intricate web of conversations and events to follow.
Some sense of this potential was realized when Melman and some other fans staged a Twitter-based short story arc involving "a meeting at the Tom Tom Club for drinks and
shenanigans" just to show what could happen if they coordinated their efforts.
(Here, they start to sound more like the kinds of Role Play Game/Fan Fiction
writing activities that occurs in LiveJournalLand.)
So far, these overtures have had a chilly reception. Mark Deuze has suggested at
least two reasons why production companies get anxious around such activities:
the creative department's desire for creative control, the legal department's concerns about controlling copyright. Here, we can add a third: the promotional department's fears about losing control over their brand message. Of the three, the last is perhaps the most absurd, since in reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking "stuck up".
As Caddell writes as a fan in the report's conclusions:
AMC saw most of us as stealing something that was theirs. When in reality, we were expressing our affinity for the characters and the show.
Shifting perspectives and writing as an industry insider, he concludes:
We shouldn't threaten fans with legal notices and we shouldn't isolate them. We should cultivate the relationships we're either lucky or gift to have and help them with their expression of their fandom. Brands should offer as much content in as many types to its audiences with the hopes that they feel to compelled to rearrange them and add novel elements to tell their own stories. We fight to insert ourselves in the conversations of real people, and that is exactly what happened with the Mad Men characters on Twitter. If we cling to this sense that we are the sole owner of creative work, we'll continue to isolate that work from the actual world and the human beings we work to affect.
Fans have consistently raced out ahead of content producers and brand executives in their understanding of the potential of "transmedia entertainment." They are testing new tools, moving into new communities, embracing new forms. Rather than seeking to silence or control them, creative agencies need to observe, document, and where-ever possible, join the game. Caddell's dual status allows him to quickly translate what he's learned as a fan into what his industry needs to learn. I just hope some of them are ready to read and take notes.
Thanks to Joshua Green for calling this report to my attention. Green, a CMS postdoc, and Madeline "Flourish" Klink, a CMS grad student, are listed as consultants on the report.
Regular readers of the blog know that appropriations of my images or ideas are like catnip to me -- nigh on impossible for me to resist! Indeed, as someone who works on appropriation as a new media literacy, participatory culture and now, spreadable media, I am always intrigued by the ways that media theory is itself appropriated and spread beyond academic circles. So, please, anyone who wants to play around with my image, go ahead, but if I find it, I reserve the right to re-post and analyze it on my blog.
I howled with delight when Mauricio Mota from Brazil's New Content shared this video he had produced during the final panel (on Global Flows, Global Deals) at the Futures of Entertainment conference we hosted last fall. Mota's co-conspirator in generating the video was Ricardo Justus, who also joined us at the November conference.
Mota helped to facilitate the translation of Convergence Culture into Portuguese and was my host during a trip to Brazil earlier last semester; he's been a key player in connecting the Convergence Culture Consortium to a range of Brazilian companies as we are seeking ways to better understand media development in what economists are starting to call the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China), which represent some of the fastest developing high tech economies in the world. And he's part of a smart group of thinkers, who call themselves the Alchemists, who are doing cutting edge work on transmedia storytelling and branding.
Mota's video was intended to dramatize the connection between some of the ideas in Convergence Culture and the practices for promotion that have emerged in his native country. Specifically, the footage here comes from Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), released in 2007 and now one of the most commercially successful Brazilian films ever, despite having almost no conventional advertising or promotion. As Mota explained at the conference, a copy of the film was leaked to pirates while it was in the final stages of production and the pirates spread it across the countryside. It's been estimated that 11.5 million people watched the illegal copy of the film.
This is piracy on a scale which would wake most American media executives up in a cold sweat. But Mota's point is that it also insured an unprecidented level of visibility for the film. According to DataFolha, 77% of São Paulo residents knew about the movie, 180,000 people saw the film on its opening weekend in Sao Paulo and Rio, and by now, more than 2.5 million people have watched the film legally. (These statistics come from Wikipedia. Mota's estimates are even higher, suggesting that by the time the video had been further pirated via torrents in 15 countries around the world, it may have been seen illegally by 13 million and legally by more than 5 million people).
So, how do we read this story -- did the 13 million plus illegal views represent "lost revenue" to the company? Maybe some of them -- but it's also almost certainly the case that the legal box office returns would have been substantially lower if the pirated circulation of the film had not spread the word and heightened awareness about the title, while potentially lowering the cost of its promotion. Mota rightly sees this pattern as a paradox: loss of control may in this case have resulted in increased revenue and much greater cultural impact. In the process, Capitão Roberto Nascimento (the film's antihero) became something of a cult icon and was subject to all kinds of grassroots appropriations (as suggested by the sample from a fan vid which Mota includes at the end of his own mashup).
Mota's story about Tropa de Elite is a powerful illustration of the concept of spreadable media which ran through this year's Futures of Entertainment event. I developed some of the basic framework for thinking about Spreadable Media through my opening remarks at the conference.
we explored them further throughout the first morning of the conference, with a panel on Consumption, Value, and Worth.
Different forms of cooperation between producers and consumers, including the concept of the moral economy, were central to my conversation with Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks).
Later this month, the Convergence Culture Consortium will be releasing what we hope will be a significant white paper which critiques the concept of viral media and offers an alternative model, one which respects the agency and motives of consumers in actively shaping the circulation of media content through a networked society and one which seeks to better understand the interplay between consumer capitalism and the gift economy in shaping the new era of web 2.0. Watch this blog for more on "spreadable media" in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, I wanted to use this post to signal that the webcast versions of the Futures of Entertainment conference have gone up over at MIT's TechTV site and are available for all of you who were unable to attend the conference. In many ways, this was our best event so far in this series -- in part because of a good balance between academics and industry people on each panel. Some of the highlights for me: Kim Moses, the Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, sharing her insights on our Making Audiences Matter session; a very animated discussion of Franchising, Extensions, and World Building, which brought together perspectives from the world of wrestling, soap operas, and cult movies; and an especially provocative series of exchanges about the relationships between the academy and industry. But every panel has something to recommend it and every panelist made at least one contribution that changed the way I thought about the contemporary media landscape.
Given the latest news of the legal battle which is brewing around Watchmen's release, the exchange which I had with Alex McDowell, the film's gift art director, and Georgia State University's Alicia Perren, has been generating a fair amount of interest out there in the blogosphere. Mcdowell just shared with me a very interesting statement issued by one of the film's producers, Lloyd Levin, about the legal struggles around the film's production and distribution. This is a story which we are all following here at CMS with baited breath.
I've always loved that moment in The Wizard of Oz where the flying monkeys have knocked (not to mentioned pulled) the stuffing out of the Scarecrow. His body lies like an empty sack. His head's been thrown someplace else. And the straw lies scattered on the ground. And he looks out and says, "well, that's me all over." There are many days when I know how he feels and also appreciate his self-deflating sense of humor.
All of this is by way of saying that I flew too much, spoke too much, and otherwise stretched myself way too thin in 2008 and I hope that the steps I've taken at the end of the year will put me in a position to slow down a little in the coming year.
That said, today's post is intended to share with you some of the digital traces which survive from some memorable speaking gigs that I did last year. Each of these represents content I had planned to post at some point last year and never got around to sharing. I figured I'd start the new year by clearing out my inbox.
For example, the day before the election, I spoke at the University of Oregon in Eugene, sharing some of my thoughts about the role of new media and popular culture in the 2008 presidential campaign. While I was there, they got me into the studio to tape a segment of the University of Oregon Today, which recently went up on the web. I was in a particularly reflective frame of mind, talking about some core themes of my work -- especially about the shifting relations between fandom and academia, about the goals and ideals of the Comparative Media Studies Program, about convergence culture, and about politics as a transmedia practice. I will especially value this interview as recording many of the core talking points about the Comparative Media Studies Program just a few weeks before I announced my decision to leave the program. It should give you some sense of why it was so hard for me to walk away from what we had built at MIT.
Earlier in the year, I participated in a lively and spirited exchange at the Consumer Research Conference here in Boston. Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and I had been invited to represent the Convergence Culture Consortium in a mock debate with some of the key thinkers in the field of Consumer Research. We begin the debate slinging zingers at each other, but as the conversation went along, we all became so engrossed in the points of contact between the two fields of research. Consumer Research shares many core assumptions with the Cultural Studies tradition which informs my own research but it has by and large taken shape in a business school context. To be honest, few of my cultural studies colleagues have ever walked across campus to talk with their counterparts in the business school and we know very little about the research being done there, even when it explores some of the same themes or developments shaping our own research. I'm very lucky to have made contact many years ago with Robert Kozinets who has been a key thinker on the topic of "brand communities" and who has been my bridge into the Consumer Research space.Such interdisciplinary conversations should occur more often. I know that I have many readers who come from industry or Business School backgrounds and so I'm grateful that you've been open, on your part, to such dialog.
My former student, Vanessa Bertozzi, now works as a community organizer inside Etsy, an online arts and crafts community. The community had been struggling with issues of copyright and fair use as they were more and more attracting fan artists. Bertozzi, with whom I did research on Young Artists for an essay that ended up in the recent book, Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life (edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey), asked me to join her online for a real time but virtual conversation about the nature of fan art, about appropriation as a transformative and expressive practice, and about the legal and ethical implications of a world where many of us create in response to existing media texts. In many ways, this exchange brought me back to ideas I first explored in Textual Poachers almost twenty years ago.
While I was speaking at the International Communications Association in Montreal last spring, I was asked to do an interview about mobile communications, new media literacies, user-generated content, and privacy for a multimedia web project being developed by Steven James May, an MA candidate at Ryerson University. I had no idea how creative May was going to get in terms of the context for the interview. He talked to me out on one of the main streets of one of Canada's busiest cities, standing inside a phone booth, and holding an outsized early mobile telephone. People were stopping on the street to stare at the strange configuration of media and at one point, an academic associate stopped, yanked out his cellphone camera, adding one more layer of mediation and telecommunication to the mix. May's project is now up on the web and my somewhat befuddled interview now lives alongside interviews with Greg Elmer, danah boyd, Toby Miller, Jonathon Zittrain, and David Weinberger, among others.
Late last spring, we held the first in what we hope will be a continuing series of Julius Schwartz Memorial Lectures at MIT. Schwartz had been a founding figure in science fiction fandom and a influential editor at DC comics who was a key influence on the so-called Silver Age of American comics and on genre entertainment more generally. When he passed away, some of his friends put together seed money for us to start a series of public talks by key figures in the space of comics, science fiction, and genre entertainment.
Our first speaker, appropriately enough, was Neil Gaiman, whose work spans comics (The Sandman), fiction (American Gods), cinema (Mirrormask), television (Neverwhere), the blogosphere, and much much more. Gaiman gave a memorable opening lecture on the nature of genre and its influence on the creative process, which is best known for an extended rift on how pornography and musicals follow similar conventions. It was inspired by Linda Williams' Hard Core, but Gaiman took it in his own idiosyncratic directions. As the evening continued, we had a great conversation, which ranged across his career, talked about some of the key themes in his work, and especially dug deep into his ideas about myth, storytelling, and popular entertainment. Anyone whose ever heard Gaiman knows he's a charming and engaging speaker with lots of interesting insights into cultural history and media theory.
In this excerpt from the event, Gaiman talks about his "pulp roots" and his ongoing relationship to genre entertainment
And here, Gaiman talks about the "dark" qualities of his children's fiction:
Gaiman was consistently this witty, engaging, and intelligent for the entire evening!
Too bad you weren't there!
Well, the good news is that CMS and New England Comics are offering you the chance to order a DVD of the Neil Gaiman lecture and discussion with most of the proceeds going to help fund future events in the Julius Schwartz Lecture series. You can order your very own copy here for ONLY $19.99.
We are already making plans for the second lecture in the series to be held on May 22nd at 7pm in Kresge Auditorium. Tickets will go on sale early next year.
This year's speaker is another transmedia creator – J. Michael Straczynski. Straczynski is best known for his role as the creator of the cult science fiction serial Babylon 5 and its various spin-off films and series. Straczynski wrote 92 out of the 110 Babylon 5 episodes, notably including an unbroken 59-episode run through all of the third and fourth seasons, and all but one episode of the fifth season. His television writing career spans from work on He-Man, She-Ra, and Real Ghostbusters through to The New Twilight Zone and Murder She Wrote. He followed up Babylon 5 with anothe really solid science fiction series, Jerimiah. In more recent years, he's enjoyed success as a screenwriter, most recently writing the script for The Changling, Clint Eastwood's period drama, and as a comic book writer, who both works on established superhero franchises, such as Spider-Man, Supreme Powers, Fantastic Four, and Thor, and creates his own original series, such as Rising Stars, Midnight Nation, The Twelve, The Book of Lost Souls, and Dream Police. He was one of the first television producers to actively engage his fan community online and has consistently explored the interface between digital media and other storytelling platforms.
This January, CMS will be hosting a screening series some key episodes from his television work, intended to revive awareness of the extraordinary contributions Straczynski has made to the evolution of American television.
I thought I would share her a passage from my forward to Kurt Lancaster's 2001 book, Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performance in a Media Universe, which spells out some of the cultural and historical significance of Straczynski's series:
Midway through Babylon 5's first season, in an episode called "And the Sky Full of Stars," Security Chief Michael Garibaldi picks up a copy of the newspaper Universe Today and the camera quickly pans over the various headlines on the cover. Some of the headlines refer to narrative issues raised on previous episodes; others introduce issues and topics that will surface more directly in subsequent episodes. What initially might seem like a throwaway detail -- a character reading a newspaper -- becomes an important turning point when we return to it for a second viewing. Of course, these headlines are only fully decipherable if you freeze-frame the image for closer scrutiny, and their full importance was made clear only through the ongoing Net and Web discussions of the series.
For me, this moment is emblematic of why Babylon 5 was such a remarkable experiment in television storytelling. First, it reminds us of the elaborate narrative planning that went into the production of the series. J. Michael Straczynski understood television as a long-form storytelling medium, and he planned and developed the basic story arc for all five seasons before the first episode was produced. His careful calculations certainly left him room to respond to shifting conditions (ranging from the loss of cast members to the perpetual threat of premature cancellation) and offered space for one-shot episodes. Such long-range planning also enabled him to build into the series elaborate foreshadowing and references to its history episode by episode. Not many television producers could have built plot details for the second season into a mid-first season episode.
Second, this moment suggests the degree of self-consciousness about media that ran through Babylon 5. The series' characters inhabit a world profoundly shaped by the flow of news and information across various channels of communication. They read about events that affect them in the newspaper or watch them unfold on television. They give interviews to reporters, and we watch as what they say is distorted to serve various agendas. They grumble over attempts to merchandise their identities as part of the ongoing propaganda and public relations warfare that shapes the complex intergalactic politics at the center of the series.
Third, the fact that these details are burried within the text, waiting to be discovered by the tacticla use of the VCR as an analytic tool and the collaborative efforts of Net discussion lists, points to the awareness and exploitation of fan competencies that transformed Babylon 5 into one of the most significant cult television programs since Star Trek. Like Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry, Straczynski understood the fans to be central to the program's success from the outset. Straczynski saw his fans as a group of opinion leaders to be courted through prebroadcast publicity and convention appearances, as a group of niche marketers and activist whose support could keep the program on the air during the rough times, and as students in an ongoing classroom where he could share his views about the production process and the aesthetics of television storytelling. Straczynski's relationship with fans was rocky. He was worshiped for his extraordinary productivity and personal vision and feared for his slashing flames in response to some fan comments. He at once sought to facilitate fan discussion and regulate fan speculations to avoid potential intellectual property issues. Yet whatever that relationship with his audience became, Straczynski sought to use digital media to directly and personally engage them, not just occasionally, but week in and week out.
Straczynski sought to validate the new styles of reading and interpretation that have been facilitated by the shifting media environment. The introduction of the videotape recorder and the Internet has significantly altered the informational economy surrounding American television. It is significant that Stephen Bochco's Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) was the first major success story of the videotape era and that David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990-1991) was one fo the first new cult television series to develop an important Internet following. These series, with their ever-more-elaborate use of story arcs and program history, rewarded a viewer who carefully scrutinized the images using the freeze-frame function, who watched and rewatched the episodes on video tape, and who used the Internet as a vehicle for discussion with a larger interpretive community and the Web as a means of annotation. The succession of new media technologies since the late 1970s has encouraged the emergence of a culture based around the archiving, annotation, transformation and recirculation of media content.
Straczynski's genius was in recognizing the shape and potential of that new culture and in producing a science fiction series that rewarded these participatory impulses. He trusted his audience to ferret out information craftily hidden within the text, awaiting our discovery; he trusted the audience to make meaningful connections from episode to episode and season to season; he trusted the fans to be invested enough in the series to watch his ambitious story unfold and flexible enough in their understanding to cope with the complex shifts in character allignment. He made demands on the audience almost unprecedented in American television history, and for those of us who stuck with him over the five year run of the series, our patience and commitment were fully rewarded!
For these reasons, it is vitally important that media and cultural scholars look closely at Babylon 5, which seems, in retrospect, as rich an embodiment of what television storytelling can do in an age of media convergence as Star Trek represented the full potential of television storytelling in the network era. If you didn't watch Babylon 5, you missed something important."
You suggest some connections between the birth of Superman and the 1939 World's Fair with its theme, "A World of Tomorrow." Explain.
The New York World Fair of 1938-9 reflected a mindset of the times that saw utopia as becoming an achievable reality in the not too distant future. The birth of Superman was also very much a product of a culture that nurtured this mindset; Superman was a character from a science fiction reality, and the product of a technologically advanced society as represented in his home planet of Krypton. His arrival on Earth was very much presented as the arrival of a god-like being who offered humanity its own utopian potential. In the real-world context of the late 1930s, visionary futures were considered realizable as a result of advances in scientific knowledge, technological development, and urban planning. As early back as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, World Expositions and Fairs - especially in the U.S. - had explored the concern with creating idealized cities but it was the 1938-9 NY fair (and the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-1934 that preceded it) that took the first important steps in forging a relationship between science and society. But more significantly, these concerns were integrated with the visions and consumer pleasures that were offered by science fiction and entertainment. The futuristic, technologically reliant cities found typically in science fiction examples like the Buck Rogers comic strips, sf novels of Edward Bellamy and H.G.Wells, and sf magazines like Amazing Stories collided with science at the New York World Fair. In particular, living up to the Fair's motto "Designing the World of Tomorrow", the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes created his 'Futurama' exhibit - a City of the Future in 1960. Designed as a diorama, viewers sat high above this miniature city while a motorized belt moved them around the exhibit. Drawing heavily on the aesthetics of flight - both through the technological capabilities of aviation and the biological capacity of the Superman body - the omnipotent view point from above was further empowered by the sensation of flight. To cap it all off, on July 4, 1940 the fair hosted 'Superman Day' (with the actor Ray Middleton playing Superman) and a further association between Superman and the U.S. was sealed. Superman's first appearance was in Action Comics #1, in 1938, and his own series began in 1939, but 1939 also saw the publication of New York World's Fair Comics and the two issues that were released at the 1939-40 exposition featured both Superman and Batman visiting the New York Fair to solve crimes. The new figure of the superhero was clearly seen as playing an important role in envision a future, utopian America. In the 1980s, the All-Star Squadron comic book series would return to these origins by placing their superhero team in the 1940s with their headquarters based in the Trylon and Perisphere - the iconic buildings created for the fair.
To broaden outward, much of your work has centered around juxtapositions across media and across historical periods. For example, your book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, combines consideration of Baroque painting and architecture with discussions of contemporary amusement parks and special effects. What do you gain by bringing old and new together in this fashion?
What I enjoy about adopting this approach is exploring and unraveling the dynamic process that is history, and trying to understand the connections that exist across diverse media that may, on the surface, appear to be radically different to one another, but which on closer inspection share a great deal in terms of perceptual, cognitive and sensory responses they may want to extract from their audiences, despite the temporal and cultural gaps. One of the things I'm primarily interested in my research is the history and development of entertainment media. How have certain experiences remained the same, and how and why have they altered. In my (almost finished!!) book on theme parks for example, I look at the parallels that exist between the aristocratic villa gardens of C16th-C18th and theme parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios. In addition to the layouts and design of the park spaces (which have much in common with the plans for villa gardens), I love comparing the minutiae - all the smaller gadgets and media toys that make these places generate delight and pleasure.
Take the trick fountain, for example: in the gardens of Versailles, Louis XIVth and his followers were entertained by the sudden spurts of water that would spray them as they walked by a statue or seat that were rigged as trick fountains. The Alice in Wonderland labyrinth in Disneyland Paris and Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure have almost identical entertainment features that are similarly rigged to trigger gut, sensory reactions of laughter, surprise and joy from their recipients. I remember the fabulous little fountain in the Lost Continent section of the Islands of Adventure. The fountain didn't pretend to be anything other than a fountain, but this one seduces you into its world by acknowledging your presence and by clearly being able to see your actions; just when you feel comfortable with it and engage it in conversation, a spurt of water erupts from one or two of the many barely visible holes that are on its surface and sprays you in the face or body. Hysterical! Crowds of people stand around waiting to see the next victim become part of this slapstick routine. What does this tell us? Well, humans are still entertained by similar toys but with one dramatic difference. The space that's home to this fountain no longer belongs to royalty and to a select few who wield power over the masses. This is now a space that entertains the masses. But are the masses the new royalty, or is this now the role performed by the multinational corporations? Lots of questions that need untangling but which are not necessarily easy to find answers to; I think there's more to be gained from opening up and presenting more questions that complicate these relationships between the past and the present, than providing black and white answers that simplistically draw conclusions (e.g. 'the new royalty are they corporations who are the new oppressors of the people' - it would be easy to conclude this, but I think it would offer a myopic understanding of the complex relationships and conclusions that can be extracted via, in this case, a comparison of trick fountains and their function in entertainment spaces past and present).
A new research project I've just started also adopts a media historical approach. I'm looking at emerging examples of artificially sentient beings, in particular, robots like QRIO, Asimo and Zeno and artificial intelligence programs used in computer games and film effects - in other words, examples from within an entertainment context. But I'm also researching their historical precedents, the intention being to place current robot and AI technologies within the context of the diverse media, trans-temporal and cross-cultural history that they belong; it's through such an approach that a deeper awareness of the historical and cultural implications of humanity's continued fascination with artificial life will emerge. The automaton, for example, is a mechanical predecessor of the robot and harks back to medieval times but reached its peak in popularity in the C18th and C19th in Europe and Japan. While the automaton was reliant on clockwork mechanics and lacked any form of sentience, it shared something crucial with the contemporary examples: a product of technological and scientific invention was presented as entertainment. Like Sony's QRIO, entertainment was the vehicle that delivered the automaton's performance as technological display of the possibilities of new science and technology. To date, no study has asked why? Why entertainment? I guess, I want to ask 'why'?
You have written extensively through the years about the amusement park and location-based entertainment more generally, a topic which has received only limited scholarly attention given its cultural and economic importance. What do you think the study of amusement parks contributes to our understanding of media convergence?
The amusement park and, especially the theme park, is the example of media convergence par excellence. In some respects, it serves a similar role to the earlier World Expositions and Fairs. It's in the theme parks that the latest in entertainment technology is trialed and first exposed to the public. The most cutting edge examples of film technology, for example, has first been experienced in the theme park - the Omnimax experience offered by the Back to the Future ride in the 1980s, or the 3D Imax extravaganzas of the Terminator 3D and Spiderman rides at Universal studios more recently. But these weren't only film experiences. The theme park, and its ride technologies, bargain on engaging the audience on intense and immediate multiple sensory levels and the way this is most effectively achieved is through media convergence. Let's take the Spiderman ride: it's a truly multimedia experience that immerses the participant in cartoons on television, sculptured and architectural environments that reproduce the spaces of the Daily Bugle and New York, filmed environments in 3D on IMAX screens, and amusement park roller coaster technology that flies us seamlessly through all these different media. Add to this the fact that Spiderman originated in comics, then became a series of animated cartoons and tv shows as well as a series of highly successful blockbuster films and a phenomenal theme park attraction and you have the ultimate in media convergence. The thing with the theme parks, though, is that the convergence is more literal and in your face.
You are just about to start an extensive project focused on the impact of new media on collector culture. Can you give us a preview of some of the key themes you plan to explore there? How might comics collecting fit within the book's core arguments?
Yes, I'm co-writing a book with Jim Collins from the University of Notre Dame, which is tentatively (and possibly permanently) titled Curatorial Culture. What we're interested in is the radical transformations that have occurred in collecting culture in light of the central role that entertainment media conglomerates and digital technologies are playing in global culture. New delivery systems are redefining what going to a movie or watching TV means at the beginning of the C21st, just as they have also transformed the "display" of images at art museums throughout the world, and the accessibility and portability of digital information has given rise to a curatorial culture in which seemingly anyone can assemble their own music, film, television and art libraries. I know someone (who shall remain nameless) who owns every Superman comic book ever published - and it's stored on his/her hard drive. I mean, that's phenomenal! Do you know how much physical space you'd need to house (let alone actually find copies of) every Superman comic every written? Our book asks how the omnipresence of the personalized digital archive has altered our understanding of what acquiring culture means, whether it be in the form of an iPod playlist, a media home library, or a public art museum.
We're looking at the relationship between private and public archives as a shifting continuum that depends increasingly on the convergence of media space and museum space, and we're investigating this continuum by concentrating on five distinct sites of convergence-personal media technology, the private home, the public art museum, the retail store, and the urban landscape. So in addition to looking at ipod culture and p2p downloading and collecting, we're also interested in the fluid exchange between high culture and pop culture aesthetics - what Jim calls High Pop. Retail centers like those owned by Nike, Apple, Sony and Prada hire 'star' architects like Koolhaas, Hadid, and Gehry who have designed destination museum sites to design their retail spaces as unique consumer experiences, while also displaying their consumer products as if they're original artworks on display in a gallery. Or, to give you a couple of examples from the city of Las Vegas.... The new CityCenter residential-retail-entertainment complex being built on the Strip (and owned by MGM Mirage) will include a $40 million public Fine Art program that will distribute contemporary masterpieces throughout CityCenter's public spaces - the gaming areas, hotel and residential towers, and the retail and entertainment districts will now all serve the role of public gallery. Las Vegas represents--in intensified form--the ways in which our urban environments and leisure experiences are transforming into a collecting and display culture that has collapsed traditional boundaries that demarcated spaces of art display and those of consumerism and mass pleasures. In very real ways, the city of Las Vegas does precisely this: it visualizes global, conglomerate culture at its most intense point and, in the process, transforms itself into a living museum. In the Bellagio Casino Hotel, for example, traditionally cultural opposites collide: a visitor can tempt fate by feeding slot machines, and then walk out of the gambling hall and into the Bellagio Fine Art Gallery that's situated down the corridor to view the works of Picasso, Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh (who were on display when I visited). Even more bizarrely, in the Bellagio's Picasso restaurant it's possible to taste and smell the delights conjured by the "legendary" Spanish chef Julian Serrano, while being surrounded by the paintings and drawings of that other legendary Spaniard, which decorate the walls of the restaurant. Picasso's name now serves a dual function: Picasso the artist who created masterpiece artworks, and Picasso the restaurant that now promises to feed its customers with masterpiece food creations. What Vegas is lacking is a Superheroes casino and entertainment complex. When that happens, I'll be packing my bags and moving to the city of lights.
Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins.
The use of Second Life as a platform for consumer advertising and corporate promotion has generated a great deal of buzz in recent years. Now that the dust has started to settle, what do you see as the strengths and limitations of virtual worlds as a platform for brand messages?
The answer depends on the virtual world. But, since you mention Second Life, we'll focus on that. Second Life is, as innumerable news stories have pointed out, simply not a good place for traditional advertising. The world is too large and too sparsely populated for billboards, in general. And unmanned virtual exhibits and structures, no matter how glorious, are simply not interesting to most consumers who visit Second Life to experience the thrill of creating and the joy of interacting with others. Why would anyone choose to walk through an uninhabited virtual
hotel when they can visit remarkably creative and/or otherworldly territories, populated and/or created by individuals like themselves? Why walk past a virtual billboard when you can teleport anywhere in an instant? Low-cost, targeted advertising campaigns that are designed toengage consumers on a personal level, and enlist them as brand agents, are far more effective.
All that said, the virtual hotel news article we referenced previously contains a hint as to the real potential of Second Life for businesses: not advertising, but harnessing user creativity to generate useful business innovations. Several large corporations have started working with the users of Second Life to model new products and test new services. Philips, for example, has been working with users to design new appliances in Second Life. Pontiac gave out virtual versions of its cars and encouraged Second Life users to hack and modify them.
At the end of the day, Second Life is a world created by its users for its users. There's something poetic -- not to mention very sensible -- about enabling those users to create and modify virtual goods that could someday be sold in the real world for millions, if not billions of dollars.
As you note, there is now a rush towards corporate sponsorship of Alternate Reality Games. What factors should a company consider before entering this space?
To date, most ARGs have required a significant financial commitment and tremendous effort to successfully execute, so businesses that are interested in creating an ARG should be sure to work with an expert in the field. That said, an ARG can prove an effective marketing tool, as demonstrated by Audi's Art of the Heist. Visitors who were attracted to audiusa.com by online advertisements promoting Art of the Heist devoted 34% of their page views to "buying indicator" pages - i.e. car configurator, dealer locator, payment, estimator, and request a quote -- which represented a 79% increase in qualification over previous launch efforts. And Art of the Heist resulted in over 45 million PR impressions for Audi, while generating over 10,000 unique leads for Audi dealerships.
Jordan Weisman, one of the inventors of the form, shared with us his well-informed views on the commitment necessary to pull off an ARG marketing project. In his words: "There's a misconception that this form of marketing entertainment has to be cheaper. Well, it's not cheaper. A heck of a lot more effort goes into an ARG than a 30-second TV spot. You have to create a lot more content, and there's a much larger editorial process involved. But the benefits, as opposed to the 30-second spot, are the level of immersion you create, and the level of affection that a person has for the brand and the experience, not to mention the community that grows around the brand and the experience. Those things provide real lasting benefit to brands. And one of the great things about an ARG is that, unlike with a TV spot, you know how engaged people are. You know how many people visited your websites, you know how many people are participating on the message boards - you can quantify things."
All that said, ARGs are poised to become much more than just marketing tools. In Changing the Game, we discuss how ARGs can be used for training purposes, and even for harnessing collective innovation. At this point, there are some
exciting experiments in these areas that are worth examining, but more work is
needed to develop ARGs to their full potential.
Corporate training games have been a huge growth area, even as other kinds of serious games have struggled to get traction. What should the developers of educational games learn from the space of corporate training and conversely, what do educational game designers get right that should be considered more closely in corporate training games?
Educational game designers seem to think more about engagement and the role of fun in games than most corporate trainers. By focusing on how to reach kids, educational game designers seem to become more aware of the "holy grail" of training -- education so entertaining that it proves self-motivating. Ironically, this is also the greatest weakness of many educational game designers. In an attempt to make learning as much like a game as possible, they end up creating the proverbial "chocolate-covered broccoli" -- shoehorning educational content into traditional games. The result is neither fun nor particularly educational.
The corporate training market has typically proven less concerned about stereotypical "fun," and instead has invested more in simulations in which learning happens naturally. Simulations like Virtual Leader, the leadership training simulator, end up being fun because the player gets to experiment with the role of leadership. Similarly, the Beer Game (a system dynamics simulation) is engaging because it is played as part of a team, in a competitive environment. Both Virtual Leader and the Beer Game teach valuable lessons in interesting ways because they allow exploration and experimentation, and encourage team interaction -- not because they ape traditional video games. Educators should think more about how to encourage interesting exploration and interaction, rather than combining time tables with first person shooters, or hiding multiple choice examinations beneath the thin veneer of a "trivia game."
Some of the most interesting sections of the book deal with the use of games as a means of collecting user innovation and tapping collective intelligence. To what degree is this section speculative? What work is already being done in this space?
We wouldn't call it speculative, but we would say that this is the very cutting edge of the serious games movement. While there are only a few examples to speak of, they have proven very successful. In particular, Luis von Ahn's work on "games with a purpose" has been published in a number of important journals, and von Ahn won a MacArthur Genius Grant for his work. One game of his, the ESP Game, encourages players to voluntarily identify random images on the Web in a way that computers simply aren't capable of doing on their own. Many people play the ESP Game for over 20 hours a week, and over 20 million image labels have been harvested in just a few years; the equivalent of several million dollars of free labor. Professor von Ahn estimates that just 5,000 people playing The ESP Game for a month - a tiny number, compared to the active populations of many gaming websites - could label every image on the Web.
Other efforts include Fold.it, a game designed to help its creators identify the optimal shape of proteins. Fold.it players are already proving to be of great help, and interestingly, many of the top players are not biologists, or even people with a strong academic background in biology.
You may also have heard about the X2 Project (which has evolved into Superstruct, the forecasting game.) Efforts like these show how ripe this area is for future work!
DAVID EDERY is the Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and a research affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a regular speaker at game industry events such as GDC, has published numerous articles on the topic of game development and the business of games, and maintains a personal blog called Game Tycoon.
ETHAN MOLLICK studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also conducting a large research project on the game industry. He has consulted to companies ranging from General Mills to Eli Lilly on issues related to innovation and strategy, and has worked extensively on using games for teaching and training, including on the DARWARS project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
