Spreadable Media is now literally and figuratively in your hands. Make of it what you will. Read it; debate it; critique it; trash it. Above all, expand the conversation we are starting here. Spread the word to others who you think may be interested. Transform these ideas through your conversations. Build on the arguments that resonate with you. Speak out against those that don’t. That’s how spreadable media works.
INTRODUCTION:
WHY MEDIA SPREADS
This book is about the multiple ways that content circulates today, from top down to bottom up, from grassroots to commercial. As we explore circulation, we see the way value and meaning are created in the multiple economies that constitute the emerging media landscape. Our message is simple and direct: if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
We don’t mean the kinds of circulation that have historically concerned publishers—that is, how many readers pick up this morning’s edition of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Any publication can cite its “circulation,” especially since the rates paid for advertising are calculated based on those numbers. Like the “impressions” that online publishers tout, such circulation is concerned with making audience members into receptacles for mass-produced and mass-distributed content: as eyeballs in front of a screen (in television terms), butts in seats (in film or sports terms), or whatever other body parts media companies and brands hope to grab next. But those definitions of “circulation” are really talking about distribution, where the movement of media content is largely—or totally—controlled by the commercial interests producing and selling it. These logics of distribution best apply in a broadcast media world, where a small number of producers—Random House or CBS or Warner Brothers—create discrete and finished products for mass audiences.
Instead, Spreadable Media examines an emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways. The decisions that each of us makes about whether to pass along media texts—about whether to tweet the latest gaffe from a presidential candidate, forward a Nieman Marcus cookie recipe email, or share video of a shoplifting seagull—are reshaping the media landscape itself.
This shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture, one which sees the public not as simply consumers of preconstructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined. And they are doing so not as isolated individuals but within larger communities and networks, which allow them to spread content well beyond their immediate geographic proximity. Henry Jenkins (1992) coined the term “participatory culture” to describe the cultural production and social interactions of fan communities, initially seeking a way to differentiate the activities of fans from other forms of spectatorship. As the concept has evolved, it now refers to a range of different groups deploying media production and distribution to serve their collective interests, as various scholars have linked considerations of fandom into a broader discourse about participation in and through media. Previous work on participatory culture stressed acts of reception and production by media audiences; this book extends that logic to consider the roles that networked communities play in shaping how media circulates. Audiences are making their presence felt by actively shaping media flows, and producers, brand managers, customer service professionals, and corporate communicators are waking up to the commercial need to actively listen and respond to them.
While many content creators are struggling with the growing prominence of such grassroots audience practices, an array of online communication tools have arisen to facilitate informal and instantaneous sharing. These platforms offer new capacities for people to pass along media artifacts—and, in the process, to seek models to generate revenue through the activities of their users. However, while new tools have proliferated the means by which people can circulate material, word-of-mouth recommendations and the sharing of media content are impulses that have long driven how people interact with each other. Perhaps nothing is more human than sharing stories, whether by fire or by “cloud” (so to speak). We must all be careful not to suppose that a more participatory means of circulation can be explained solely (or even primarily) by this rise of technological infrastructure, even as these new technologies play a key role in enabling the shifts this book describes.
Spreadable Media focuses on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms, logics that explain why sharing has become such common practice, not just how. Our approach doesn’t presume that new platforms liberate people from old constraints but rather suggests that the affordances of digital media provide a catalyst for reconceptualizing other aspects of culture, requiring the rethinking of social relations, the reimagining of cultural and political participation, the revision of economic expectations, and the reconfiguration of legal structures.
Throughout this book, we use terms such as “spread,” “spreadable,” or “spreadability” to describe these increasingly pervasive forms of media circulation. “Spreadability” refers to the potential—both technical and cultural—for audiences to share content for their own purposes, sometimes with the permission of rights holders, sometimes against their wishes. As we have been working on this book, some critics have challenged the term “spreadable,” suggesting it sounds more appropriate for describing cream cheese or peanut butter. (The term originated in relation to “stickiness,” as we will soon explain.) However, think of “spreadability” as a placeholder, perhaps like a stub in Wikipedia; it is something we can shape a conversation around. Our goal is not to create a new buzzword. Instead, we want to challenge readers to think through the metaphors we all use when talking about how content moves across the cultural landscape—to resist terminology that might distort how we understand these trends and to continue seeking terms that more accurately describe the complexity of how we all engage with media texts.
Our focus on terminology is more than mere semantics. We believe that language matters deeply and that the metaphors we all use to describe the patterns we see shape how we understand our world. We become blind to some phenomena and biased toward others. By discussing “spreadable media,” we aim to facilitate a more nuanced account of how and why things spread and to encourage our readers to adopt and help build a more holistic and sustainable model for understanding how digital culture operates.
Sticky Content, Spreadable Practices
“Spreadability” refers to the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community’s motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes.
Our use of “spreadability” is perhaps most effective as a corrective to the ways in which the concept of “stickiness” has developed over time to measure success in online commerce. A term that emerged through marketing discourse and which was popularized by its use in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (2000) and elsewhere, “stickiness” broadly refers to the need to create content that attracts audience attention and engagement. Gladwell proposes, “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it” (2000, 132). Gladwell uses “stickiness” to describe the aspects of media texts which engender deep audience engagement and might motivate them to share what they learned with others. In short, to Gladwell, sticky content is material that people want to spread.
As online business models have