Despite changes in communication and culture, stickiness still matters. Returning to Gladwell’s use of the term, stickiness acts as a measure of how interested an audience member is in a media text. Any creator—whether media company, fan, academic, or activist—produces material in the hope of attracting audience interest. (Perhaps peanut butter isn’t such a bad way to represent spreadable media after all: content remains sticky even as it is spread.)
What Susan Boyle Can Teach about Spreadability
What happens when many people make active decisions to put content in motion by passing along an image, song, or video clip to friends and family members or to larger social networks? As this question suggests, much of what is being exchanged at the current moment is entertainment, as fan communities have been among the first to embrace the practices of spreadability. These fan activities will thus be a recurring topic throughout this book. Yet what we say about the spread of entertainment content also increasingly applies to news, branding and advertising, political messages, religious messages, and a range of other materials, and we will draw on a variety of these examples to provide a multidimensional picture of the current media environment.
To start, let’s contrast a U.S. “broadcast” phenomenon with a widespread entertainment clip. The finale of the 2009 season of American Idol drew 32 million viewers in the U.S., making it one of the year’s most viewed two-hour blocks on broadcast television. In comparison, a video of Scottish woman Susan Boyle auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent was viewed more than 77 million times on YouTube. This latter figure reflects only the viewership of the original upload; YouTube is a space where success often encourages duplication. A cursory survey showed more than 75 different copies of Boyle’s audition performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” available on the site when we conducted our research, with versions uploaded from users in Brazil, Japan, the Netherlands, the U.S., and various parts of the U.K. We found edited copies, high-definition copies, and copies with closed captioning and subtitles in various languages. Many of these versions have themselves been viewed millions of times. Even this scan of the Boyle phenomenon considers YouTube alone, ignoring other large online video-sharing platforms such as Chinese site Tudou (where a quick glance showed at least 43 copies of the original performance) or Dailymotion (where there were 20 easily found copies of her first audition video).
Since any of these videos can be watched more than once by the same person, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reduce these views to a raw “eyeball” count equivalent to television ratings. No matter how you look at it, however, the viewership of the widely spread Susan Boyle clip dwarfs that of the highest-rated show on U.S. broadcast television. The Boyle video was broadcast content made popular through grassroots circulation.
The Susan Boyle audition was the result of mainstream commercial media production, to be sure. The original video was professionally produced and edited to maximize its emotional impact. One segment introduced a character and set up ridiculing expectations, while the next swept the rug out from under those expectations with a spectacular performance of a popular West End song, followed by the emotional responses of the overwhelmed judges and audience. Audience enjoyment of the event was shaped by people’s general familiarity with the genre conventions of reality television and/or by particular perception of and investment in Simon Cowell’s tough judge character, whose schoolboy grin at the segment’s end represents the ultimate payoff for her spectacular performance. And, once the video had been widely spread, the visibility of Boyle was amplified through mainstream media coverage; she was, for instance, interviewed on Good Morning America and spoofed on the Tonight Show.
Nevertheless, Boyle’s international success was not driven by broadcast distribution. Fans found Susan Boyle before media outlets did. The most popular Susan Boyle YouTube video reached 2.5 million views in the first 72 hours and drew 103 million views on 20 different websites within the first nine days of its release. Meanwhile, Boyle’s Wikipedia page attracted nearly half a million views within a week of its creation.1
While the performance was part of a mainstream television program in the U.K, it was not commercially available at all to viewers in the U.S. and many other countries. Instead, the video was circulated and discussed through a variety of networks online. Her entry into the U.S. market and her spread around the Internet was shaped by the conscious decisions of millions of everyday people functioning as grassroots intermediaries, each choosing to pass her video along to friends, family members, colleagues, and fellow fans. The Susan Boyle phenomenon would not have played out in the same way if not for the relationships and communities facilitated by social network sites, media sharing tools, and microblogging platforms.
Part of what allowed the Susan Boyle video to travel as far and as fast as it did was the fact it could travel so far so fast. People had the right tools and knew what to do with them. Sites such as YouTube make it simple to embed material on blogs or share it through social network sites. Services such as bitly allow people to share links quickly and efficiently. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook facilitate instantaneous sharing to one’s social connections. All of these technical innovations made it that much easier for the Susan Boyle video to spread.
However, the mere existence of individual technologies to facilitate the sharing of the clip does little to explain how the Susan Boyle performance was spread. We must consider the integrated system of participatory channels and practices at work that support an environment where content could be circulated so widely. For instance, uses of particular services should not be viewed in isolation but rather in connection, as people embrace a range of technologies based on if and when a particular platform best supports the cultural practices in which they want to engage.
But, more fundamentally, we have to understand the cultural practices that have both fueled the rise of these sharing technologies and evolved as people discover how these platforms might be used. For instance, the Susan Boyle video was widely shared because the participating public is more collectively and individually literate about social networking online; because people are more frequently and more broadly in contact with their networks of friends, family, and acquaintances; and because people increasingly interact through sharing meaningful bits of media content.
Taken together, this set of social and cultural practices, and the related technological innovations which grew up around them, constitute what we call a “networked culture.” These cultural practices were certainly not created by new technologies. We’ve long known that news stories generate conversations; many of us have a cousin or grandmother who (still!) clips newspaper articles to put on the refrigerator, in an album, or in the mail to us. Social historian Ellen Gruber Garvey (2013), for example, has offered a glimpse into how circulation and value were connected in the scrapbook culture of nineteenth-century U.S. readers. Their primary activity was sifting through newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, gathering material to archive. In an era when news publications themselves actively engaged in “recirculation”—local papers reprinted stories originally published elsewhere if they seemed of interest to local readers—scrapbook collectors stored the most appealing of these ephemeral accounts for future generations. In turn, newspapers sometimes capitalized on this early form of “user-generated content,” publishing retrospectives featuring reader-curated material. These archival practices accelerated with the twentieth-century rise of photocopiers, which facilitated easier reproduction and sharing of found material.
However, what happened in a predigital world now occurs with exponentially greater speed and scope, thanks to