In this Book. Additional Information. Spreadable Media maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content. It delineates the elements that make content more spreadable and highlights emerging media business models built for a world of participatory circulation. They highlight the vexing questions content creators must tackle and the responsibilities we all face as citizens in a world where many of us regularly circulate media content.
Written for any and all of us who actively create and share media content, Spreadable Media provides a clear understanding of how people are spreading ideas and the implications these activities have for business, politics, and everyday life.
Table of Contents. Cover pp. Contents pp. Acknowledgments pp. How to Read This Book pp. Introduction: Why Media Spreads pp.
The book is like a treasure chest full of ideas for scholars, practitioners, and university teachers. Although neither a textbook nor an academic dissertation, it provides an insightful foundation for discussions.
In terms of ideology, the authors place themselves firmly within a social responsible media theoretical framework. Some of the concluding remarks are reminiscent of the report from the Commission on Freedom of the Press: A Free and Responsible Press. For example, Jenkins et al. The authors add that both companies and governments should expect increased pressure to be more transparent and that all citizens must make responsible decisions when sharing material.
In other words, they ask for media to be free and for creators at all levels to be responsible to the rest of society when they exercise their freedom. It is, they argue, in the interest of creators to allow such free sharing — even though it breaks their copyrights - because their media products can only resonate as long as they are shared.
Like A Free and Responsible Press, Spreadable Media is written by academics but based on testimony from practitioners. Many of the core arguments were developed through years of dialogue between three groups: 1 faculty members at the MIT Program in Com- parative Media Studies, 2 leading media corporations, and 3 content creators.
The proj- ect, furthermore, was funded by the corporations p. The authors encourage further dialogue with the industry: While great value comes from media studies academics acting as outside cultural critics of industry power and policy, this mode of discourse has historically made engagements between cultural and media studies and the creative industry contentious.
Instead, our intervention takes the form of fostering dialogue between industry and academia p. Media companies and their active audiences often have different sets of norms and values. As a theoretical foundation for this analysis, the authors use historian E.
Companies are warned that it may backfire if they try to profit from the gifts they receive freely, such as likes and dislikes on webpages; product reviews; and the demographic data, pictures, and other types of infor- mation that users share. According to the norms for gift giving, people expect something in exchange for the content that they share, such as interest, comments, or information.
However, some companies treat the data as commodities that can be bought and sold in the market, and this creates conflict. Jenkins et al.
The authors compare commercial use of free labor to misuse of community assistance, and they call on companies to make sure that audiences get something valuable in return for their gifts of free labor. Accordingly, spreadable content should be open, with loose ends and gaps that make it possible for an active audience to interpret it in the light of their own experiences. For the same reason, journalistic news writing and scien- tific papers are seldom considered spreadable.
Anyone who regu- larly browses the social media will be familiar with the availability of this type of content and knows how often it is liked and shared, typically with some personal comments from friends. The downside to this is that the often-lengthy case descriptions can be a bit tedious to read for an impatient scholar seek- ing theoretical implications. Many metaphors are used in connection with the distribution of content on web 2.
The Canadian author Cory Doctorow compares the process of sharing to a dandelion spreading its seeds with- out knowing where the process will end. Spreadable Media has adopted this dandelion metaphor for the book cover pp. The choice over how we deal with intellectual property is ultimately cultural, political, and economic — not biologically hardwired p.
The book demonstrates the valuable insight that can be gained when professionals and academics co-create.
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