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Spreadable Media April Round-Up
- VICE documentary Lil Bub & Friendz recently won Best Feature Film (online) at the Tribeca Film Festival. The documentary features co-author Sam Ford, commenting on the popularity of cats online. See mentions of Sam’s role in the film at Indiewire and WSJ Speakeasy.
- Co-author Henry Jenkins recently spoke with screenwriter, songwriter, and media thinker Terrence McNally on KPFK/WBAI’s Free Forum.
- In his post a few weeks ago about co-author Sam Ford’s appearance on Marketing Profs’ Marketing Smarts podcast, Matthew Grant, the program’s host, asks, “Should Business Books Make You Think?” Grant distinguishes categories of business books: “how to,” “how to better do things,” and “reconceptualization,” for instance. But Spreadable Media is the type of business book that “makes you think.” Writes Grant, “Rather then tell you to do something, the book invites you to question what you are doing and, as a result of that questioning, consider what you might do instead. In other words, it doesn’t tell you to do, it asks you to think.”
- Henry was also recently a guest on J.C. Hutchins’ Storyforward podcast, talking about, among other subjects, Spreadable Media.
- Marta Boni provides a thorough review of Spreadable Media in French at Culture Visuelle.
- Rachel Hoover writes, in a review of Spreadable Media for Library Journal, that the book is “a timely and accurate account of the current state of media in our networked culture.”
- Co-authors Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford were recently guests on Lisa Loving’s Wednesday Talk Radio at KBOO in Portland, Oregon, to talk about various implications of Spreadable Media for community activism and citizens in general.
- Henry also recently published a piece at Transmedia Coalition, entitled “Six Reasons Why Transmedia Producers Should Read Spreadable Media.
- Sheron Neves recommends the book to Portuguese-language readers, at Meditations in an Emergency. The press is hard at work on a translated version!
- Ethnography Matters connected Spreadable Media with An Xiao Mina’s presentation at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium about what Ugandans choose to pass along via online communication.
- Brian Lemond of Brooklyn United listed the Spreadable Media session at this year’s South by Southwest as one of the top five SXSW highlights. Elsewhere, Jon Woods at GroundFloorMedia also lists the authors’ SXSW session as a conference highlight, in response to a recent Fast Company piece from co-author Sam Ford.
- Among the top recommendations from this year’s South by Southwest conference from the American Library Association’s dh+lib blog was Spreadable Media co-authors Henry Jenkins’ and Sam Ford’s Ideadrop House session for librarians.
- Also, librarian Marc Compton wrapped up his series analyzing the implications of Spreadable Media for librarians at the end of March. See Part 6 and Part 7.
- Gardner Campbell writes in a recent EDUCAUSE interview about the implications of “bring your own device” trends in higher education on the concept of “spreadable learning,” evoking Spreadable Media.
- Spreadable Media has also been the subject of some discussions about the ebook market. NYU Press’ business manager, Tom Helleberg, joins Len Edgerly at The Kindle Chronicles, and the conversation turns both to concepts from Spreadable Media, as well as the press’ approach to the actual book itself. Also, a German podcast discusses the pricing of ebooks in the U.S. versus Germany, using Spreadable Media as an example.
- Greg Greenberger at BoomGen Studios calls Spreadable Media “a fascinating exploration of how media today is becoming a two-way street.”
- Melanie Peck at The Viral Ad Network calls Spreadable Media “a little gem…about the nature of audience engagement.”
- At Western Kentucky University, co-author Sam Ford’s undergraduate class has been blogging about issues related to the book throughout the semester. Also, Ford gave a talk at WKU a few weeks back about the book, as part of the Thoughts on Pop series hosted by WKU’s Popular Culture Studies program.
- Rodrigo Castaqeda and M. Pierre Berger have posted their reviews of Spreadable Media on Amazon.
- See other reactions to/mentions of Spreadable Media across the blogosphere at the MIT Center for Civic Media, the USC Rossier School of Education, USC #FRICTION, SteamFeed, Tapioca.tv, Televisual, Red Gypsy, Lutheran Confessions, Communication for Effectiveness in Spanish, the “A Southern Heart” blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4), Hannah Wilson’s The New Me(dia) and Samantha Weisman’s A New Perspective on New Media at Cornell University, Nathan Schulman at Reinhardt University, The Digital Oyster, Cultural Curios, Mediální proroci in Czech, Changing the World One Blog at a Time, Entertainment Media, and Sarah’s Thoughts (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). Also, see this response to Whitney Phillips’ essay for Spreadable Media and this response to William Uricchio’s essay for the project.