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Thinking Further about Spreadability
Several great pieces have been published which draws on Spreadable Media in some way in looking further at how stories spread in a digital age:
- The January 2014 International Journal of Cultural Studies piece “Constructing a Digital Storycircle: Digital Infrastructure and Mutual Recognition,” authored by Nick Couldry, Richard MacDonald, Hilde Stephansen, Wilma Clark, Luke Dickens, and Aristea Fotopoulou, examines the community setting in which stories are shared online. In their analysis, the authors draw on Spreadable Media’s “reflections on the limits of participatory culture around commercial media” and questions about the potential dangers posed to political institutions by spreadability but primarily focus on “the positive possibilities” for narrative exchange in an online setting.
- John Hartley includes Spreadable Media among his references for his 2013 piece in Journal of Cultural Science, entitled “A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Stories?” In the piece, Hartley examines the “scaling up” from self-expression to self-marketing/representation and how storytelling connects with “the evolution of the polity.” Ultimately, via a case study of connections between Australia and Turkey, Hartley argues that there needs to be “new guides to storytelling action, not the old (Trojan) warhorses of mainstream media.”
- In their introduction to the 2014 inaugural issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia, entitled “Revisiting the Emancipatory Potential of Digital Media in Asia,” Leiden University’s Florian Schneider and Chris Goto-Jonesdraw on Spreadable Media in talking about co-author Henry Jenkins’ contention that “social sharing and the ‘remixing’ of culture allows users to develop a sense of self-worth and of community.”
- Pip Shea’s 2013 Journal of Cultural Science piece, entitled “Co-Creating Knowledge Online: Approaches for Community Artists,” focuses on the concepts of co-creation and participatory culture in the community arts field, and particularly looking at “the making of new knowledge.” The piece evokes Spreadable Media in referring to a booklet Shea made and focuses the analysis around, entitled Co-creating Knowledge Online, which was made available for free online distribution.
- University of Southern California’s Kathi Inman Berens (now researching as part of the Digital Culture Research Group at Norway’s University of Bergen) is currently doing work on “OccupyMLA,” a “hoax” that took place at the Modern Language Association’s 2013 conference. Her work includes using concepts from Spreadable Media to examine the wide circulation of the project beyond its original context and beyond the creators’ own distribution. More on her work from her proposal for a 2015 session at the MLA’s national conference, as part of a larger panel on “Authenticity in Distributed Networks.”
- In his 2013 University of Texas-Austin Master’s thesis, entitled “Characteristics of Content and Social Spread Strategy on the Indiegogo Crowdfunding Platform,” Joseph S. Stern references Spreadable Media’s consideration of how people appraise media content.
- In his 2012 political science thesis for the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali “Guido Carli” (LUISS University of Rome), entitled “Influenza, Reputazione e Visibilità su Twitter. Un’analisi Semiotica.” Gian Mario Bachetti draws on Spreadable Media’s reference to a networked culture where people maintain much more frequent connections with a wider range of their network via online communication tools in his semiotic study of the activity of “influencers” on Twitter.
- Recent George Washington University School of Business grad Alex Smolen looks at the cultural drivers behind various highly spread online videos, drawing on Spreadable Media and other media studies/journalism texts at her blog, The Mind of Alex Smolen.