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Applying Spreadable Media to New Realms
Since Spreadable Media was released, we’ve been intrigued to see scholars, practitioners, and thinkers apply concepts from the books to fields we wouldn’t have expected. Below, see how the book has recently been used as a resource in studies of religion, mathematics, museums, photography, sound, architecture, performance art, psychology, sociology, and communication platforms that uniquely meet the needs of seniors:
- In their 2014 piece for Argumentation, entitled “What’s So Funny about Arguing with God? A Case for Playful Argumentation from Jewish Literature,” Don Waisanen, Hershey H. Friedman, and Linda Weiser Friedman reference Spreadable Media to establish how humor about God is highly spread through the contemporary environment for producing and circulating content.
- In their 2014 Perspectives on Psychological Science piece, “Missed Programs (You Can’t TiVo This One: Why Psychologists Should Study Media,” authors Bradley M. Okdie, David R. Ewoldsen, Nicole L. Muscanell, Rosanna E. Guadagno, Cassie A. Eno, John A. Velez, Robert A. Dunn, Jamie O’Mally, and Lauren Reichart Smith draw on Spreadable Media to argue that the more active roles audiences play in producing/circulating media texts further proves the need for their field to pay greater attention to contributing to media psychology.
- In her 2013 piece for Scientific Studies and Research. Series Mathematics and Informatics, entitled “Measures for Uncertain Data. Case Study on Data Extracted from Mass Media,” University of Bacău Mathematics, Informatics and Education Sciences Professor Elena Nechita examines two key measures of uncertainty when applied to a data set from mass media. Nechita references Spreadable Media as a supporting text when talking about the prominence and increased access to media texts in a digital age, as well as an increased ability for interactivity between producer and audience enabled by new technologies/platforms.
- Johan Oomen and Maarten Brinkerink from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Thijs van Exel from Kennisland included Spreadable Media among their cited works for their “Sound of the Netherlands: Crowdsourcing the Dutch Soundscape” presentation at the “Museums and the Web 2013″ conference in April 2013 in Portland, Ore.
- In her presentation at Helsinki Photomedia 2014: Photographic Powers, which took place at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, on March 26-28, 2014, Dr. Bojana Romic, a researcher at Roskilde University’s Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies and professor at Malmö University’s Communication for Development Department in Denmark, presented “Cloned Images and the Optical Unconscious,” which proposes a definition of broadening the concept of “optical unconscious” as defined by Walter Benjamin and Rosalink Krauss to include phenomena of image cloning explored by W.J.T. Mitchell and spreadability as defined by Spreadable Media.
- In his 2014 University of Texas-Austin doctoral dissertation, entitled Televising Architecture: Media, Public Engagement, and Design in America, Samuel Tommy Dodd evokes Spreadable Media and its description of today’s media environment in exploring how definitions of architecture must change “as our understanding of new media and participatory culture change within the digital culture of the twenty-first century.”
- In her Master’s thesis work at The University of Akron on “New Media Technology Strategies in the Performing Arts: A Case Study on GroundWorks DanceTheater’s New Media Project,” Takisha Williamson draws on Spreadable Media to underscore how audiences are reshaping media texts in new ways in the contemporary media landscape.
- Denis I. Chistyakov’s dissertation (in Russian) for the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, focused on sociological interpretations of the operation of mass media in society—including how media texts impact people’s identities, status, and construction of social reality. Included among the sources for the project is Spreadable Media.
- In their work advocating for the development of information-sharing communities “tailored to the use of older people” as part of Projeto SEDUCE in Portugal, published in Portuguese as “Construção de Comunidades de Partilha para Utilizadores Seniores,” authors Célia Soares, Ana Veloso, and Óscar Mealha draw on Spreadable Media to establish the increased importance of information dissemination community practices in shaping the movement of content.