Co-Authors Spreading the Word

Over the past several months, the Spreadable Media team has remained active in further developing, challenging, and…spreading…their work surrounding the book. Check out some of their recent speaking appearances here:

• Co-author Sam Ford joined Spreadable Media project contributors Xiaochang Li, Abigail De Kosnik, Ted Hovet, and Sharon Marie Ross in March 2014 for a workshop discussion entitled “Rethinking Networked Culture, Media Audiences, and Media Content through Spreadable Media,” at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The discussion was largely a follow-up to the recent Cinema Journal roundtable about the Spreadable Media book.
• Co-author Sam Ford spoke about Spreadable Media’s concepts and structure as a project itself as part of The Essay in Public  a one-day symposium on “how to better bring longform and dense content to general audiences,” at Brown University in April 2014.
• In his Spring 2014 MIT Communications Forum, co-author Henry Jenkins spoke on a range of issues, including Spreadable Media’s exploration of the tension between the market logic of the media industries and the non-market logic governing the actions of active audiences.
• The 2014 Innovation Cities Tour, from Innovation Excellence, cites Spreadable Media as an inspiration. Also, co-author Sam Ford spoke as part of the tour’s Boston event at the IBM Innovation Center.
• In his May 2014 talk as part of the University of California-Davis’ Chancellor’s Colloquium Distinguished Speaker Series, co-author Henry Jenkins spoke on “Democracy and Diversity in the Era of Spreadable Media.”
• Ford participated in the Southern Kentucky Book Festival this April in Bowling Green, KY, where he spoke as part of a panel of Western Kentucky University-related authors about their various book projects.

Spreadable Media Authors on the Road and in the News

Upcoming Spreadable Media Events

European Tour 2012: Henry Jenkins Spreads the Word

Now that Spreadable Media is out in Italian and soon to be released in Portuguese, here is a glimpse at the book’s European “preview” last year. In Summer 2012, before Spreadable Media was released, co-author Henry Jenkins went on a speaking tour in Europe, where he talked about the book across a range of countries. Here are some of those talks, available online, as well as other key interviews, etc.:

• Henry spoke at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in an event organized by Sorbonne Nouvelle-Universite Paris 3 and supported by Orange’s Transmedia Lab. His talk was on “Engagement, Participation, Play: The Value and Meaning of Transmedia Audiences”. After the event, Henry also did an interview (in Italian) with Adele Savarese at Ninja Marketing about spreadability, participatory culture, and transmedia storytelling.
• He was a keynote for the Fundación Telefónica Transmedia Living Lab, delivering a talk entitled “‘Occupying’ the Transmedia Landscape: Spreadable Media, Fan Activism, and Participatory Learning” as part of various speaking engagements in Madrid.
• Henry was the keynote speaker for the Center for Storytelling in Lucerne, Switzerland, discussing “How Content Gains Meaning and Value in the Era of Spreadable Media.”
• He also spoke on this subject at the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, Ireland. While in town, he talked about issues related to the book with Irish radio station RTÉ (here and here.)
• Also, see Henry’s talk on similar issues at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Listen to the audio here, and find video here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
• He keynoted a symposium in Prague entitled “Transmedia Generation: On Empowered and Impassioned Audiences in the Age of Media Convergence.”  Find his talk here. In addition, he joined a panel to discuss political and educational implications of his work, available via video here.
• Henry also  talked on this subject with a group of professional journalists in Lisbon through a masterclass organized by the Centro Protocolar de Formação Profissional para Journalistas (CENJOR), in conjunction with the U.S. Embassy in Portugal.
• He spoke about Spreadable Media in London as part of the “Digital Transformations” series. The last part of his talk and the Q&A is available here.
• In Stuttgart, Henry conducted a lecture as part of 5D’s transmedia storytelling track at the FMX 2012 conference. In addition, Henry joined production designer Alex McDowell, director Shekhar Kapur, and moderator Inga von Staden to talk “The Future of Storytelling in Transmedia” in a session that was recorded. Also, during Henry’s time in Germany, he talked with Transmedia Storytelling Berlin about “transmedia storytelling around the world.”
• Henry talked with TheNextTV Channel in Rome about his research (here and here) while in town for a “Talking IED” event about “the transmedia generation” with the Istituto Europeo di Design.

Videos of Spreadable Media Authors from SXSW

While Spreadable Media co-authors Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green were in Austin as featured speakers for South by Southwest Interactive this March, they shared some of their insights for lessons marketers and entrepreneurs might take away from the book:

Henry Jenkins on lessons to be learned from independent media creators.

Sam Ford on the distinction between hearing and listening.

Joshua Green on the importance of internal innovation within corporations.

Spreadable Media June Update

• Author Sam Ford recently spoke on a panel for the American Association of University Presses annual conference for 2013 in Boston. His panel, entitled “Reaching the World,” focused on how university presses might rethink themselves in an era where cultural and global borders are more malleable than before and where the distribution of academic work is increasingly driven through circulation from among interested audiences.
• Authors Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford were recently interviewed for a piece by Sam’s Peppercomm colleague Steve Cody for the Arthur W. Page Society, about the purpose of Twitter and how the communications head at Twitter should best approach understanding how people use the platform.
• Author Joshua Green recently spoke in New York City as part of a panel called “Sketch & Draft: Bridging the Gap between Content and Design,” drawing on concepts from the Spreadable Media project as part of an event organized by Undercurrent (where Joshua works) and LoyalCX.
• Mark Anthony Neal (a fellow NYU Press author who recently released Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities) writes about the need to pay attention to how independent black artists like Jasiri X are designing critical works to be circulated by their audiences in today’s digital age, drawing on concepts from Spreadable Media.
• In a recent blog post, Mel Stanfill references Spreadable Media’s distinction between individual fans and fandoms, in relation to current conversations about how to understand Kindle Worlds vis-a-vis the fan fiction communities most frequently examined by traditional fan studies work.
• Carlos Scolari shares some of his initial thoughts on Spreadable Media (in Spanish) via his Hipermediaciones blog. Also, the Open University of Catalonia recently interviewed Scolari about his work on changing relations between the media industries and fans, where Scolari referenced Spreadable Media‘s work about tensions between producers and fans and on the notion of surplus audiences.
• Robin Honderich, a student in Curtain University’s Internet Studies program, created this great video illustrating some of the core concepts in the introduction of Spreadable Media.
• Portuguese scholars João Pedro da Costa from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Rui Raposo from the University of Aveiro have been doing a textual analysis on what makes band OK Go’s music sharable, drawing on Spreadable Media‘s framework pushing back against viral media metaphors.
• Josh Jarrett writes that Spreadable Media is “an extremely worthwhile and timely read into exactly what defines ‘spreadable’ material,” via his The Participating Resource blog.
• See this student post about the book by Sara Anderson at Georgetown University.

Spreadable Media at MiT8

Two sessions at MIT’s Media in Transition 8 conference at the beginning of May focused on the Spreadable Media project. First, Spreadable Media contributor Chris Weaver moderated a discussion with Spreadable Media co-author Sam Ford; fellow contributors  Whitney Phillips and Kevin Driscoll; and Harvard University’s Jonathan Zittrain and Microsoft NERD’s Kate Miltner, on “The Dark Side of Spreadability.” The discussion covered issues from disruption of people’s sense of privacy as content crosses from the private to the public domain. No video of the session exists, but thanks to Giovanni Boccia Artieri for a comprehensive Storify of the Twitter action from the session.

Meanwhile, Sam Ford also moderated a session, focused on “Transnational Dimensions of Spreadable Media,” with co-author Henry Jenkins and project contributors Nancy Baym, Ethan Zuckerman, and Aswin Punathambekar, discussing lessons from case studies ranging from Ghanan responses to “Gangnam Style” and participatory culture in digital India to emerging international business models for independent musical artists and the growing transmedia storytelling industry in Brazil. See a great recap from MIT Center for Civic Media’s Erhardt Graeff.

Media Round-Up: New Talks & Pieces from Authors

• In a guest piece for the Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog, Spreadable Media co-author Sam Ford examines “What Soap Operas Teach Us about Online Business Models,” looking at the distinction between models of “stickiness” and models of “spreadability.”
  
• In his latest Fast Company piece, co-author Sam Ford questions, “Does Your Company Listen to Social Media–or Simply Hear It?” (Also, see follow-up pieces on this subject from Mason Walker at Portland Business Journal and from the 2020 Workplace blog.
• Spreadable Media authors Sam Ford and Henry Jenkins recently discussed the book with David Schwartz on the New Books in Journalism podcast.
  
• O’Reilly Media has released the video of co-author Henry Jenkins’ recent panel with Cory Doctorow and Brian David Johnson at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference. Also, see this piece from InfoTrends’ Jim Hamilton on the panel.

Spreadable Media at SXSW

Spreadable Media co-authors Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green were in Austin for SXSW last week. The authors had about 900 people on-hand for their talk. Sorry to those who weren’t able to get a signed copy of the book after the bookstore sold out! See below for a few pictures from SXSW (as well as our book display from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference earlier in the week), as well as a range of related links about Henry, Sam, and Joshua’s talk in Austin.

For those who weren’t able to attend at SXSW, an audio podcast of their session is now live (which i-docs has listed as one of the “awesome,” “don’t miss out” sessions from this year’s conference, and which Hugh Garry recommended by stating that the book “is as an important read today as Convergence Culture was when written”).

In other SXSW news, check out all three authors talking with genConnect about the book from SXSW’s media room. Also, Henry did a five-part series with ad agency Leo Burnett about the session. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)

Elsewhere, Henry and Sam talked with the Electronic Resources & Library’s #IdeaDrop project at SXSW about the implications Spreadable Media has on librarians in particular. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.) For those particularly interested in the implications the book has on librarians, also see Marc Crompton’s ongoing series about the book. (See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

You can also see blogs on the SXSW talk from Scoop.it’s Clair Byrd, Sarah Skerik with PR Newswire’s Beyond PR blog, the International Packaging Association, Jinah Kim and Danny Muller at Moxie Interactive, Scott Woodhouse at Agency News, Jon Woods at GroundFloor Media,and Dave Jones of the Viral Ad Network.

Also, see Storify collections from the SXSW session from Gayané Adourian, Hugh Garry, Krisleigh Hoermann, Patricia Marinho, and Michiel Rovers, and notes on the session here, here, and here.

Spreadable Media launch party at NYU Press!

On February 13th, NYU Press held a launch party for Spreadable Media. Check out the photos below featuring authors Joshua Green, Sam Ford, and Henry Jenkins. Needless to say, we had a blast hosting them!