Blog
Spreadability in Public Media
A range of great research has been conducted in the past several months that draw on Spreadable Media in some way in relation to looking at the public media space. Find some of those pieces below:
- José van Dijck and Thomas Poell’s 2014 Television and New Media piece, “Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media,” argues that public service broadcasters “have historically not only played a role as creators of public programs but also as promoters and facilitators of public value outside their institutional space.” The piece draws on Spreadable Media to build the argument that public service broadcasters must develop new initiatives for producing and distributing content outside their proper channels, despite the imperfections and imbalances that raises, in order to “promote audience engagement and push public value content through the transnational flows of media circulation.”
- Maura Edmond’s 2014 New Media & Society piece, “All Platforms Considered: Contemporary Radio and Transmedia Engagement,” draws on Spreadable Media’s description of “transmedia engagement” and active audience engagement practices surrounding transmedia strategies in an in-depth application of transmedia concepts to radio.
- Ren Reynolds’ “Managed Not Edited—How Participative Platforms Operate” references Spreadable Media within co-author Henry Jenkins’ range of work advocating for rethinking the “producer/consumer” dichotomy in light of “fan culture and other participatory practices.” Reynolds examines massively multiplayer online role-play games and Wikipedia and questions what public service media can learn from these case studies. The piece appears in Michał Głowacki and Lizzie Jackson’s 2013 book, Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century: Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction.
- In their piece “”The Mass, the Audience and the Public: Questioning Preconceptions of News Audiences” for Michał Głowacki and Lizzie Jackson’s 2013 book Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century: Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction, Heikki Heikkilä, Laura Ahva, Jaana Siljamäki and Sanna Valtonen draw on arguments from the Spreadable Media project that media companies must be prepared for their audiences spreading content to places or via contexts that may go against the intent of producers, in their advocacy that media managers must “take into account—and appreciate—the critical and sometimes unruly features associated with the role of audience.”