Interviews with Spreadable Media Co-Authors

Spreadable Media’s co-authors have been talking about themes from the book in a range of venues these past few months. Read those interviews here:

• Arturo Arriagada interviewed co-author Sam Ford for Chilean newspaper La Tercera, which ran on May 3 (in Spanish). The interview also ran at Observatorio de Medios FUCATEL.
• Co-author Henry Jenkins was interviewed by Julia Fernandez on the Library of Congress’ The Signal: Digital Preservation site in July 2014. Jenkins explains the book’s reaction against “viral media” and unpacks what is meant by the phrase, “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead”: If we don’t know about the media, if we don’t know where to find it, if it’s locked down where we can’t easily get to it, it becomes irrelevant to the conversations in which we are participating. Spreading increases the value of content.”
• In July 2014, Bob Morris interviewed co-author Sam Ford about his background, his career, his philosophy, and—in particular—in depth about Spreadable Media.
• Also, Nino Rapin interviewed Ford for Opoloo’s Squirrel Park “great conversationist” interview series where he discussed, among other things, the writing process for Spreadable Media.

Further Publishing from Spreadable Media Authors

Spreadable Media’s co-authors continue to do work drawing on ideas from the book. See these recent publications:

• In his 2014 piece for The Journal of Fandom Studies, “Fan Studies: Grappling with an ‘Undisciplined’ Discipline,” co-author Sam Ford draws on Spreadable Media’s description of “accretion texts,” the increased interest from marketers and the media industries on fans, and the book’s argument that the audience’s increased ability “to share, discuss, debate, and critique texts” today “constitutes the greatest shift in the media ecology in a digital age.” Ford also references the ways in which the 2007 “Gender and Fan Studies” series impacted the Spreadable Media project.
• In his 2014 piece for Cultural Studies, “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’,” co-author Henry Jenkins writes extensively about what informed and shaped the Spreadable Media project in the aftermath of his previous book, Convergence Culture.
• NYU Press’ new book Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, edited by Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo, includes an essay from co-author Sam Ford, entitled “Listening and Empathizing: Advocating for New Management Logics in Marketing and Corporate Communications.” (See an earlier version posted for the MIT Media in Transition 8 conference.) In the essay, Ford draws on Spreadable Media to talk about infrastructural tensions within organizations around who “owns” the customer relationship.
• The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism ran an excerpt from Spreadable Media in their Winter 2013 Agenda magazine.
• In late 2013, Spanish-language journal Panorama Social ran Ford’s “Diferencias entre Oír y Escuchar al Público en la Comunicación Corporativa,” which draws on Spreadable Media’s distinction between “hearing” and “listening” to further explore the concept in corporate communication/public relations/marketing.
• Harvard Business Review recently re-ran Ford’s 2013 piece, “In Marketing, People Are Not Numbers”—drawing on concepts from Spreadable Media—in Russian.

Spreadable Media Authors on the Road and in the News

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.

August Spreadable Media Updates

July Spreadable Media Updates

Late June/Early July Spreadable Media Updates

• Co-author Henry Jenkins provides TIME‘s Lily Rothman with preview remarks from a forthcoming Cinema Journal roundtable about the Spreadable Media, for this article on Kindle Worlds.
• Meanwhile, on his Kindle Chronicles podcast, Len Edgerly writes about how Kindle Worlds might impact the analysis of Spreadable Media and particularly its look at the relationship between fandoms and media properties.
• Roy Christopher talks with danah boyd and others about their Summer Reading List. Among danah’s top choices? Spreadable Media.
• Birgit Horvath-Muck also includes Spreadable Media among her “Non-Fiction Discoveries” at “The Book Garden.”
• Carlos Scolari writes a follow-up blog post considering more takeaways from Spreadable Media (in Spanish).
• Also, see this recent review of Spreadable Media (in Japanese).
• Tama Leaver’s latest research on “Angry Birds as a Social Network Market” draws on Spreadable Media.
• Agnès Jiyoung Yun at the Organic Media Lab writes (in Korean) about why Amazon is “social media,” both drawing on some concepts covered in Spreadable Media and also demonstrating how Amazon connected feedback from other customers into the purchase process.
• Dave Vineberg references Henry Jenkins and the “spreadable media” argument in a piece about the obsession with discovering new status symbols and its ties to commercial culture, in this piece on the Madame Pickwick art blog.
• Amazon customer reviewer Iain writes of Spreadable Media that, “for Media Studies teachers in  particular, this book will not disappoint.”
• Novelist Kate Pullinger also recently used Spreadable Media during her keynote at the Brave New World conference organized by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and Australian Literacy Educators’ Association (ALEA) on Saturday, July 6.

• 

  Novelist Kate Pullinger presenting at Brave New World 2013. Photo by Jon Callow.

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 May Update

Sam Ford speaking at Planning-ness conference. Photo by Keith Burtis, Carbonview Research.

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.