Web Exclusive Essays
The Implicit Contract
Everyone wants something from their entertainment. Whatever this desire is, audiences’ satisfaction with a product is dependent on whether their → Read Essay
Valuing Fans
Why work toward a model for valuing fans? The U.S. media industry has run into some significant economic problems in → Read Essay
Co-creative Expertise in Gaming Cultures
Gamers increasingly participate in the process of making and circulating game content. Games such as Maxis’s The Sims franchise, for → Read Essay
The Swedish Model
Sweden is a small country, yet it has one of the world’s biggest and best-selling music scenes. You might think → Read Essay
Interrogating “Free” Fan Labor
Over the past two decades, large swaths of the U.S. population have been engaged in copyright wars. On one side, → Read Essay
Tecnobrega’s Productive Audiences
Ronaldo Lemos (2008) has coined the phrase “globoperipheral music” to describe the emergence of music scenes that put central focus → Read Essay
Soulja Boy and Dance Crazes
During the summer of 2007, U.S. pop media seemed saturated with talk show hosts and pro athletes dancing along to → Read Essay
The Long Tail of Digital Games
In the raging debate over the legitimacy and consequences of the “Long Tail” theory (Anderson 2006), few markets have received → Read Essay
The Use Value of Authors
A key dilemma for both media consumers and producers in today’s media environment is discoverability: with so much media spreading, → Read Essay
The Moral Economy of Soap Opera Fandom
Soaps accompanied my real life as a stay at home mother, chronicled my years as a working adult, kept me → Read Essay
YouTube and Archives in Educational Environments
Students in a film studies class settle back and watch a clip of the iconic scene from the ending of → Read Essay
Twitter Revolutions?
In summer 2009, public discontent around the outcome of the Iranian elections sparked a worldwide response, largely because of the → Read Essay
Joss Whedon, the Browncoats, and Dr. Horrible
Experimentation among independent media creators is inspiring some mainstream media producers to create alternative systems of production and distribution. Few → Read Essay
A History of Transmedia Entertainment
As embraced by industry professionals and media consumers alike, transmedia storytelling promises to bring greater institutional coordination, added narrative integrality, → Read Essay
Retrobrands and Retromarketing
Today’s big brands are all rooted in the past. Tide, Coca-Cola, BMW, and even Apple are all connected to bygone → Read Essay
Performing with Glee
Some producers developing cross-platform media franchises are experimenting with distribution models that engage consumers on a quotidian level, capitalizing on → Read Essay
Transnational Audiences and East Asian Television
Consider a clip from the Japanese variety show Arashi no Shukudai-kun that recently made its way onto YouTube in early → Read Essay
(Sp)reading Digital Comics
Comic books—especially single issues, or “floppies”—have always been spreadable. As kids in the 1980s, my friends and I would head → Read Essay
What Old Media Can Teach New Media
While it may be the case that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the question remains whether that → Read Essay
“Consumers” or “Multipliers”?
The term “consumer” is a fixture of the marketing, media, and cultural worlds. It is hard to imagine certain conversations → Read Essay
Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text
While the rise of spreadable media is a major trend of the contemporary era, another development within media seems to → Read Essay
In Defense of Memes
Although I agree that the terms “viral” and “meme” often connote passive transmission by mindless consumers, I take issue with → Read Essay
Targeting Desis
“Desi,” which means “from the homeland,” is a term that refers to people within the South Asian diaspora. It also → Read Essay
The Value of Retrogames
Existing in dialectical tension with contemporary games which trumpet their photorealistic graphics, sprawling storyworlds, and intricate, extended, networked play, retrogames → Read Essay
Television’s Invitation to Participate
In Beyond the Box: TV and the Internet (Ross 2008), I argued that television shows starting in the late 1990s → Read Essay
Chuck vs. Leno
In April 2009, a sandwich saved a television show. The sandwich was fairly large—12 inches, to be exact—but the feat → Read Essay
The Revolution Is Not Spreadable
When I consider India, the main question that comes to my mind about spreadability is what is being spread and → Read Essay
A Global History of Secondhand Clothing
Clothing, almost by definition, is a medium of transmission within a spreadable media ecology. It is both the means and → Read Essay
The Online Prime Time of Workspace Media
Ask a producer of digital content about website usage patterns, as I have, and they will tell you how important → Read Essay
The History of Spreadable Media
Media have been evolving and spreading for as long as our species has been around to develop and transport them. → Read Essay
How Spreadability Changes How We Think about Advertising
You can’t spell “spreadability” without “ad.” The vision of unpaid people cheerfully passing around ads they love has been a → Read Essay
Learning to Be a Responsible Circulator
The Challenges of Departing from a Broadcast World In Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic operetta The Gondoliers, the song “There Lived → Read Essay
The Value of Customer Recommend-
ations
With new channels of communication and old, marketers can deliver a dizzying number of advertising messages to consumers—by many accounts, → Read Essay
“From Weird to Wide”
The fundamental question of development economics, my late mentor Dick Sabot taught me, is simple to formulate and hard to → Read Essay