Designing for Spreadability

Introduction

In previous chapters, we learned that media is spread not just from companies creating the content but also from the audiences active participation in circulating the media.  Chapter 5 is not about the spreading of the content but more what all goes into the creation of the content that is going to be spread.

Chapter Sections: 

The Uncertainty Principle

It has always been very difficult for companies to predict which products will be successful and which will not. Making these predictions has become increasingly difficult with the Internet and the increasing prevalence of participatory culture, as now media is significantly more likely to be successful if it is spreadable. There are many strategic and technical considerations that can be made to increase the likelihood that a product will be spreadable and therefore successful.

Producerly Texts and Cultural Resources

Even if all the above considerations are made, a product will still fail if the content does not engage people to a point that they wish to spread it to their friends. Texts are more likely to be spreadable if the audience finds meaning in them. When people decide to spread media, they are integrating it into their everyday lives and changing it from a commodity into a cultural resource. 

Shared Fantasies

A commodity culture emphasizes personal expression freedom, upward social mobility, escape from constraints and enabling new possibilities. These themes are described as “escapists”. The fantasies of a commodity culture are those of transformation, while the fantasies of nonmarket exchanges are based on shared experience. Fan-created work centers on themes of romance, friendship, and community. Fan-made media is shared among a community with common passions. Commonly spread content often has an explicitly nostalgic tone.

Humor

Anthropologist Mary Douglas examines what separates a joke from an insult. A joke expresses something a community is ready to hear; an insult expresses something it doesn’t want to consider. A joke involves exchanging judgments about the world and defining oneself either with or against others. Humor is not simply a matter of taste, people articulate and validate their relationships with those with whom they share the joke.

 Parody and References

Fiske specifically cites parody as a popular form closely associated with the “producer” one of the ways audiences transform brands into resources for their own social interactions. While all humor builds on whether an audience “gets” the joke or shares a sensibility, parody combines that aspect of humor with a specific shared reference. Parody can express shared experiences and especially when it plays on nostalgic references, a shared history.

 Unfinished Content

This section discusses components of a successful, unique media franchise (e.g. the licensing of an original form of media, such as a film or work of literature). It explains that not only do effective media franchises obtain an audience made up of similar individuals; they also compel this group to contribute something or become further engaged within the content. This section used the example of an online interactive video ad for Burger King called “Subservient Chicken”. It showed a man in a chicken suit and a text box that said, “Get chicken just the way you like it. Type command here”. When the user typed a recognized verb, the chicken preformed the command. The campaign became recognized as a new, unique way of advertising because of the memorable relationship the user had with the ‘product’. Additionally, gamers felt inclined to tweak with the ad and come up with replicas of the video that responded to further commands, which relates to the spreading of media content.

 Mystery

The original sources of media content are becoming much more of a mystery in today’s world because of the increase of spreadable media. Content moves throughout the Internet rapidly, which can diminish the initial intent behind it. This section used the YouTube video of a woman named Heidi as an example. She made a seemingly amateur video claiming that she found a black coat in a café and hoped to find the owner to return it. The video ended up gaining popularity and appeared on national news and talk programs, however, viewers began to grow suspicious of the video’s real motive. They analyzed the way that the brand of the coat (Witchery) was not-so-subtly pointed out, and eventually the video was revealed as a hoax. The company was gearing up to launch a new line and created the video in order to promote the brand. In today’s society, it’s more common to have to dig deeper to find the source and motive content that’s circulated online.

 Timely Controversy

Controversy and timeliness are two things that need to be considered when creating spreadable content.  Controversy is when a content producer creates something that involves a public controversy that people can relate to and timeliness is creating content that is relevant to current events and fads. 

Rumors

This final quality that can help spread content is described as informal and temporary constellations of speculation and can potentially cause the most harm.   Although content that involves rumors may not necessarily be true or of the highest quality, it is content that strikes the powerful feelings of desire or fear among the audience. 

Avatar Activism and Other Civic Media

The core principles of spreadability can be deployed by any kind of media producer that wants to ensure the circulation of its content across dispersed and diverse populations. Principles of spreadability are most visible when we look at the ways civic media is adopting new styles and strategies in order to encourage free circulation and to attract so-called earned coverage. Many groups such as political candidates, grassroots organizations, and individual citizens do not have the means to reach wide audiences through broadcast channel and often working with limited sources. Speadabiltiy has lowered the cost of political speech and as a result, activist groups find it easier to design and circulate compelling media content. These tactics work because they create media (such as YouTube videos) which are easy to circulate and encourages more supporters and more casual viewers to share the content with their friends. This spreadable civic media content may initially be jarring in the ways that it abandons the sobriety with which we normally receive political messages, but producers count on the controversy around such unexpected tactics to inspire further spread of their media. One of their examples was an international activist group that took an “Avatar” protest approach. After seeing images and footage of blue-skinned protesters suffering and choking on tear gas, more people will pay attention to the type of message that is being conveyed and although the resulting images were not in any way humorous, they depend on the audience’s access to contextual knowledge. The goal of these videos and protests was to circulate beyond the core audience already invested in these issues by speaking to the wants and interests of other communities in a visual language familiar to various international audiences. The collective control over meaning making and content circulation we all now have may provide powerful new ways to participate as citizens and society members. Advertisers are striving to create texts that people actively seek out and willingly circulate.

Conclusion

This chapter discusses the rapid increase in which online media is spread. It focuses particularly on the way creators of advertisements use various strategies in order to circulate their content online. A component of successful media franchise is creating a form of slightly unfinished content that sets the stage for users to engage and become more involved. This not only forms more of a solid impression on the audience, but compels them to initiate further interaction with the content; causing it to spread. An additional method that creators use is to mask the original source of the content. This example was shown with videos that appeared amateur, but had the hidden intention of promoting. The audience also becomes engaged in another way by digging deeper to find the true origin of the content.

5 Important Quotes

v“The hope is that such provocative videos will encourage greater information seeking, inspiring those who encounter them to follow links back and to drill deeper into the content-rich sites that these groups have structured around them” (223).

v“Under the producer’s control, it is mass culture. Under the audience’s control, it is popular culture” (201).

v”The line between a ‘cool campaign’ purporting to be part of ‘the real world’ and marketers exposed as looking to ‘dupe’ the world can be thin and relies on whether creators seem to have wanted the true origins of the text to eventually be discovered and whether creators are seen to be part of the culture with which the content seeks to engage” (213).

v“When producers are part of a community and understand its values and shared fantasies the content they create is more likely to resonate deeply with fellow community members” (204).

v"As these sections indicate, texts that are particularly producerly - that leave open processes of analysis, meaning making, or collective activity for the audience to fill in - often drive deep engagement.  In short, engaging, producerly texts have a greater tendency to spread" (219). 

Online Resource:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE