Internet And Social Media

Why Media Spreads – Hanry Jenkins
● Media texts are reshaping the media landscape.
● Shift from distribution to circulation, embracing a participatory model of culture.
● Public actively shapes, shares, reframes, and remixes media content.
● Participation occurs within larger communities and networks.
● “Participatory culture” coined by Henry Jenkins.
● Networked communities play a role in shaping media circulation.
● Audiences actively shape media flows.
● Online tools facilitate sharing and revenue generation.
● Spreadable Media explores social logics and cultural practices.
● Term “Spreadability” refers to technical and cultural potential for sharing content.
● Challenges to the term “spreadable” are addressed.
● Emphasis on the importance of language and metaphors in understanding digital culture.
● Sticky Content, Spreadable Practices
○ “Spreadability” refers to technical resources facilitating the circulation of content.
○ It encompasses economic structures, content attributes, and social networks influencing content sharing.
○ Contrasts “spreadability” with the concept of “stickiness” used in online commerce.
○ “Stickiness” is about attracting audience attention and engagement.
○ It centralizes audience presence to generate revenue.
○ It focuses on counting isolated audience members.

○ “Spreadability” values social connections among individuals and recognizes the importance of audience interactions.
○ Encourages creating content in easy-to-share formats and facilitating access points in various places.
○ Allows diverse experiences and open-ended participation.
○ Emphasizes audience participation in shaping content’s context.
○ Recognizes the role of grassroots intermediaries in advocacy.
○ Blurs distinctions between producer, marketer, and audience roles.
○ Acknowledges the value of both sticky destinations and spreadable media in a coexisting relationship.
○ Success in the stickiness model ultimately depends on audience activity that happens away from the site, driven by Spreadability.
○ “Stickiness” still matters as it measures audience interest in media content.
● What Susan Boyle Can Teach about Spreadability
○ The text discusses the phenomenon of content Spreadability.
○ Fan communities were among the first to embrace Spreadability practices.
○ The text contrasts the viewership of American Idol’s finale with Susan Boyle’s audition on YouTube.
○ Susan Boyle’s video received millions of views and was shared globally on various platforms.
○ Social networks, media sharing tools, and microblogging platforms played a significant role in its spread.
○ The text introduces the concept of “networked culture,” highlighting the increased literacy about social networking and media sharing online.
○ Content is shared based on social decisions, worthiness, and relevance to specific people or communities.
○ Spreadable media content often reflects shared interests and is embraced by a networked culture.
○ The text challenges the idea that user-generated content has replaced mass media, as mass media content is also shared by users.
○ The text mentions concerns about piracy and its complex nature in the digital age.
○ Piracy is defined in the book as profiting economically from the unauthorized sale of content produced by others.
○ Market failures to make content available in a timely and desirable manner contribute to piracy.
○ The media industry’s broadcast and sticky mentality hinders its ability to respond to unanticipated interest in their material.
● We’ve Found a Cure for Viral Media!
○ The text criticizes the use of the term “viral media” to describe the circulation of content.
○ It highlights the limitations of viral metaphors, which oversimplify how media content spreads.
○ The concept of viral media is linked to notions of infection and control, often neglecting the role of active audiences.
○ The text introduces the concept of “Spreadability” as an alternative to viral media.
○ Spreadability recognizes that audiences play an active role in shaping the circulation and meaning of content.
○ The term “viral marketing” is discussed and should be reserved for marketing concepts that do not rely on audience agency.
○ The choice of metaphors influences expectations and outcomes in media distribution.
○ Spreadable media involves content that achieves deep engagement within niche communities, not just broad circulation.
○ Understanding Spreadability empowers both audiences and activists to form new connections and challenge decisions by companies and governments.
● “Comcast Must Die”
○ Companies are using the metaphor of “going viral” to understand how customer communication about them can circulate widely.
○ In the past, communication between companies and customers was mostly one-way, with limited customer engagement.
○ The emergence of corporate websites allowed brands to tell their stories directly to audiences outside of traditional advertising channels.
○ Companies now need to listen to and learn from their audiences to achieve long-term success.

○ Customer complaints in the era of spreadable media have become both customer service and public relations issues.
○ Comcast’s experiences with customer complaints, which spread online, highlight the importance of listening and responding to customer concerns.
○ Comcast created a department to respond to online issues and engage with customers.
○ Comcast’s approach to online customer service has been praised as an exemplar, but the company still faces challenges in traditional communication modes.
○ The power of customers with online presence has made listening to audiences a greater priority for marketers and companies.
○ Public relations and corporate communication departments are using their online presence to address the messages customers are circulating and shape their corporate agendas.
● Participatory Culture Reconsidered
○ Spreadability occurs when mass content is continually adapted as it enters various niche communities to better fit their needs.
○ Material gets remade either literally through remixing or figuratively through its insertion into conversations and platforms.
○ Traditional boundaries between production and consumption are eroding as content spreads.
○ Whitney Phillips discusses how even disrespectful remixing can be generative, with the concept of memes being seen as evolving content nests.
○ Examples like 4Chan demonstrate how the appropriation, remixing, and recirculation of content through participatory culture impact conversations in various communities.
○ The book explores various groups motivated to produce and circulate media materials as part of their social interactions, including activists, religious groups, art supporters, brand enthusiasts, local community bloggers, collectors, subcultures, and more.
○ Entertainment fandom, particularly TV fandom, has played a significant role in using participatory platforms to organize and respond to media texts.
○ Female fans have embraced new technologies and reversed early conceptions about gendering digital culture.
○ Platforms like Twitter efficiently facilitate resource sharing, conversation, and coordination among communities.
○ Twitter’s early success was driven by marketers, advertisers, and PR professionals as the rules of marketing rapidly changed.
○ Mad Men, the TV series, explores the “golden era” of mass marketing, providing a retrospective on the broadcast era and advertising practices during that time.

How one tweet can ruin your life | Jon Ronson
● For the longest time Jon Ronson reveled in the fact that Twitter gave a voice to the voiceless … the social media platform gave us all a chance to speak up and hit back at perceived injustice. But somewhere along the way, things took a turn. In this passionate, eloquent talk, Ronson explains how too often we end up behaving like a baying mob — and that it’s time to rethink how we interact with others online.

Lecture notes: How media spreads
● Participatory culture- refers to a range of different groups deploying media production and distribution to serve their collective interests ( term coined by Henry Jenkins in 1992)
● The term “stickiness” broadly refers to the need to create content that attracts audience attention and engagement. ( was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (2000)
● In broadcast media, impressions are measured by how many people see a particular piece of media, whereas stickiness refers to the mechanisms motivating people to seek out and spend time at a particular site
● Spreadable media
○ Recognises the importance of the social connections among individuals
○ Spreadability emphasises producing content in easy-to-share formats ( encoded YouTube videos, flash player)
○ Creating media texts that various audiences may circulate for different purposes
○ Audiences using content in unanticipated ways as they retrofit material to the contours of their particular community
○ Values the activities of audience members
○ Blurring the separation between roles
○ May act counter to corporate goals
○ Moving audiences from peripheral awareness to active engagement.

● Viral videos
○ If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead
○ Originally appeared in sci fi novels
○ Idea of viruses being spread
○ You can spread it unwillingly
● Difference between ‘Viral’ and ‘spreadable’
○ In this emerging model, audiences play an active role in “spreading” content rather than serving as passive carriers of viral media: their choices, investments, agendas, and actions determine what gets valued. (Jenkins, p.21)
● Advances of Internet in social Media
○ Anybody can reach publicity
○ Diversity of suitable platforms
○ Connectivity
○ Somebody is always online
○ Never ending story
○ Follow back
○ Brands becoming their own media companies
○ Is the difference between platforms still that huge?
○ Social platforms = connecting users + advertising advantage
○ Creating buzz (however first create a buzz for a network itself)
● Power of # and Likes
○ Topic continuation
○ Promotion
○ Trends/Awareness ( #MeToo)
○ Can the content get lost?
○ Criteria for success
○ Prioritizing material
○ Facebook initiative
○ Promotion strategy based on analysis
● Google trends
● Your own personal page
○ Metric Systems on social platforms
○ Social platforms need raw data not you personality
○ “They guide our behavior, changing what we write, what we delete, who we friend, or who we follow. Metrics make us feel more compulsive, competitive, and anxious, and compel us to produce ever more content for the system in the hopes of achieving future metric success.” (Ben Grosser)
● Your own personal page
○ Metric Systems on social platforms
○ Social platforms need raw data not you personality
○ “They guide our behavior, changing what we write, what we delete, who we friend, or who we follow. Metrics make us feel more compulsive, competitive, and anxious, and compel us to produce ever more content for the system in the hopes of achieving future metric success.” (Ben Grosser)
● Apple Vs Facebook
○ iPhone privacy feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT)
○ When you say yes to tracking on your iPhone, apps such as Facebook can track you across other apps and websites, using something called the identifier for advertisers (IDFA).
○ This unique code assigned to each iPhone offers insights into your buying habits so an advertiser can measure the success of their campaigns.
○ When you don’t allow an app to track your iPhone activity across other companies’ apps and websites, the ATT feature returns a string of zeros instead of the IDFA.
○ How it can affect social media platforms?
● Photos in posts
○ Old tendencies on new platforms
○ From 2014 with the use of pic.twitter.com, users we able to insert images into their posts, twits with images received 18 % more clicks
○ Instagram popularity
● Cancel Culture
○ the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure