Tag Archives: Henry Jenkins

Spreadable Media

Spreadable Stories, , ,

In short, Spreadable Media argues: If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead… this book challenges some of the prevailing metaphors and frameworks used to describe contemporary media, from biological metaphors like “memes” and “viral” to the concept of “Web 2.0” and the popular notion of “influencers.” Spreadable Media examines the nature of audience engagement, the environment of participation, the way appraisal creates value, and the transnational flows at the heart of these phenomena. It delineates the elements that make content more spreadable and highlights emerging media business models built for a world of participatory circulation… (Spreadable Media)

Spreadable Media Overview

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Spreadable Media provides an updated media map for the digital age replacing outdated broadcast age concepts like “stickiness” (roach hotels!), memes and “viral content”. Authors Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green define the nature and importance of content “spreadability” in a world of pervasive social media. Spreadable Media focuses on the conditions for global participatory circulation, the movement and evolution of co-created content (derived, mashup, remix, etc.) and the augmented relevance/value of audience enhanced content.

In many cases, the greatest marketing successes are not those that spread “virally” among a massive audience but instead those that have content that really resonates with a key audience and acts as cultural material for their own conversations. And, in those cases where a piece of content does become an Internet-wide sensation, it is always driven by allowing people to express themselves through your message rather than having something inherent within the video or story that people are somehow forced to send along. ~ Sam Ford (Fast Company)

Spreadable media is a theory of circulation. Distribution historically refered to a top down, industry controlled system which sought to control the movement of media content across the culture. Independent media makers have often been locked out of the most established systems of distribution by powerful gatekeepers who have worked to protect the interests of mainstream media. Circulation, on the other hand, refers to an emerging hybrid model, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways. Collective decisions people make about whether to pass along media texts are reshaping the media landscape. A system of circulation offers far more opportunities for independent media makers to enter the consciousness of their desired publics, to court relationships with fans and followers, and to engage with audiences beyond their national borders. ~ Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green (TribecaFilm.com)

Pre-order Spreadable Media

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green will be released on January 21, 2013, but you can pre-order it now.

More Information

Book Website: spreadablemedia.org

Related articles
Transmedia and Convergence Culture
Transmedia and Convergence Culture

Transmedia storytelling is a way to create a storyworld and tell a story across multiple platforms and formats. The different media complement each other and are linked together. An essential aspect of a transmedia production, is that the audience can actively participate in the storyworld.  Therefore a digital platform often has a central role. One example is a tv series where the audience can follow the characters on Twitter and respond to them.Transmedia arises from our convergence culture, as mediatheorist Henry Jenkins states. We use all kinds of media at the same time. We text with our cellphones while listening to music on Spotify, reading the newspaper, checking tweets and meanwhile writing a blogpost.

Since the audience is getting more and more used to consume different media at the same time and responds to them online, producers are looking for new and creative ways to tell their stories, and use different platforms in order to create a storyworld. ~ Katía Truijen (Masters of Media)

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story… There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the… [story]. ~ Henry Jenkins

In a March 22, 2007 blog post, “Transmedia Storytelling 101“, Henry Jenkins laid the foundation stone for all subsequent conversation and speculation on the nature of transmedia storytelling. (Nota bene: USC Professor Marsha Kinder is generally credited with coining the term “transmedia” in 1991.) Though transmedia storytelling definitions abound, most trace their DNA back to Jenkins. Attempts to explain the idea of transmedia storytelling sound wonky: discrete constituent parts of a narrative are distributed via diverse audience interfaces, permitting a more interactive, organic and audience-centric story experience… Snooze!

Despite the academic language and the buzzword-laden rants, transmedia storytelling isn’t such a complicated concept. We apply the term primarily in instances where digital communication channels are involved, but the underlying idea is that the audience/player/consumer actively “creates” the story by selecting and aggregating distinct but complementary narrative threads. Uh-oh, I’m slipping into wonk-land. The idea is simple. Articulating the idea, less so.

Immersive multi-channel storytelling…

Yikes.

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