Viral vs. spreadable media
By Molly Flatt‘Viral’ has become a vague and largely negative term in social media marketing, synonymous with brands ’seeding’ gimmicky quick-win content to a reluctant web, so the Convergence Culture Consortium’s whitepaper on ‘Spreadable Media’ is a welcome attempt to clarify and reposition the idea. In the report Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua Green define the difference between ’sticky’ and ’spreadable’ media, and offer a more insightful model for spreadable brand content; one that suggests that brands promote rather than fear consumer appropriation of their message and style:
“Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities [...] allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain ‘purity’ of message.
All 8 parts are now up online and nicely indexed here (with thanks to Online Fandom). Go read.
