Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Acknowledgments

vii The ideas we present in this book were inspired by a range of people who we want to recognize here. We want to thank all the graduate student researchers and staff who took part in the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. In particular, we want to acknowledge the significant impact Xiaochang Li’s work had on our thinking presented in chapter 2 and chapter 3 of this book. We also owe significant credit to Xiaochang and Ana Domb for coauthoring with Henry Jenkins the white paper that inspired this book. And we owe a debt of gratitude to the rest of the C3 team: Ivan Askwith, Alec Austin, Eleanor Baird Stribling, David Edery, Alex Leavitt, Geoffrey Long, Daniel Pereira, Shiela Seles, Parmesh Shahani, and Ilya Vedrashko. We also want to thank all our Futures of Entertainment Fellows, the community that has surrounded our work over the past several years. Their collaboration, brainstorming, and feedback shaped our thinking and challenged us all along the way. Many of these Fellows contributed to the enhanced book (explained in the “How to Read This Book” section). We want to thank them, along with all those whose work inspired our thinking and with whom we were proud to collaborate on this project. A special thanks to the institutions that provided support to our work along the way and to our colleagues at those institutions: the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT; the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California; Peppercomm Strategic Communications; Undercurrent; and the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. We ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Acknowledgments viii also want to thank our corporate partners that collaborated with us in the Convergence Culture Consortium project: Turner Broadcasting, Petrobras, MTV Networks, The Alchemists, GSD&M, Nagravision, Yahoo!, Fidelity Investments, and Internet Group do Brasil. A deep debt of gratitude is owed to the staff of NYU Press and specifically to Eric Zinner and Ciara McLaughlin for helping guide this project and brainstorming with us every step of the way. We also thank the reviewers of our proposal and manuscript along the way for their thinking and feedback. We can’t imagine how a project of this magnitude would have been completed if not for the support, advice, and editing expertise of several key people: Zhan Li at the University of Southern California, whose meticulous work as a research assistant on this book challenged us for accuracy down to every minute detail; Amanda Ford, for both her hard work coordinating and editing as an administrative assistant for Henry at USC and as a supportive (and understanding beyond reason) spouse for Sam at home; Cynthia Jenkins, for providing regular feedback, proofreading, and other tasks all along the way; Nina Huntemann for her support (and listening intently to Joshua’s long opines on the topic); Sarah Banet-Weiser, for being a critical thinking partner who challenged our arguments and increased the rigor of our analysis; and family and friends who provided the moral support, interest, encouragement, and understanding we often needed to push this project through. Finally, we want to thank our colleagues who devoted time and energy to providing us feedback on the manuscript along the way, including danah boyd, Scott Ellington, Mizuko Ito, Lynn Liccardo, Kim Moses, Whitney Phillips, Carol Sanford, Suzanne Scott, Sangita Shresthova, Lana Swartz, Jerry Swerling, Dessewffy Tibor, Nikki Usher, Lance Weiler, Pamela Wilson, and Tim Wintle. ...