Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

2 Reappraising the Residual

85 Chapter 1 suggested that each party involved in exchanging material may have a different conception of its value and/or worth. We use the term “appraisal” to describe the process by which people determine which forms of value and worth get ascribed to an object as it moves through different transactions. Appraisal is often used to talk about the monetary value of a commodity in a commercial transaction. However, the same term is also used in processes of curation, which create value not through buying and selling commodities but through critiquing, organizing, and displaying/exhibiting artifacts. An appraisal performed in an archive or museum may be just as concerned with an artifact’s historical, cultural, or symbolic value—with whether the material is worth preserving for future generations—as it is with the item’s monetary value. Further, museums and archives may be reluctant to take gifts if the costs of preserving an artifact exceed its symbolic worth or cultural significance . As the rise of digital networks has accelerated the flow of texts and objects, such processes of curation have become part of the everyday lives of many people. Such competing forms of appraisal are especially visible in the case of “residual” materials—antiques, hand-me-downs, collectors’ items, and so on. Such “old stuff” may have lost much of its economic value and cultural centrality but still carries enormous sentimental value for some enthusiasts. As the chapter progresses, we will develop a more nuanced understanding of the “residual” as a specific site of cultural transactions, exploring how and why negotiations of older media content are gaining new REAPPRAISING THE RESIDUAL REAPPRAISING THE RESIDUAL 2 2 Reappraising the Residual 86 centrality within a culture where sites such as eBay and YouTube support grassroots exchange of items which otherwise no longer command the attention of commercial interests. Assessing economic value and determining cultural or sentimental worth are two increasingly connected notions when talking about grassroots forms of appraisal. As artifacts (whether a physical object or a piece of content) travel through different exchanges, the various groups involved might apply different systems of appraisal that reflect divergent goals and interests. We might broadly distinguish between market and nonmarket exchanges, between purchases and gifts; however, even within a market exchange, there may be more than one kind of value at play. While many of the examples we raise in this book consider how media texts circulate through peer-to-peer exchange, not all spreadable media begins that way, and not all spreadable media ends that way. Rather, material is shared by virtue of its adaptability to different conditions and its ability to be adjusted to fulfill a wide range of needs and motivations. Clips from U.S. television shows, for instance, are created within the logic of market-driven commodity culture but get repurposed by fans to establish social relations as they are passed along. Conversely, many forms of user-generated content created within primarily social exchanges get leveraged commercially when hosted on revenue-generating websites. Mentos, for instance, claims to have received more than $10 million worth of publicity from videos posted online of people dropping Mentos into Diet Coke, a coup for a brand which, at the time, spent less than $20 million a year annually for U.S. advertising (Vranica and Terhune 2006). In other cases, content generated and spread through the digital gift economy is also eventually used directly by companies as promotional material, as in the case of a Chicken McNuggets commercial that appropriated user-generated video of two friends rapping about the meal. The original video clip was posted to YouTube a year before McDonald’s acquired it. McDonald’s used the clip mostly intact, interspersing some title cards and adding a tagline at the end. As both these cases show, spreadable media can travel through both market and social exchanges and in both directions. Reappraising the Residual 87 If we could decide that some things bear a market value and others don’t, there would be less tension or confusion over what something is worth. But goods or services don’t inherently possess market or nonmarket characteristics. Rather, these values and conditions are assigned to goods and services via the context of the exchanges in which they are involved. Purchasing a bottle of wine to bring to a dinner party begins as a market exchange—the store purchase—where its value is communicated...