“Promises and Pitfalls of the Digital Age”: A Review of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (review)

Readers who have worked through Henry Jenkins’s influential Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2008) will find Spreadable Media (coauthored by Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green) to be a compelling extension of many of the themes and arguments of the previous work. The authors of Spreadable Media provide a plethora of examples that illustrate the changing nature of media and popular culture (moving from old to new), but they also advance several theoretical arguments that bring insight about these changes.

Spreadable Media is a perceptive description of the current state of social media and how electronic communication is being used to foster reciprocal relationships among consumers/citizens and between consumers/citizens and corporations/producers of culture. It moves beyond mere description, however, by identifying problems that affect these relationships and suggesting paths forward that will improve these relationships.

The most basic focus of the book is nothing new; it is the idea of “participatory culture” that Jenkins and others have been investigating for years. Spreadable media, in fact, are media that can be manipulated and circulated by everyone, and not simply media that are created and distributed by the culture industry. “This shift from distribution to circulation signals a movement toward a more participatory model of culture,” the authors write, “one which sees the public not as simply consumers of pre-constructed messages but as people who are shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media content in ways which might not have been previously imagined.” They add that these creators of culture “are doing so not as isolated individuals but within larger communities and networks, which allow them to spread content well beyond their immediate geographic proximity” (2). Take the example of fans. For many years, fans have created and shared media sometimes in spite of the primary producers (those who create the product of which the fans are fans). Now something different seems to be happening. As the authors note, we “are moving from focusing on the oppositional relationship between fans and producers as a form of cultural resistance to understanding those roles as increasingly and complexly intertwined” (36–37). Fans not only are sharing the product; they are critiquing, elaborating, extending, and manipulating it—in short, re-creating product or creating new product from old.

It is this moving beyond old and tired oppositions that opens a space for new and different media, and this movement requires of the authors new and different theoretical tools for understanding and critiquing what is taking place. One such tool is the idea of the gift economy—an idea that leads to interesting insights about value and power.

The gift economy is different from commodity culture. The latter refers to the standard understanding of the culture industry, in which there is a producer of a cultural artifact that the user passively purchases and consumes. Spreading or sharing the product here is a problem for the producer, since it potentially cuts into the profits generated by the sale of the product. But users who share products (for example, music, videos, etc.) are not thinking about profits. What they are sharing is more like a gift than a commodity. “Within commodity culture, sharing content may be viewed as economically damaging,” the authors note; “in the informal gift economy, by contrast, the failure to share material is socially damaging” (63). Drawing on the work of theorists like Howard Rheingold (The Virtual Community), Lawrence Lessig (Remix), and Lewis Hyde (The Gift), the authors demonstrate how this different way of thinking about sharing changes not only how we view the user but also how the producer must think about his or her product when it goes out...