Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

7 Thinking Transnationally

259 A central argument running through this book is that spreadability has expanded people’s capacities to both appraise and circulate media texts and thus to shape their media environment. None of this supposes an end to the role of commercial mass media as perhaps the most powerful force in our collective cultural lives. In many cases, producers and brand makers have decided to utilize more participatory means of communication and informal means of circulation, but their ultimate aim is still the propagation of mass-media content. In other cases, circulated mass-media texts have been grabbed and quoted by people who insert these segments into their ongoing social interactions without regard to—or even against the wishes of—commercial creators. Throughout, mass-media content remains that which spreads the furthest, the widest, and the fastest. This book has also focused on situations in which content has circulated socially which audiences could not access through mass-media distribution: archival materials preserved by collectors, material produced by fans and amateur producers, activist and religious media created to spread the word, and independently produced and distributed media. But all of these instances rest on a basic assumption: that a networked culture is easily accessible to those who desire to spread content. Our final chapter focuses on the transnational spread of both mass and niche media content. Throughout this chapter, we are using the term “transnational” rather than the commonly used “global,” in recognition of the uneven nature of these flows. While, as we will demonstrate, media texts are being exchanged between communities THINKING TRANSNATIONALLY THINKING TRANSNATIONALLY 7 7 Thinking Transnationally 260 in many diverse and dispersed countries, there are also many countries (especially in the Global South—much of Africa, parts of Latin America and Asia) not yet able to actively participate in such exchanges. This increased transnational circulation in some cases amplifies the already powerful influence of producers from the developed world and, in others, reflects the efforts of media producers in the developing world to increase their (sometimes already powerful) influence. Transnational media content sometimes comes through the front door, distributed by commercial interests (large and small) seeking to expand markets. Other times, it comes through the back door, shaped by the efforts of pirates seeking to profit from media produced by others, by immigrants seeking to maintain contact with cultures they have left behind, and by audiences seeking to expand their access to the world’s cultural diversity. In every case, participatory cultural practices are transforming transnational media flows, even if access and participation among those audiences remains uneven. John Fiske has drawn a productive distinction between “multiplicity,” which consists of “more of the same,” and “diversity,” which reflects a range of alternative identities and agendas: We live, we might say, in a society of many commodities, many knowledges , and many cultures. Multiplicity is to be applauded only when it brings diversity, and the two are not necessarily the same, though they are closely related. Multiplicity is a prerequisite of diversity, but it does not necessarily entail it—more can all too often be more of the same. Equally, diversity thrives on multiplicity, but does not necessarily produce it. (1994, 239) While this book has primarily focused on U.S. media and culture, we have throughout called attention to the ways that works produced elsewhere are entering broader circulation—from the British Susan Boyle video and Twitter flows from Tehran in the introduction to the European genre films and music in chapter 6. To be sure, these materials are being filtered according to local cultural norms and interests; only some of the media texts produced around the world are able to find audiences, for example, in the United States. The patterns of this Thinking Transnationally 261 media spread are not simply between center and periphery, as they have been historically understood, but may be multinodal, connecting countries that have had limited communication in the past. This chapter focuses on transnational cultural flows to illustrate the ways that spreadability may enhance cultural diversity. What we say here about the complex interplay of immigrants and fans around shared cultural materials that travel across national borders also applies to other kinds of exchanges between communities—say, for instance, the secular circulation of Christian media. Throughout this chapter, we also call attention to the potential limits, misunderstandings, and frictions that emerge as media content flows across communities with different histories and...