Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

How to Read This Book

ix We envision three readerships for this book: media scholars, communication professionals, and people actively creating and sharing media content who are interested in how the media industries—and our culture(s)—are changing as a result. Spreadable Media has been designed to find common ground for conversation among these audiences and their perspectives. As you read through the book, however, you may find particular passages that speak more directly to one group than another. Bear with us in those cases, and perhaps even take it as an opportunity to consider these phenomena through other eyes. We want all three of our audiences (and others who may find this discussion beneficial) to use our argument as a provocation to ask some fundamental questions about how everyday people are producing meaning and value in a changing communication environment. Many of this book’s core arguments were developed through our work at the Convergence Culture Consortium, a five-and-a-half-year academic research project (2005–2011) aimed at speaking to and facilitating dialogue among these three groups. The Consortium’s research was led by a team of faculty, staff, and graduate students at MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies. This core team worked in conjunction with a community of leading media studies scholars around the world and a diverse range of corporate partners that funded the project: television media companies (Turner Broadcasting, MTV Networks), Internet and digital technology companies (Yahoo!, Internet Group do Brasil, Nagravision), and major brands and marketers (Petrobras, Fidelity Investments, advertising agency GSD&M, and transmedia storytelling agency The Alchemists). The Consortium created a variety of forums—from the Futures of Entertainment and HOW TO READ THIS BOOK HOW TO READ THIS BOOK How to Read This Book x Transmedia Hollywood conferences to blog posts, newsletters, white papers, and corporate brainstorms—aimed at bringing these three perspectives together, and the project has fostered a community around the annual Futures of Entertainment conference dedicated to continuing such collaboration. The Convergence Culture Consortium was created for several reasons . A growing number of media studies graduate students were seeking industry rather than academic jobs upon graduation, and the Consortium wanted to take even more seriously the charge to help students turn the thinking they do in the classroom into the “\thought leadership” (to use the corporate term) that might help transform the media and marketing industries. Our team recognized that a great many corporate communicators and media creators providing such thought leadership through their own publications and digital platforms were actively interested in the work being done inside the academy. Indeed, many of our corporate partners not only supported our research but also became collaborators. Our dialogue with these and other industry thinkers informed our work and, in return, helped them apply some of our thinking to their own companies and industries . The Consortium brought together a community of scholars and researchers from a range of disciplines interested in meaningful dialogue between “academy” and “industry.” Given how little dialogue often crosses academic boundaries (consider the disconnects between cultural studies and the social sciences or between the humanities and business schools, for instance), we have been particularly energized by this interdisciplinary collaboration enabled by our research initiatives. Though all three of us once managed the Consortium together, our career paths have diverged, and we now bring our different vantage points to the range of issues discussed in this book. Sam Ford works for a strategic communications firm that consults with a variety of brands and media companies; Joshua Green, after managing an academic research program investigating the media industries, now works at a management consultancy that specializes in digital strategy; and Henry Jenkins serves as a professor of communications, journalism, cinematic arts, and education, calling himself an “aca-fan” to reflect the ways his life has straddled the worlds of academia and fandom. How to Read This Book xi Throughout, you’ll see references to the enhanced version of this book. If you visit http://spreadablemedia.org, you’ll find additional material by a range of contributors that shaped our argument and are referenced directly throughout the book—case studies and deep thinking that extends the work discussed here, along with counteropinions to some of the arguments we make. We have drawn liberally on these contributions in this edition, all of which were collected as we worked on this project over the past few years. Many, though not all, of these...