A wide-ranging examination of the contemporary media environment as individuals increasingly control their own creation of content.
Spreadable Media is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how media works today.
Solid analysis and detailed examples to make it sticky enough for the intended readerships of media scholars, media professionals, and fans.
Howard Rheingold,author of Net Smart:
Something new is emerging from the collision of traditional entertainment media, Internet-empowered fan cultures, and the norms of sharing that are encouraged and amplified by social media. Spreadable Media is a compelling guide, both entertaining and rigorous, to the new norms, cultures, enterprises, and social phenomena that networked culture is making possible. Read it to understand what your kids are doing, where Hollywood is going, and how online social networks spread cultural productions as a new form of sociality.
Jane Espenson,writer-producer of Battlestar Galactica, Once Upon a Time, and Husbands:
Finally, a way of framing modern media creation and consumption that actually reflects reality and allows us to talk about it in a way that makes sense. It's a spreadable world and we are ALL part of it. Useful for anyone who makes media, analyzes it, consumes it, markets it or breathes.
danah boyd, Microsoft Research:
By critically interrogating the ways in which media artifacts circulate, Spreadable Media challenges the popular notion that digital content magically goes & viral. This book brilliantly describes the dynamics that underpin people's engagement with social media in ways that are both theoretically rich and publicly meaningful.
Manuel Castells,Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society, University of Southern California:
The best analysis to date of the radically new nature of digital social media as a communication channel. Its insights, based on a deep knowledge of the technology and culture embedded in the digital networks of communication, will reshape our understanding of cultural change for years to come.
Jason Falls,CEO of Social Media Explorer and co-author of No Bullshit Social Media:
It's about time a group of thinkers put the marketing evangelists of the day out to pasture with a thorough look at what makes content move from consumer to consumer, marketer to consumer and consumer to marketer. Instead of latching on to the notion that you can create viral content, Jenkins, Ford, and Green question the assumptions, test theories and call us all to task. Spreadable Media pushes our thinking. As a result, we'll become smarter marketers. Why wouldn't you read this book?
In Spreadable Media, media theorist Henry Jenkins, formerly of MIT and now at USC, and his coauthors, digital strategists Sam Ford and Joshua Green, make a convincing case that fan involvement in the re-creation and circulation of media content is not just an interesting side effect of man-to-many multimedia networks and smartphone video editing apps, but a significant force for empowerment and exploitation in and of itself...If you are in the music, move, television, or game business, this book is a must read.
Content today, the authors suggest, can travel not only from the top down but also from the inside out. It is a remarkably different terrain than what we have been used to, one they effectively and stridently analyze.
