Spreadable Media. Henry Jenkins
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average global Internet user receives 26 news stories per week via social media or email and shares 13 news stories online. According to a report from the Pew Research Center (Purcell et al. 2010), 75 percent of respondents received news forwarded through email or posted on social network sites, and 52 percent shared links to news with others via those means.
This news gathering is shaped by a strong desire to contribute to ongoing conversations with friends, family, and co-workers. Of the respondents to the Pew study, 72 percent said they follow the news because they enjoy talking with others about what is happening in the world, and 50 percent said they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know. All of this suggests a world where citizens count on each other to pass along compelling bits of news, information, and entertainment, often many times over the course of a given day.
In this networked culture, we cannot identify a single cause for why people spread material. People make a series of socially embedded decisions when they choose to spread any media text: Is the content worth engaging with? Is it worth sharing with others? Might it be of interest to specific people? Does it communicate something about me or my relationship with those people? What is the best platform to spread it through? Should it be circulated with a particular message attached? Even if no additional commentary is appended, however, just receiving a story or video from someone else imbues a range of new potential meanings in a text. As people listen, read, or view shared content, they think not only—often, not even primarily—about what the producers might have meant but about what the person who shared it was trying to communicate.
Indeed, outside the U.K., most people probably encountered the Susan Boyle video because someone sent a link or embedded it in a Facebook update or blog: many people shared the video to boast their accomplishment of discovery. They could anticipate sharing the video with people who hadn’t seen it, precisely because the material was not widely available on television. Some may have heard conversations about it and searched on YouTube; for many more, the message came in the midst of other social exchanges, much as an advertisement comes as part of the commercial television flow. Yet, while an advertisement might feel like an intrusion or interruption, people often welcome spreadable media content from friends (at least discerning ones) because it reflects shared interests.
It is apparent that some people were passing Boyle’s performance along as a gesture of friendship to build interpersonal relationships, while others used the material to contribute to a community organized around a key interest. This difference is a key distinction: between friendship-based and interest-based networks (Ito et al. 2009). An avowed Christian, Boyle became the focus of online prayer circles. Science blogs discussed how someone with her body could produce such a sound. Karaoke singers debated her technique, reporting an incident when she was thrown out of a karaoke bar because she was now viewed as a professional performer. Reality-television blogs debated whether her success would have been possible on U.S. television given that American Idol excludes people her age from competing. Fashion blogs critiqued and dissected the makeover she was given for subsequent television appearances. Boyle’s video spread, then, as a result of the many conversations it enabled people to have with each other, whether among friends or within communities of common interest. (And, of course, many may have done some of both.)
From a commercial perspective, American Idol had a full season to build public interest in its finale yet failed to attract the scale of attention the seven-minute clip of Boyle sparked. Contrary to speculation that the Boyle phenomenon would be short-lived, her debut album released by Columbia Records months later enjoyed groundbreaking advance sales, surpassing The Beatles and Whitney Houston on Amazon’s charts (Lapowsky 2009). The album sold more than 700,000 copies in its first week, the largest opening-week sales of any album released that year. As Columbia Records chair Steve Barnett explained, “People wanted to get it and own it, to feel like they’re a part of it” (Sisario 2009). Of course, those who helped circulate the video already felt they were “a part of it.”
While such success makes for an impressive business story, the initial international popularity of the Susan Boyle moment wasn’t driven by a plan for counting impressions and raking in the cash. Most of the many millions of people who streamed the Boyle clip were part of a “surplus audience” for whom producers had not built a business model. Boyle’s performance was part of a British program with no commercial distribution in most other countries, so the majority of people sharing the video couldn’t turn on a television network—cable or broadcast—and watch the next installment of Britain’s Got Talent. They couldn’t stream the show legally online. They couldn’t buy episodes from iTunes. Despite relationships with multiple television networks, FremantleMedia couldn’t get the show into commercial distribution quickly enough for transnational viewers to catch up with the Brits. Given the global circulation of information about Susan Boyle online, anyone who wanted to know what happened on Britain’s Got Talent heard about it within seconds of its airing. In short, market demand dramatically outpaced supply.
The spread of Susan Boyle demonstrates how content not designed to circulate beyond a contained market or timed for rapid global distribution can gain much greater visibility than ever before, thanks to the active circulation of various grassroots agents, while television networks and production companies struggle to keep up with such unexpected, rapidly escalating demand.
The case also allows us to challenge the commonplace assertion that, in the era of Web 2.0, user-generated content has somehow displaced mass media in the cultural lives of everyday people. Lucas Hilderbrand notes, “For mass audiences, broadcast, cable and satellite television still dominate, […] and network content will continue to feed these streams. And I suspect that for many audiences, network content—new or old—still drives users to YouTube, and amateur content is discovered along the way, through the suggested links, alternative search results, or forwarded emails” (2007, 50). What Hilderbrand’s account misses, though, is that much of the mass-media content encountered on YouTube and other such platforms is unauthorized—not so much user-generated content as user-circulated content. While audiences’ sharing and spreading of Susan Boyle’s video may still fit within the broad logic of capitalism, the capacity of audiences to alter the circulation of content is nevertheless causing consternation for companies and artists trying to figure out how to reshape broadcast business and marketing models or to design new businesses altogether. In cases where bottom-up activities have not been ordained by content creators, various corporate entities have labeled many of these activities “piracy” or “infringement”—even when unauthorized forms of sharing create value for both the people circulating the material and those who created it, as was clearly the case with the Boyle video.
Piracy is a concept that will surface repeatedly throughout the book, and every reader will probably draw the line between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” practices at different points. In fact, one of the problems of the current use of “piracy” is that it shortcuts important conversations we should all be having about the economic and cultural impact of different types of media sharing. Such discussions might draw on legal notions that consider the nature of the use (commercial or noncommercial, education or entertainment), the degree to which the use is transformative, the portion of the work being taken, and so forth in determining what constitutes piracy.
As a rule, though, we are reserving the term “pirate” in this book for people who profit economically from the unauthorized sale of content produced by others. This is not a legal distinction but a moral one that matters for many of those whose activities we will discuss. Yet, as the Boyle example suggests, piracy is as much a consequence of the market failures of media companies to make content available in a timely and desirable manner as it is a consequence of the moral failure of audience members seeking meaningful content by hook or by crook if it is not legally available. We will thus make the case that the appropriation and recirculation of even entire works may sometimes work in the best interests of not only the culture at large but also of the rights holders.
One can only speculate whether Boyle’s album and career could have been even more successful or whether Britain’s Got Talent could have been a transnational hit had the show’s producers been prepared to react quickly to this clip’s spread. The failure to reconceptualize the way Britain’s Got Talent circulates reduced