Spreadable Media. Henry Jenkins
Читать онлайн книгу.
multiethnic dance troupe Diversity won the season rather than Boyle. This case not only demonstrates the cultural and technological system at the core of a networked culture but also the inability of the media industries—whose structure and models are still largely configured to a “broadcast” and “sticky” mentality—to actively listen and respond to unanticipated interest in their material.
We’ve Found a Cure for Viral Media!
As we question how and why content circulates today, it is all too easy to accept an inadequate answer, a theory of media distribution that makes a media text sound more like a smallpox-infected blanket. Many observers described the Susan Boyle phenomenon as an example of “viral media,” a term whose popularity has been fueled by the rapid rise of social network sites alongside declining advertising rates and an extremely fragmented audience for broadcast media.
Viral metaphors do capture the speed with which new ideas circulate through the Internet. The top-down hierarchies of the broadcast era now coexist with the integrated system of participatory channels described earlier in the chapter which have increased access to tools for communication and publishing. As marketers and media companies struggle to make sense of this transformed media landscape, one of the most common explanations is that media content now disseminates like a pandemic—spreading through audiences by infecting person after person who comes into contact with it. Even if the media industries must accept the shift from an environment where people congregate around media texts to a context where audiences do the circulating, they hope to preserve creator control. The promise is simple, if deceptive: create a media virus, and success will be yours. Thus, marketers and media distributors that are unsure of how to reach audiences through traditional “broadcast” or “sticky” methods now pray material will “go viral.”
The term “viral” first appeared in science fiction stories, describing (generally bad) ideas that spread like germs. Something of the negative consequences of this simplified understanding of the viral are suggested by this passage from Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Snow Crash: “We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban Legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information” (1992, 399). Here, the viral is linked to the “irrational,” the public is described as “susceptible” to its “pull,” and participants become unknowing “hosts” of the information they carry across their social networks.2
Echoing this theme, Douglas Rushkoff’s 1994 book Media Virus argues that media material can act as a Trojan horse, spreading without the user’s conscious consent; people are duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content. Rushkoff writes that certain “media events are not like viruses. They are viruses,” and such a virus seeks “to spread its own code as far and wide as possible—from cell to cell and from organism to organism” (1994, 9; emphasis in original). There is an implicit and often explicit proposition that the spread of ideas and messages can occur without users’ consent and perhaps actively against their conscious resistance; people are duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content.
This notion of the media as virus taps a larger discussion that compares systems of cultural distribution to biological systems. Rushkoff describes the culture through which modern U.S. residents navigate as a “datasphere” or “mediaspace”—“a new territory for human interaction, economic expansion, and especially social and political machination”—that has arisen because of the rapid expansion of communication and media technologies (1994, 4). He writes,
Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But, instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The “protein shell” of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero—as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code—not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call “memes.” (9–10)
This theme of comparing the spread of cultural material to biological processes extends beyond the “virus” metaphor. In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, famed British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the “meme,” which was to become both an incredibly important and incredibly overused idea, just like its viral companion. The meme is a cultural equivalent to the gene—the smallest evolutionary unit. “Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission,” Dawkins argues (1976, 189), writing,
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. (192)
Dawkins notes in later editions (1989, 2006) that the notion of the meme has itself spread in memelike fashion—it provides a compelling way to understand the dispersion of cultural movements, especially when seemingly innocuous or trivial trends spread and die in rapid fashion. In a moment when the meme pool—the cultural soup which Dawkins describes as the site where memes grow—is overflowing with ideas, being able to create or harness a meme seems to promise anyone the chance to ride the waves of participatory culture.
However, while the idea of the meme is a compelling one, it may not adequately account for how content circulates through participatory culture. While Dawkins stresses that memes (like genes) aren’t wholly independent agents, many accounts of memes and viral media describe media texts as “self-replicating.” This concept of “self-replicating” culture is oxymoronic, though, as culture is a human product and replicates through human agency.
Simplified versions of these discussions of “memes” and “media viruses” have given the media industries a false sense of security at a time when the old attention economy has been in flux. Such terms promise a pseudoscientific model of audience behavior. The way these terms are now used mystify the way material spreads, leading professional communicators on quixotic quests to create “viral content.”
The term “viral marketing” was first popularized in relation to Hotmail in 1995, after the creators of the service used the phrase to describe why their service gained millions of users within months (Jurvetson and Draper 1997). At the bottom of every email sent, a marketing message appeared which offered, “Get your free Web-based email at Hotmail.” The term described the process well. People communicated and—in the process—sent along a marketing message, often without realizing it had happened.
Yet the viral metaphor does little to describe situations in which people actively assess a media text, deciding who to share it with and how to pass it along. People make many active decisions when spreading media, whether simply passing content to their social network, making a word-of-mouth recommendation, or posting a mash-up video to YouTube. Meanwhile, active audiences have shown a remarkable ability to circulate advertising slogans and jingles against their originating companies or to hijack popular stories to express profoundly different interpretations from those of their authors.
“Viral marketing,” stretched well beyond its original meanings, has been expected to describe all these phenomena in the language of passive and involuntary transmission. Its precise meaning no longer clear, “viral media” gets invoked in discussions about buzz marketing and building brand recognition while also popping up in discussions about guerrilla marketing, exploiting social network sites, and mobilizing audiences and distributors.
Ironically, this rhetoric of passive audiences becoming infected by a media virus gained widespread traction at the same time as a shift toward greater