Jenkins, Green, Ford — Designing for spreadability

• First off, nobody can guarantee something will go viral. C’mon, man
  • To be fair, Mekanism has a good handle on their audience (the youth)
• Spreadability is determined by “process of social appraisal”, “active participation of engaged audiences”. This doesn’t mean that media artefacts can’t be designed to optimise their chances of virality
• The uncertainty principle
  • Difficulty of predicting and measuring success – even demand is foggy
  • Response in entertainment media industries has been to overproduce i.e. throw as much at the wall as they can and hope enough sticks to turn a profit. Sequels are a big part of this, hoping to see some of the cash from the popular original. See also: the seventeen new Alvin and the Chipmunks features
  • This favours spreadable media in particular because audiences hold it to a different standard of production quality, meaning it can manufacture even more media. This is why nobody minds that Friendlyjordies sets most of his videos on his porch
  • In this day and age, content is more likely to succeed and spread if…
    • It’s on-demand (YouTube)
    • It’s easy to share (quotable and grabbable)
    • It’s reusable (gif potential)
    • It’s widely relevant (maximise potential audience)
    • It’s regular (hit subscribe!)
  • Good, potentially viral media pays attention to the “patterns and motivation of media circulation”
• Perceived value is deeply important, which is why juice brands work with weird, rich, beautiful teenagers on Instagram
• Spreadability feeds into lifestyle – I define myself as the kind of person who drinks fancy juice, I want to align myself with these beautiful juice people
• Rushkoff: “Content is just a medium for interaction between people”
• Producerly texts and cultural resources
  • Fiske: mass culture v popular culture which is “meaningfully integrated into peoples’ lives”
  • Messages are encoded into content and then decoded from a text. Audiences will interpret meaning whether producers like it or not and often deviate from the intended meaning. This is why fanfiction is so terrifying
  • Although a friend of mine wrote an 80,000 Harry Potter fanfiction this one time and she’s pretty switched on so I guess they’re not all awful. I haven’t read it but I’d really like to
  • How to nudge media artefacts into cultural resource status: openness that affords the audience an opportunity to see their own experiences in it, add something of themselves to it
  • Sidebar: this text references somebody called Grant McCracken and that, without doubt, is the best name I have ever heard
  • Traditional branding theory: “controlling meaning rather than inspiring circulation”. Anti-meme culture
• Highly spreadable content
  • Shared fantasies: nostalgia, aspirational lifestyles, OTP nonsense
  • Humour: dangerous territory – requires intimate understanding of the publics’ ethical codes. If it works, audience will build upon the joke, often through parodies
  • Parody and references: respect and understanding of the community
  • Unfinished content: interaction, puzzle-solving
  • Mystery: is it genuine? Is this a real person or an actor?
  • Timely controversy: a rallying cry
  • Rumours: if people think your chicken brand is owned by the KKK, watch out

Gambarato – Signs, Systems and the Complexity of Transmedia Storytelling

• Signs have an “open nature”, can really be anything
• Interact with the sign first, which stands for an object and is then interpreted
  • Substitute > object > context
• Signs as intersection and means of exploring the internal and external (mind and physical world)
• System: the idea of the total of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts
• There’s a lot of Latin in this reading
• Uh oh, here’s Aristotle
• A system is made up of its composition (what’s in it), environment (context) and structure (how the composition and environment relate)
• Open and closed systems (with or without an external structure)
  • What’s an external structure, you ask? Well, Gambarato never really clarifies so you get to guess! Isn’t this fun.
  • I’m assuming he means the possibility for public collaboration
• Seriously, am I stupid or is Gambarato assuming a whole lot of prior knowledge? Maybe / probably both
• Supersystem, system and subsystem entwined in transmedia storytelling
  • Supersystem: the entire transmedia experience – the universe
  • System: means of experiencing this world, platforms
  • Subsystem: character, plot etc
• Cultural attractors “draw together a community” and cultural activators give them “something to do”
• Lance Weiler, who clearly wasn’t paid enough attention as a child, declares: “Audience is dead”.
  • His point about a shift from passivity to collaboration is better