Spreadable media is a theory of how media is distributed in online culture, but is the theory, originally proposed in 2013, still relevant in 2023 when everyone is trying to “go viral” online? We take a deep dive at the theory, and look at how at it’s core it is really a question of value, and how competing ways of determining the value of a cultural good continually clash against one another.
Music for this episode provided by Calvin Becker, and one of his bands, the UnderLites. You can listen to them at www.theunderlites.com and you should check out his music at calvinbecker.com
https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14074904-implausipod-e0016-spreadable-media
Transcript:
Hey, have you heard about this new podcast? It’s pretty cool. I think you might like it. Let me share it with you. Welcome to an age of spreadable media, which we’ll discuss on episode 16 of the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible.
So what is spreadable media? It seems important to start by defining our terms. Spreadable media is any media that can be shared, whether online or otherwise. That’s it. Good night, everybody.
Okay, maybe there’s a little bit more to it than that. But as authors Jenkins, Ford, and Green state in their book from 2013, spreadable media is quote “Anything that can be used to describe the increasingly pervasive forms of media’s circulation. Spreadability refers to the potential, both technical and cultural, for audiences to share content for their own purposes.
Sometimes with the permissions of right holders, sometimes against their wishes.” End quote.
Reading that now, ten years later, in an era of TikTok and Instagram and AI generated art tools, it seems like the correct response is like, well, yeah, duh, but at the time it was describing something that had yet come to pass and was mostly just in its earliest incipient stages.
And the authors reflected on the impact of their work in their 2018 paperback version of the same text. And it’s that one that I’ll be mostly referring to during the course of this episode. In an era of digital media and online content creators, of influencers and internet micro celebrities, where a lot of the content production and distribution has shifted off online, often driven by the pandemic and the response to it, it seems that the world they predicted has come to pass.
Now, perhaps the pandemic accelerated the shift online that was already happening by about a decade where programs were in place were rapidly accelerated much the same way that Y2K hastened the upgrading of PC equipment and that in turn led to the dot com boom that was largely driven by those corporate expenditures into renewing and updating their systems.
And there’s something to be said for that as well. The crisis drives investment and opportunity, but we’re not going to get into Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine and work on disaster capitalism, at least not in this episode. Before we go too far off on a tangent, perhaps some introductions about our authors are in order.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Now. Spreadable Media was co authored with two others, Sam Ford, who’s a media consultant, and Joshua Green, who’s a research consultant as well, and had worked with Henry Jenkins prior.
I’m just going off the About the Authors page here from the text. But the primary focus of reference will be towards Jenkins. I have two of Jenkins books, both Spreadable Media and Convergence Culture, and those have informed some of my work on the role of storytelling and media in the development of innovation and technology.
Even though I’m not really a fan cultures researcher, or at least I haven’t been particularly focused on fan cultures in the past, that’s where Henry Jenkins initially made his mark. His early work on fan culture was foundational for that genre of research, and a lot of work that he’s done subsequently on things like comic studies, video games, and the like, has really grown up with those mediums, and as such, he’s continually cited as a key figure in some of the academic work that’s been done in those areas.
You can see echoes of that influence in the work we’ve been doing on some of the cyberpunk literature, as well as the show reviews, and the development of the Appendix W. We’ll also come back to this idea a few weeks from now in a future episode, when we talk about the role that cyberpunk literature had in the development of the VR systems going back and forth between real world creators and science fiction literature and how that ended up forming the development.
So the work that Henry Jenkins has done on transmedia storytelling has formed some of my own work or inform some of my own work academically and shows up again in some of the current work we’re doing here as a foundational text. And if all this background information can be thought of as like a framework, then we can get into what we’re talking about when we’re looking at spreadable media as a whole.
At its core, Spreadable Media is about engagement, and it looks at the history and development of this phenomenon with respect to media flow. We haven’t touched a whole lot on flow yet, from early studies and theories of it, to how it was operationalized in the 80s by the likes of Moses Znaimer. On stations like MuchMusic in Canada, there flow was seen as a constant circulation of content, blurring the distinction between programming and the surrounding material, with a never-ending river of material popping up freshly in front of the viewers regardless of the time of day they tuned in.
This wasn’t just limited to music video stations either, and the continual flow found its way to cable news networks as well. Fast forward to the 21st century and the shift to online distribution, and there is a shift to hybrid models of delivery as well. It wasn’t just top-down material that was being circulated, but also bottom up, user created content.
This hybrid model of circulation, of the interplay between major creators, audiences, and fans, and the shift between online and offline methods of viewing or consuming, have radically changed the patterns and flows of the content, and how that content is valued as well. The book covers a huge swath of topics and examples in its case studies, providing evidence for their overarching thesis.
Through the chapters, which cover media companies and audiences, how content is reappraised, how audiences are measured and how they participate, and how this spreadability can be designed for in a diverse and increasingly transnational media landscape. We’ve covered some of the elements of this in earlier episodes of the podcast, and I’ll refer you back to those episodes in the show notes.
But for now, we’re going to focus on what’s actually within the text, and we’ll dive deeper into Spreadable media. Now, spreadability comes from Jenkins’s idea of participatory culture, which he is writing about in his earlier works. We can see it in the book, Convergence Culture, as well as the stuff he is writing in the late nineties and early two thousands.
It’s an idea that’s particular to the web 2.0 culture that was endemic in the mid to late 20 aughts. That’s a weird way to phrase it, but you know, 2005 to 2010, roughly, give or take, it’s that timeline where we were seeing the rise of Facebook and other social media apps, as we’ve talked about before. And I think this is a given based on when it was written as the web 3.0 or blockchain web was still in its incipient stages in 2013, when the authors were working on this. And as that is now, it looks like it isn’t going to come to pass. This is still kind of that. Interactive web model that is still what we have, but it was very much coming into vogue in the early two thousands.
Now, spreadability is focused on producing content and producing it in easy to share formats. Now I know there’s some people that kind of chafe at the idea of anything that they produce as being content or labeled as content. It might be art or, you know, a book, music, what have you, but that’s a longer discussion.
In the terms of Douglas Rushkoff, we’d say that content is just a medium for interaction between people and mediums are what allows for spreadability. It’s possible through the use of media. A medium in this case is any tool that can be used by anybody to deliver the various forms of media or what we now call content.
And so because we’re looking at this idea of content being readily available, easier to produce and easy to share. We have a rich landscape for a participatory culture to actually, you know, take place in. So we can see how this is kind of linked to the rise of what we might call the everything app, things like Twitter or TikTok or Facebook, Instagram apps that allow a little bit of everything, whether it’s text or music or video or what have you to be shared.
They all allow for spreadable media and for participatory culture to happen. Now, where Jenkins and his co authors found this was in the river, in the flood, in the fast flowing waters of popular culture. They were investigating entertainment fandom, things like video games and comic books and pro wrestling, and they used that because Fandom was a reference point because fan groups were often, as they said, innovators in using participatory platforms to organize and respond to media texts.
And you can look at this in any new media platform as it comes along, you’ll find furries and Dungeons and Dragons players and again, wrestling fans, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s Usenet or Facebook, TikTok or wherever, as a new medium comes around, those fan groups will engage with it and use it to share the stuff that they’d like. They’re constantly sharing, shaping, reframing, and remixing the media content. And I think I kind of got some of those backwards, but that’s the overarching quote.
Now there’s different types of spreadable media and the media theorist Karcher talks about this. You can have media that’s original, it’s created from scratch. It could be a media that’s altered, which has changed in some way before being circulated. And then media that exists as-is, which is circulated before any alterations are made.
And so we can see this as stuff that fans produce for themselves, stuff that they alter, put on a filter, pass around, or, you know, see something cool, and then share that with their friend group. But it might be something that arrived from somebody else from some other creator. So it’s a cultural thing that’s going on, and the culture is part of what’s happening with grassroots audiences and how they practice it. The subcultures and cultures spread media based on, you know, their jokes, their parody, their references, rumors, controversy, whatever, you know, shared fantasies that they might have.
And that’s from Jenkins again, in page 202. So this all ties into the development of what Bourdieu calls like social capital and allows for what we might call homophilic bonding. That people share their experiences, their nostalgia, their youth, and this sparks the exchange of memories. So for older groups, like say Boomers or Gen X, it might be TV shows that they remember from when they were young, from like the 60s to 80s.
And for younger groups, it’s still, you know, cartoons or things they grew up with or video games. Or anything without that. And when you go to a medium where you don’t know everybody else, and all of a sudden you start sharing like Monty Python jokes, and then you find out where your tribe is, right. It builds new relationships in areas where you might not know anybody, but you at least can share some of the jokes and share some of the references.
You’re like Captain America finding your way in the, you know, in the two thousands, but, you know, at least, “Hey, I recognize that reference!”, right. But as we’re moving a little bit deeper into the episode, a few things should start to be becoming apparent. One is that spreadable media is a lot deeper than just media that can be passed around, as I joked at the beginning of the episode.
And two is that not all media is necessarily good for sharing, is good for being spreadable. So let’s look into what some of the prerequisites are. We talked about some of the platform conditions and that ties into that, but we’ll go into the list here that Jenkins and his coauthors has. There’s a long list of key attributes that exist in both the introduction as well as their conclusion.
And this can include things like the internet enabling the power of the user to actually go out and share stuff. Platforms making it easy through share buttons or other means that allow them to pass media to their audience or a specific audience including friends, family and others. And The public being savvy enough to actually carry out these actions.
If everybody just views it and passes and moves on, it doesn’t actually help if they don’t actually share it. There’s other things that might be required, like collaboration between the producers, marketers, the audience, what we might now call influencers. And the motivation and facilitation of sharing that actually exists and a culture that allows for diversified experiences, open ended participation, and the flow of ideas.
Now, a lot of creators, especially traditional creators might not want to allow this. There’s certain bands [cough] the eagles that really don’t like their stuff to be shared and will issue copyright strikes for covers or anybody, you know, showing that on YouTube. So this is kind of contrary to the requirements for spreadable media.
It’s often in the interest of creators to allow such free sharing because even though it breaks the copyrights, as Mogenson points out in a supplementary article, media products can only resonate as long as they are shared. As Jenkins and others point out, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead”. Now, there’s some challenges to this, obviously, because this goes against copyright law and some other systems that are put in place to protect creators and rights holders and others.
As author Kirsten Mogenson points out, the authors use, E. P. Thompson’s idea of a “moral economy”. This is like the social norms and mutual understandings that allow for two parties to conduct business. Now, This is, you know, Moog, uh, Thompson, sorry, was looking at like 18th century business practices, but it’s something that’s stuck with us to this day.
It’s that social contract that we really think about. The authors also talk about Lewis Hyde’s work on the relationship between commodity economy and the gift economy. So within it, we can see that a commodity has a value where the gift has worth. And so this relates to the gift economy and the idea of sharing.
So people can share in, share out, and then cross share. So with that risk with respect to their groups, and that allows them to extract some value with it. So gift giving itself has a set of norms around it. And often these are reciprocal. Some companies will break those social norms, that social contract, and they treat the data of those commodities as something that can be bought and sold in the market.
End quote. There are challenges between the shared assumptions of the audiences that Social contract and then how things work, especially with respect to the large media companies. If I’m giving a gift and we’ve talked about how like gift giving is a communal practice back in our episode on recursive publics a few weeks ago, if I’m giving a gift and someone breaks those expectations about the practice of gifting, the social contract around it, then we’re going to have some problems. And even if there’s a legal right, then there might be a rejection of that property or brand or universe or whatever, by those whose expectations weren’t met. And hopefully that we can see how this whole thing ties into the question of how goods have value and especially cultural goods, how we value them.
This is, I can’t stress this enough. This is going to be the key point of spreadable media in this episode. We’re going to loop back to this near the end and I hope all the threads kind of come together, but I really want to kind of pinpoint this at this point in time.
So the challenge is like, how do you value, uh, Cultural or a media good, right? How do you appraise its value? And we have different ways of doing that. For some things it can be like reach, or we’ll talk about like the Nielsen ratings for a TV show or sales for a book, something like that. But. But that’s stuff that’s like new and current. How do you deal with stuff that already exists? Goods that have what the author’s mark as a residual value. It’s the everything, everywhere, all at once problem. Not the movie, but the context collapse that we talked about a few episodes ago as well. If everything’s already available and the new stuff has to compete with the old stuff and everything exists out there in the marketplace, like, do you have different ways that you value these different things?
It’s, it’s a really tricky question now within say the. Capitalist Realist framework that we kind of have, everything just kind of breaks down to value, sorry, to dollars, but that doesn’t necessarily work when you have a gift economy that’s working in parallel with the commodity economy and they have different regimes that kind of determine the value.
The lines between them get very blurry is Jenkins at all note on about page 90 and when you put online transactions into that as well, and it blurs even further still.
Now, when it comes to spreadable media, as anyone who’s ever tried to put honey on their toast knows, there can be a challenge with it, depending on how smooth or liquid the honey is, right? And this is what Grant McCracken calls fast culture. Sometimes you’ll have videos or other cultural artifacts that are moving at such a rapid rate that the spread becomes highly visible and trackable, while other, other videos in this case, represent slow culture, which is like evergreen material that constantly bubbles up again.
And you can see this on a video platform like TikTok or YouTube or Instagram Reels, where you’ll have things that are like really going for lack of a better term, viral. and then people jump on it. And then stuff that’s often from traditional media that just gets continually re reused, reposted, and everybody kind of knows the joke and that’s fine.
Now you’ll have the idea of what’s been mentioned there as a cool hunter, which is looking for, you know, what’s hot and hip, and that’s the fast culture that they’re bringing for it. And there’s been a lot of study on this. The Cool Hunters will also often look at the subcultures that are actually existing.
And if we look at the subcultures, we can see how there’s been a lot of work there, starting with the Burningham School of Cultural Studies, with the works of Stuart Hall, John Clark, and others in 76, and then Dick Hebdige’s work on subcultures in 79. There’s a lot of work done on those cultural practices. and I think we really just have to put a pin in it and saying that spreadable media is really contingent upon the speed, and velocity that’s taking place with respect to the distribution of the media.
And a lot of the ways this takes place is in the cultural practices, right? And this was, we talked about earlier with respect to like the communal practices of sharing, but Raymond Williams has a quote about different types of cultural practices and Jenkins et al. talk about that here. There’s four types of cultural practice, whether it’s emergent, dominant, residual, or archaic. And there’s interesting things that take place with all of them. So we can see something new like a TikTok or YouTube as being an emergent practice, whereas the dominant one in our case would still be something like television.
And then residual practices or archaic practices are where things in this case, the residual ones where stuff is the dominant culture, neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize.
We can think of it in terms of music of things that are say old fashioned, like, I don’t know, jazz. It still exists, but it’s in a residual form. Not as many people are into jazz, but it still can have effect. And occasionally it does get mined again and, you know, brought back to the fore by emergent media that are looking for new ideas.
Now, the thing is, is that A lot of the work that’s done on either those residual or archaic forms of media are no longer done for any monetary reason. I mean, yes, there’s people that are doing classical music or jazz or what have you, and they are expecting some kind of remuneration, but in a lot of instances, that’s no longer the case.
It’s done for the learning. It’s done for the fun. It’s done for play. And because that play, that work is often done without expectation of profit or remuneration, it’s freely given. It’s in that gift economy. And then all of a sudden, when somebody comes around and derives value from that, there’s some ethical challenges as Jenkins et al notes, when there’s profiting from a freely given creative labor, then in the long run, that can be socially damaging to both the companies and the communities involved.
And as they know that playful participation, if this continues, can turn into alienated work over time. And we’ll see that with things like Spotify, with a lot of artists being on there, not being successfully remunerated for the labor that they’re doing in the creative industries. Now, people can still do things for the love of it, as Richard Sennett notes, workers often had pride in their craft, in the work that they’re producing, even if that’s.
You know, different from the alienated labor of classical economic models, but getting back to our honey example here, I think the thing to remember is that not all content is created equal and not all good content is necessarily good for sharing.
Good spreadable content, much like honey, will have a number of characteristics. Spreadable content should be open with loose ends and gaps that make it possible for an active audience to interpret it in the light of their own experiences. And for the same reasons, journalistic news writing and scientific papers are seldom considered spreadable, or at least that was the case in 2013.
We’ve seen massive shifts within journalism in the last 10 years to make it more approachable, more spreadable, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing. And we’ll get into that, I think, in a future episode. There’s a bit here in Jenkins et al about the reason for Twitter’s early success. And in light of the changes of that have been happening with Twitter that we’ve discussed on earlier, and I want to go into it.
The popularity of Twitter that they state, for instance, was driven by how efficiently the site facilitates the types of resource sharing, conversation, and coordination that communities have long engaged in. The site’s early success owes little to official brand presence. Big name entertainment properties, companies, and celebrities began flocking to the micro blogging platform only after its success was considered buzzworthy.
But we can go further into the idea of adoption curves at some other point in time. The main takeaway here is that not everything that’s mass-produced mass-media is necessarily part of the popular culture. There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s very niche. And in order to get out of that niche, you may need to be spreadable.
And so in addition to describing what spreadable is, Jenkins et al provide some tips for the creators. Continuing with John Fiske’s ideas here on popular culture the idea is that there’s this producerly content. Now, fiske was extending Barthes idea when it comes to media, specifically writing, that there’s readerly media, well that’s a bit of a tongue twister, and writerly texts. And these are understood through the practices they invite.
So this kind of applies Don Norman’s idea of affordances to cultural artifacts, basically. So readerly texts are those that invite a passive reception, they’re text as is, you don’t have to do much more than read it. Writerly texts in the parlance is those that encourage engaged use, where you really have to dig in and participate in the construction of meaning from the text.
They’re a little bit more challenging. So Fiske adds the idea of a producerly text. a popularly, a popular writerly text. So it sits in the middle ground between these two. They’re not necessarily challenging to read, but it offers itself up for engaged use. These are the type of texts that we often see in like sci-fi and genre media, where there’s a lot of fan fiction written about it.
It sits in the middle between these things, but it allows for an engaged audience and so when we see stuff that’s shared widely or is spread widely, often there’s these producerly texts. Producerly introduces guiding principles for transforming commodities into cultural resources. Again, that openness, the loose ends, and the gaps we talked about.
And the reader’s own experiences are key. And consumers, or readers in this case, are engaged, right? They don’t simply consume, they recommend what they’d like. They’re curators about the type of stuff that they’re engaged with. And if they’re engaged with it, they’ll spread it. So this goes back to Jenkins’s quote, that if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
But the other thing Jenkins notes, and I quote, is that sometimes producers would rather die than give up control. Control is heavily tied to how things are valued. If you’re looking to monetize media as a commodity, then you want to maintain that ownership and not necessarily let it get away.
Now, one of the ways that it’s useful to understand something is to contrast it with something that it’s not. And the authors repeatedly state that spreadability is in contrast to another model of media distribution, in this case, stickiness. And there’s a lot of familiarity with stickiness. It was originally popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the Tipping Point in 2000.
And it resembles the impressions model that has shaped the measurement of audiences for broadcast content and a lot of content online as well. Now we’ve gone in depth into that in our discussion on the audience commodity, but spreadability contrasts with the stickiness in terms of how stickiness will aggregate media in a centralized place.
Spreadability allows for decentralization, which is similar in things to like the Fediverse. Stickiness generally requires fidelity. It needs to be the same thing for everybody to see it. Whereas a spreadable model, the original copy, whether it’s text or visual or audio or whatever, the information doesn’t need to be replicated perfectly in order to display the characteristics of spreadability.
And sometimes that lack of fidelity allows for the spreadability, allows for those gaps for people to add their own bit to it. The funny thing is, is that stickiness has managed to stick a little bit better in terms of audience retention. It’s a lot more what people think about. And as we said, it drives a lot of the marketing and ad industry that funds the current, you know, advertising web.
So this stickiness also has deep links to another alternative model of distribution. The viral model, and this is the one most people think about now, when you think about something going viral on the web, whether, whether it was on the former Twitter or YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, that idea that it’s spread spreads rapidly is something that does capture the speed with which the ideas circulate through the internet, but it’s still a bit of a misnomer. It isn’t really necessarily viral per se. And I’m going to quote a bit here that the authors wrote about the circulation of viral media. And I want to emphasize for context that they wrote this in 2013.
So reading this in 2023 is a bit of a shock. The authors state that 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. As I said, clearly written before 2020, but interesting nonetheless in hindsight, we all now bring something completely different to that quote in 2023.
Now the idea of virality in media had existed for a long time prior. Jenkins et al note that it existed in sci fi properties like Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and in 1994 Douglas Rushkoff wrote Media Virus. In that he said that “media material can act as a Trojan horse Spreading without the user’s conscious consent people are duped into passing a hidden agenda”. This has ties to the hypodermic needle model, the media distribution, and where the people are, you know, passive receptors to whatever’s being transmitted, it’s tied heavily to theories of propaganda, and it was kind of endemic throughout the 20th century, echoed in both that and the viral model, or how people are dupes who may be susceptible to it, in this case, the virus, and pass it along unwittingly, you know.
In 2023, we as a public have learned a little bit more about pandemics and the behavior of crowds, and not everyone is a passive transmitter, while others might be a little bit more active in trying to aid the transmission and spread. But the way we can understand this it, this thing gets passed around, is as the driver behind internet content, the meme.
Now, the idea of a meme is much more than just a biological metaphor for culture as a virus. If we take a look at how Dawkins originally proposed it in 1976, The Selfish Gene, and then how it’s been understood and readapted since then, and especially applied to the internet culture, that would be enough material for a whole episode on its own.
So we don’t want to go into that in too much depth. Really we’re just going to take a look at Jenkins et al and their critique of it. What they say is that: “While the idea of the meme is a compelling one, it may not adequately account for how content circulates through participatory culture. The idea of a self replicating culture is oxymoronic, as culture is a human product and replicates through human agency.”
Now, I’m going to contest that a little bit, and I think maybe when we get to doing a memetics episode, we’ll go into it in a lot more depth. I think there are some issues with the idea of memetics as a whole, but again, that’s far outside the scope of this particular episode. My work in 2010, which predates this book, I found the effect of media being inscribed in artifacts was pretty significant actually.
And that’s something that’s, I guess, more easily understood or affordable than spreadability. And I think stickiness is kind of the factor we need to look at. What Jenkins and all critique is they say that the viral metaphor does little to describe situations in which people actively assess a media text, deciding what, who to share it with and how to pass it along.
They say that spreadable media needs to be understood in evolutionary rather than revolutionary terms. And I’m a little bit confused because Evolutionary terms is exactly what memetics is about. Needless to say it’s complex and that there’s a lot more to go into on this one in particular, but the questions we have with respect to spreadable media is: why is nobody talking about it anymore? Have we moved from an era of spreadable media or is it still with us? Did it fall out of use or did it just come to pass?
And this is as I stated at the outset Obvious and just how we assume everything works in the culture nowadays But since the publication of the paperback version of Spreadable Media in 2018, there’s been a couple of significant events that the authors likely could not have foretold.
The first item is, as Metzger points out in 2018, that fake news is perfect for spreadability. And as we’re now kind of existing in a post truth always online era, where there’s a lot of fake news going around, spreadability is happening. Now at the time, the authors were suggesting that sharing culture may be an antidote for that, that sharing in culture has increased media literacy as the public has become more individually and collectively literate about social platforms and their ability to construct identities online.
But while I agree with them that the populace is becoming more media literate. I don’t necessarily know if that’s a contrast to fake news. Yes, we can assume that there’s production going into it, but as they say, a lie spreads across the world before truth puts on its pants and gets out of bed. It’s moving so quickly and so rapidly that the ability to combat fake news is severely curtailed and it still is a massive problem. And that ties into other things that we’re about to see as well.
And the second challenge is the one that ties all of our threads together. Questions about ownership and value and how much things are worth have been embedded throughout this episode. And as the shutdowns imposed by the pandemic response in 2020 changed the livelihoods for a number of individuals, we Collectively had to grapple with the idea of the value of a digital good and how to make a living on digital products.
Now, this has been something that’s been going on for quite some time, but when it comes to the value of the participatory labor, the work that’s done by the groups that are responsible for spreading and sharing the media. They’re particularly alienated from it. They’re removed from the fruits of that labor.
And this is especially telling in markets like say Spotify and the minuscule amounts that it’s paying creators. So if you’re not, and if you don’t have a lot of shares or streams, then you’re hardly seeing anything at all, or like the lack of a creator fund in Canada for producers on TikTok, or other ways that those who create value might be separated from the payouts of it.
This could be seen as anything like AR creators or effects creators, voiceover artists, anything are separated from their ability to reap those monetary rewards. There’s access over ownership that also ties it to it, especially for work that’s done with regards to existing IPs: who actually does the work here? who’s creating it? who’s creating the value?
And so we see this all across fan created communities and properties, and there’s been solutions and some of those solutions have seen large amounts of uptake, but that uptake has challenges in it of itself. I mean, it’s a serious question. How do you value digital art?
And since 2018, since the publication of this book, there has been a model that was used. Whether it was for text or audio or video images online, there was valuation applying to that in the form of an NFT.
As I’m recording this, recently reported on the Guardian at the end of September, 2023, the challenge is that at that time, nearly 95 percent of all NFTs have a floor value of zero. They’re functionally worthless. And this is a problem, is that there’s an incredible amount of investment that was sucked up and, and, you know, put into the NFTs, but they haven’t retained the value.
I think going deeper into the whole crisis around NFTs, and what happened is it provided a solution to the valuation of a digital product in a commodity culture. But it was co-opted, and cratered and is now effectively valueless. So if that was one solution, what are other ways to deal with this?
And then finally, the last challenge for spreadable media is the one that’s been recurrent in 2022 and 2023. We’re getting close to being one year since the launch of chat GPT and it’s launch has driven massive strikes within Hollywood and the entertainment community. People see AI tools as profiting off freely available content, content that was spreadable or shareable prior, and others have used that now to mine, to create these models, whether it’s for language or art, generative text, and there’s a question of where the copyright resides and who’s responsible if it was freely available is it free for anybody to use? And if that’s so what happens to the artists who created it?
This basically shut down Hollywood for the summer of 2023 and as we said it’ll also contribute to fake news going into 2023 and 24 and beyond but we have challenges about what the use and value of spreadable media is in the 21st century. We don’t have answers to all those questions yet.
Wow. So, 40 minutes, I think this is our longest episode yet, and it might be for quite some time. As hinted throughout the episode, there’s a dozen different ways we can take this, and it’ll likely spin off through any or all of those directions here in the near future. But If you did stick with us till now, I want to bring to light one thing in the interest of spreadability and shareability.
You might’ve noticed that the musical interludes were different this year, and that’s because they were provided by a friend of mine, Mr. Calvin Becker. You can check him out at calvinbecker. com online and look for his music. It’s wonderful music that’s been shared with us, and in the interest, again, of spreading the media that we enjoy. We’d like to share that with you.
Once again, this has been the Implausipod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. All research, writing, recording, and editing is by me. And once again, the music provided by Calvin Becker. Take care. We’ll talk to you soon.
