Grats 2023

Quick update from the ‘pod for the holidays:

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14195452-grats-2023

 Hey, everybody, it’s Dr. Implausible. Thanks for joining us here on the eve before the eve before Christmas on the Implausipod. We’ll have a new episode coming up for you soon on the Doctor Who 2023 Christmas special, but in the meantime, I just wanted to reach out and say thanks to everybody who’s been listening to us over the past year and a half.

I’m going to read out some names: thank you, I appreciate you. If you recognize any of the names that I read out here, just know: I’m listening. I feel seen and feel heard and that’s really encouraging. So if you’re here from Victoria, British Columbia; Portland, Oregon; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Prairie Village, Kansas; Fredericton, New Brunswick; Winter Park, Florida; or Valmo, Kronenberg County, Sweden; Newcastle, Delaware.

St. Catherines, Ontario; Montreal, Quebec; Toronto, or Vancouver, British Columbia; I appreciate you. Thanks for everything you do. Wichita, Kansas, I don’t know why Wichita is listening to me, but I appreciate you too. Ashburn, Virginia; Amherst, Ohio; Airdrie, Alberta; Sacramento, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Poitiers, Vienne, France; Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; Chicago, Illinois; Plano, Texas; Wichita, California; Pico Rivera; Phoenix; Brooklyn; Hyde Park, and so many more.

And anybody listening in my hometown of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, too. I appreciate all of you. I don’t have a lot of communications going on, but like I said, you make everything we do here at the Implausipod worthwhile, so just wanted to say thanks. We got some exciting stuff coming to you through the rest of the holiday season into the new year.

We’re going to finish off some things, some threads that we dropped earlier on. And wrap up some loose ends before starting a few new projects. I’ve got a nice long list of about 140 or 150 ideas for episodes, and that’s not even including the stuff that happens with the news that comes out. So, if you want to hang with us over the next year or two as we try and tackle some of those topics, I’d sure love to have you around.

Take care during the holidays, look after your friends and your family, all the best. We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

The Giggles

is up. Spent about 5 hours today editing the episode, to get it sounding better.

It’s one of those processes I find I can lose myself in, just keep working.

Which is a good thing, even though I might forget to eat or drink.

…so. Maybe not that good. But i like it

And that’s why it’s just a quick update tonight.

Check it out!

Implausipod E019 – The 14th Doctor

What does a sci-fi fan who’s never seen Doctor Who think of their first exposure to a full episode of the series? Can you even be a sci-fi fan if you haven’t? Well, we’re about to find out. Welcome our guest, an academic and Dr Who fan Dr Aiden Buckland who helps guide yours truly Dr Implausible through some of the details of “The Star Beast”.

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14072417-implausipod-e0019-the-14th-doctor

Transcript:

DRI: Actors have a bit of a challenge in that they can become deeply linked with iconic roles that they play so that the audience always associates them with whatever they first saw them in. And so too it is for me with David Tennant and the Purple Man. Killgrave. From the Netflix MCU series Jessica Jones.

See, that’s where I first saw him. And he was absolutely stunning in that role. Super creepy. And it’s hard to imagine him as anything else. But apparently he has a long and storied history as an actor in various other cinematic universes. And one of those is returning to screen shortly. Something called Doctor Who.

And apparently it’s widely popular, but it’s a bit of a gap in my knowledge. I mean, I was aware. of it, but I’d hardly seen any episodes. Maybe something with Christopher Ecclestone back in the early 2000s and something with a dude in a scarf back when I was around eight, but it was never largely accessible to me.

But with it returning to the screen, it seems now is a perfect opportunity to get on board with the Doctor.

And I’m not kidding, I’m being completely honest with you. I haven’t really watched much Dr. Who and Jessica Jones was the first time I saw David Tennant. So there’s a lot of stuff out there in the media sphere and you can’t watch everything. And for some reason, Dr. Who just never really caught into me, you know, didn’t get its hooks in.

So I’m aware of it. I’m aware of some of the larger themes, but what we’re going to do for this episode is it’ll be in two parts. The first part will be me going to watch the first episode of these 2023 specials, StarBeast. And then I’ll come back and I’ll give you like, some of my initial impressions.

And then the second half is going to be a discussion with a colleague of mine, who’s a big Doctor Who fan. And so once they join in, we’ll kind of go over some of what my impressions are and how that connects to the larger universe. And then we’ll have, If time allows, we’ll do this for the other specials in 2023.

So stay tuned. I’m going to go check out an episode and I’ll be right back to let you know what my first impressions of watching a full Doctor Who episode are.

And we’re back after having seen the Starbeast, and that was an interesting episode. So this isn’t really a recap, it’s just kind of a list of impressions, so it may go chronologically for a little bit.

So, going in with having no history of the characters or any of their connections, it was a little odd. We got the recap at the start with the once upon a time, and I thought that was an interesting way to do it. We have the introduction of A British housewife, Donna Noble, and felt very much like, say, a British housewife canonically, as opposed to one from America or Canada or anywhere else.

And we learn that she is married and has a lovely child, and the child has grown. So there’s been a lot of history, I guess, in the past, but that doesn’t really have a whole lot for me. There’s some lines that they drop there that also stood out with an interesting juxtaposition where Dr. Who goes, this face has come back. Why? And Donna goes, the story hasn’t ended yet. So we get this idea that there’s something going on. And at least a little bit of a mystery that might be hinted at later.

The whole introduction itself felt very like. Marvel comics from the seventies and eighties, where there’d be a recap in the first few pages after a splash page or something, and I’m wondering if that’s common. We get the introductory title by Russell T Davies from a story by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons. And that is very curious because I recognize both those names from sci fi, especially like 2000 AD and other comics, again, of the seventies and eighties. So I’m wondering what the source was, whether it was a comic or a novelization, an older episode or something like an issue of 2000 AD or something else, heavy metal back in the day.

So I’m keeping an eye out for that and maybe I’ll track down the references after, but for now, that just kind of jumped out like, Hey, I recognize that reference. And while they set up some tension in the recap that, you know, they couldn’t see each other again, they get like right to it with their interaction right away, and kind of release that tension, but also set it up for something later on. We get introduced to Rose, but I got no idea who she is. I, I understand she’s Donna’s daughter, but I got no reference or what those eyes are referring to. So I’m wondering if that’ll pop up later. And then the meteorite or whatever streaks across the sky.

There’s a comment that Donna makes, while her eyes are distracted, about never trust a man with a goatee, and something about being stuck in a drainpipe, and I was wondering if that was a hint to any prior episodes, but I don’t know. And then she makes the reference to the doctor telling him that he has to ditch the tie by the age of 35, that he can’t do that old 80s Duran Duran style anymore. I thought that was cute.

And then following that we have a ride with the taxi driver, Sean Temple. Ends up being a little bit more expository as well. When we get some of the backstory and I was grateful for that. It was kind of, came about a little bit naturally, but also a little bit, Oh, here’s all the main characters all, all at once altogether.

So I’ll get to this later, but it felt like everything was just like one after the other falling into place. Like we didn’t really have a whole lot of mystery. So it was just kind of straight into it. And. We arrive at the factory and this explosion looks like something right out of the nineties, like demolition man or Robocop, which is pretty good for TV, honestly.

I mean, full points. I remember what syndicated sci fi TV shows looked like in the nineties. It was a little rough. As he’s wandering around the factory, I think the only thing that would make it more 80s would be the lighting as we have that gold and teal kind of filter rather than the blue and red filter that was endemic in 80s sci fi.

And then we’re introduced to a few other characters or groups. The ship is being Surrounded by some soldiers or soldier type persons and there’s a woman in a wheelchair, but again, I don’t have a reference here I don’t know if they’re new or supposed to evoke something from past episodes And then we switch to a home scene with an older lady cooking and who says there’s no such thing as spaceships. Now Donna has a neat quote about the 930 mark or she says I will burn down the world for you darling And then she goes, I will dissent, or I will descend. I didn’t quite catch it, but it was kind of neat.

And Oh, okay. So the older lady is her mom, but her mom seems to remember more of the past than she does. So again, I, maybe they were in earlier stuff. There’s a lot of internal reference, even at this point, like, you know, 10, 12 minutes into the episode that it feels is starting to be there for people who watch it regularly. And I admit I’m not lost, but I’m kind of, I don’t have any association that the authors, the show runners might be trying to evoke with this.

So sometimes it’s coming across a little bit flat as again, I don’t know who the people are. I don’t recognize them, and there’s just a lot of assumptions made. About the audience, about who and what they see. So then, we switched to the kids and Rose outside and there’s an escape pod in the middle of a field. And it feels like right now they are speed running through ET and they meet this little critter called a meep.

And while it’s cute enough, I’m not sure what they’re going for here. There’s also some dudes with like bug eyes in the dark and they remind me of like bug from Micronauts, which is weird given that, you know, we had Mills and Gibbons doing this. So maybe they were kind of tying into like the seventies comics.

I’m wondering if there’s that earlier comic book reference there. So, but apparently they’re hunting something. So we’ll see what’s up with that. The doctor is in the warehouse or sorry, in the factory steel factory. So very eighties heavy metal video here with his whole display that he’s able to conjure up on the out of thin air and actually works as an interface.

And that’s super cool. I don’t know if he’s ever done that before. And then. We meet the redhead in the wheelchair again, who knows the doctor is familiar with him. She’s Shelly science advisor, number 56, and she knows his history. At least he was science advisor. Number one, don’t, I’m probably saying that too much, but that comment, I guess about Donna, where the universe is turning around her again.

And the, he does has, I don’t want to be the one who kills her. So there’s definitely linking to that back history again, and so we get more of the officers from the unit. It had unit in the badge. I didn’t quite see what it was from, but you know, they’re like the men in black or something or the paramilitary organization associated with the men in black, maybe like shield or sword or some other group.

So they’re not necessarily regular police officers, but they are something else. And then. They open up the capsule and that is, that stood out. If you remember from like the earlier podcast, I talk about dragon’s domain and how there was like a creature that came out and started possessing the crew members from space 1999.

And we almost have that exact same thing here. This strikes out with. The light and the light changes in the soldier’s eyes, and then it takes them over and is able to possess them and move them around. And that is, it’s kind of wild. So we have these linkages to earlier, like 1970s sci fi, that’s been going on within this episode.

And that’s super cool. I’m wondering how much more that is. I’m just going off what I know, but maybe this is something previously within the show as well. Now the Meep and Rose run back at the show. And then the mother who, I guess now the grandmother, sorry, Cynthia, she seems to know what’s up. She goes, the Meep isn’t real.

So I’m wondering if it’s illusory. With the family all home, they’re trying to keep each other away from it. And I think Cynthia recognizes the past history between the doctor and Donna and doesn’t want anything to happen, but, yeah, that’s a bit of an issue. So they meet the meep and then we have the little bit with the fur harvesting is kind of a bad thing and a discussion about the pronouns for the meep and that struck me as interesting, but it also just struck me as matter of fact that the doctor was able to just accept that and correct and ask and just went with it for the rest of the episode. So that was really interesting.

There’s a comment, I guess the doctor has twin hearts. And that’s cool. The space Marines in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe all have twin hearts too. And so does like, um, Longshot from the X Men and that whole Mojoverse series. So that’s a common thing, I think, with a lot of sci fi series as a way of kind of evoking a subject’s transhumanism that, you know, Oh, they’ve got multiple hearts or whatever. And, and that was kind of fascinating. So I’m wondering if the 40 K guys kind of cribbed that when they were making their trans war, transhuman warriors and the space Marines, or that, if that’s just so common that it’s not from a particular thing, but it’s just a trope in general.

So from there, we’ve get into the firefight, and I’m wondering how many factions are going on here. We obviously. We have the meep plus the family at this point are with them. We have the possessed soldiers. We have the bugs who are fighting the possessed soldiers. We have the regular military, the ones who haven’t possessed. And I don’t know if the doctor is his own faction or what, but you know, we’ve got four or five different groups here.

And again, while they’re doing some cool tricks with the shields and using the. tool, the sonic screwdriver and their defensive capability, and just being clever about getting away from it and trying to escape and save lives. And I thought that was really interesting. There were some airborne troops in there and I was wondering if those were the bugs.

They’re kind of in the black and I didn’t quite see if those were more drop troops coming in to support the paramilitary organization or not, but I guess we’ll learn more as this goes on. And then we get to this parking garage and it says either we’ve escaped or we’ve got things very wrong. And he says, we’re in a court, court is in session.

It’s a shadow court and he puts on a teleport intercept. And then the bug soldiers appear and it turns out that yes, we indeed do have everything wrong. There’s something about a psychedelic sun here that powered the meep’s homeworld as they ate the galactic council and this is the last one left. And we get the whole reveal that yes, curse your inevitable betrayal here as the Meep turns out to be the one that is possessing the soldiers and there’s a whole lot more going on.

The star beast is indeed the furry little creature that finally shows its fangs. And so from there, things move along rather rapidly. The doctor and the family are taken prisoner and moved back to the steel factory. The little critter is being worshiped and brought about on a plank when made out of metal by the possessed soldiers.

And while they’re trapped, there’s a rescue from Shelly, the science advisor, who’s in the wheelchair, who has weapons apparently embedded within it. Because of course, James Bond also probably echoes into the influences here as well. So We switch to the ship and the doctor tries to prevent the launch as the dagger drive is engaged.

And we start seeing this whole scale destruction of London with the tendrils of flame and like earthquakes going out. It feels a lot like Guardians of the Galaxy 3 where we know this is like a populated area with people involved. And like, how are there not casualties and catastrophic destruction from this?

Now, Donna Noble is assisting him as they’re trying to get this right. But it’s a whole lot and there’s a lot of like internal reference going on here. I can see the action that’s going on. And then finally Rose undoes the psychedelic lightness that shining in the eyes of all the possessed and everything kind of goes back to normal.

We’ve learned that the toys in the shed are tied to Rose’s memories of all the beasts that have been encountered in the past and We finally kind of get some resolution here, but as a viewer I was kind of starting honestly, from about the 30 minute point on, I was kind of tuning out a little bit.

There was a lot of internal references and I wasn’t necessarily getting. All of them. It was the thing with like the Phoenix force that was going through Donna and Rose. I don’t know what’s going on there. Some shared memories or something was embedded within Rose that allowed her to be saved and then finally they walk inside the Tardis and we get that tiny little ship or the family’s talking about just taking one tiny trip and it feels like every Rick and Morty episode ever. And honestly, I’m wondering how much Rick and Morty is kind of tying into the doctor at this point. It’s weird that I’ve seen almost all of Rick and Morty, but almost none of Doctor Who.

So is it just a case of picking one and not the other? I don’t know. Or can you enjoy both? To my friend who’ll be joining me later, perhaps that’s the question. We get into a what looks like a redesigned TARDIS interior. It looks almost like Cerebro from some of the X Men films with all the sphere and the railings and stuff.

And it has a coffee maker, but apparently it hasn’t been protected against coffee. It’s fragile enough that one spilled coffee is enough to almost destroy the place. And that’s kind of where we end. So as the credits roll, it It, it feels a little odd, earlier note I made about it feeling like a speed run through ET.

I mean, it feels like the whole story was a speed run as they were racing through the required story beats to try and link everything together with previous seasons and previous episodes. And there was a lot of history there and so much of it was being elided. It was kind of being relying on our cultural memory of other sci fi.

Movies and TV shows and episodes, and we got equal parts of like a very special episode and a lot of fan service going on there. So I’m not sure as a new viewer, it was a representative story of the franchise. I was able to make some external connections to some stuff. Like the authors and some other references to sci fi and even by the midpoint, but by the last 15 minutes or so, it was all very internally referential.

And the titular Starbeast was like a very thin foil for the rest of the narrative that was assumed, like we assumed things would work out. And. They were just used there for the show runner to hang all the connections together. So as a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced. I do want to discuss this with my colleague though.

So I’m going to step away from a brief second for a brief second, and we’ll be right back.

And we’re back and we’re going to talk about the impressions of the show. I’m here joined by Dr. Aidan Buckland, who’s a professor of digital and social media. You can let him introduce his bona fides. I’ve known him for quite some time. And we’ll get into it. So, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Aiden.

Dr Aiden: Well, Well Dr. Implausible, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so, Ph. D., Communication, I’m usually somewhere in that pop culture landscape, and Dr. Who is something, you know, I’ve been a fan of for a while, but also had a bit of a Professional interest in: done some presentations over the years at Calgary and Edmonton Expo, and have watched a number at places like the Popular Cultural Association.

DRI: Okay, so you have like an academic interest in that, then. Awesome. Okay. I’ll just let you know I think, I sent you the copy of the of the first half of the episode here. I’m coming in with this, like knowing that exists, I have almost no exposure. And for a franchise that’s like older than me, which is rare, it’s like, okay, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and like, I’m older than Star Wars, right, so it’s a rare thing. And like, how have you not watched any of this? So here we are. Yeah, I, found it really interesting, but I’m kind of like, what’s your kind of take on it as somebody who’s like well versed in this, cause I’ll admit there’s some parts of it that didn’t necessarily land with me, but maybe we’ll walk through the episode a little bit and you can tell me what I missed without going too much into spoilers.

Maybe we can just chat about that for a little bit.

Dr Aiden: For sure. Yeah, and I was thinking that while I was watching it. So, you know, myself as a fan, I jumped on during the new who era. So I have dabbled a little bit and kind of watching and rewatching. I think at this point, all of the doctors for at least a few hours of their runs each just to get a flavor for it before going out and speaking about it. But yeah, this was a daunting episode. I think in some ways for new fans to be jumping on board. It was relying on a lot of stuff that kind of happened during Russell Davis’ 1st run at the show. But at the same time, I also felt it was very emblematic of of his vision of doctor who like, it felt very much like it would fit very easily into, you know, what we sometimes refer to as the season of specials.

DRI: Okay. The season of specials is like the Christmas season where they just have these one offs. I guess there’s two more episodes coming up and if you’re, if you’re down for it, I’ll watch those and we can maybe chat about each of those in the coming weeks too.

Dr Aiden: For sure. I’ll definitely be watching them. So I would love to chat.

DRI: Okay, cool. So yeah, like for me, the first, it kind of had like a, it felt like a Stan Lee Marvel recap at the start of it. And then, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it; while you do pop culture stuff, so you’re probably sure of who Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons were in that jumped out at me.

Cause I’ve been looking at both their works, Pat Mills, especially in his work on 2000 AD ties into something I’m working on called Appendix W, which are like the prehistory of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. And so he’s really influential as like a creator from back in like the 70s and 80s, and that was just like, okay, so what am I watching here?

And I don’t know if you had any foreknowledge of that kind of era or influence on Doctor Who.

Dr Aiden: Yeah, I’d be interested. And I think, you know, in some cases with Dr Who, in particular, there is kind of a media kind of explanation for, you know, the influence that runs through here. You have to remember, of course, when Dr Who was.

In its prime, say, late 60s in through the 70s, you know, this is at a point in time where there are actually very few channels to watch in the UK. So whenever we’re talking about sci fi creators, writers, directors, who are living in the UK, you know, you can almost guarantee to a person that they would have been exposed to this show at least in its first run from, from 63 to 89 at some point.

DRI: Yeah. I’m getting a feeling, like we’ve covered Space:1999 a bit, and we’re going to be covering, as I said, 2000 AD and Blake’s Seven at one point, I’m sure. It feels like everybody knew everybody in this community. I mean, Britain is, is relatively small size wise, I guess, especially if you’re from the Canadian prairies, it’s like, well, we can just drive across Britain pretty quick here.

But yeah, so there’s that whole idea of scope and size, but as a community in the seventies, yeah, I’m assuming it was very connected. I can’t say for sure, but it has that feel to it.

Dr Aiden: And a hub of sci fi too, right? Like, there’s so much happening in television, in movies, so, yeah, it would be interesting to sit down and map all of that sort of stuff, like, who’s influencing who, where are we seeing, kind of things pop up, especially as it relates to the Doctor and his travels.

DRI: Yeah, that’s, well we’ll I think that’s kind of like the side project or maybe that’s something assumed with the Appendix W. I mean, we’re tracking everything up to the launch of Warhammer 40, 000, which is in 87. So yeah, it’s going to be coming. So, so how have I never watched the doctor before?

I got no idea, but what stood out to you from the episode? Like what was really kind of like a big thing, or just maybe walk through it chronologically, like how did you feel watching it?

Dr Aiden: I think the first thing that really struck me with the episode was the mixing and matching of the aesthetic of Doctor Who.

So, as, you know, you probably know production wise, there’s been a deal. Disney plus is distributing it now internationally. So there’s a lot more money in the budget, and this has been the case for a while. Chibnall, the previous show runner, also had a pretty big budget, for Doctor Who standards at least.

So, you know, we saw a lot of that, like that really lovely shot in (the) neighborhood. I’m jumping ahead chronologically in terms of the episode. Where we see the soldiers fighting the other soldiers and that nice over the action shot of that, like, that’s, that’s a really expensive thing that, you know, we sometimes got in new Who but we definitely didn’t get in the original run of the show, which was that kind of them flexing their muscles production wise.

I think the Meep in particular, in terms of the creature design, looked a lot more polished than a lot of Doctor Who aliens and and creatures look, but then we also had the Rolf, the, the grasshopper looking gentleman, who talked very nicely once they actually got to speak.

You know, they actually look more emblematic of that old aesthetic of Doctor Who. So I thought that that was, it was one of the things that stood out to me is this really does feel like A kind of crossover for Dr. Who: of Russell T. Davis going from kind of what he was working with in the early 2000s with the relaunch of the show to now having a bit more money, but wanting to stay true to that aesthetic that a lot of Who fans would be comfortable with.

DRI: Okay, so there’s he’s playing to some audience expectations there. Okay, that’s interesting because I mean, I noticed that with like, The set with in the steel factory with the spaceship in there that looked fairly impressive, like production wise. I don’t know how much of that was digital and how much of that was like a practical, but they at least had put that into place.

I mean, there was some obvious places where there’s like the digital layover of the city and the like, but even as you said, like that overhead drone shot that we’re seeing, it’s starting to become very common. We saw that in like The Peripheral and Westworld and a bunch of places where it kind of gives a top down third person perspective or not third person, but almost like an RTS perspective that we’re kind of used to.

Dr Aiden: I was going to say, it reminded me a lot of that series of games XCOM where you’re looking at the field from that and that’s an alien invasion game too. So it almost felt like they were trying to tap into that aesthetic with that shot, which It was neat, I think, for Doctor Who.

DRI: Yeah, for sure. So they’re expanding it now.

Like you said, these are the specials. So maybe it’s like the CFL on Grey Cup or the NFL on the Super Bowl where they’ll bust out multiple cameras and kind of go for broke and the regular episodes don’t quite have that same level of production. I don’t know, we’ll kind of see how that goes, but I’m always fascinated how the production culture elements influence the onscreen workings of it, or, you know, what we see as fans on screen and then how much the fans will, you know, develop the no prizes from Marvel or whatever to come up with explanations that kind of patch over some of those holes that might be simply explained by, well, we, we had no budget, so we had to put a plunger on the end of this, of the Dalek and, and kind of make it a thing.

Yeah, fascinating stuff, but we’ll keep an eye out for that in the future, for sure. So, what else kind of jumped out at you?

Dr Aiden: I mean, off the bat, I am a big fan of David Tennant, both as a doctor, but also as his other roles like Kilgrave, as you had mentioned earlier, having him do that kind of fourth wall break that once upon a time, once upon a time Lord was an interesting opening.

It reminded me of the last time Doctor Who as a franchise really started to, you know, put on a push to get American viewers, which I associate this Disney plus deal with, and they did something similar. They had the Companion at the time, Amy Pond do like a little voiceover kind of explaining her relationship to this being the doctor, and it got a bit of pushback actually, from some older doctor who fans.

It’s that gatekeeping element in fanculture that essentially. You know, Dr. Who’s been around for decades. Most people have grown up with it in the UK and in some of the Commonwealth countries like ours. And, you know, the idea that you would need to put this in here and, you know, clearly it is for newer fans. But how did you find that? Did that help you? or orient you for what was coming up. Did you find that useful?

DRI: I found it super useful, I think between the introductory bit before the credits, as well as some of the exposition that happened with the cab driver, I felt, you know, they kind of put a lot of pieces in place. So maybe they were, I think I commented earlier as a bit of a speed run, but I felt there was enough exposition that I wasn’t necessarily confused about who was what, like I didn’t, I didn’t have any deep connection with any of the characters, but I could generally tell the relationships and the social map of who was who there. Sometimes characters would show up and I wasn’t sure as, Oh, is this an old person or a new person or something?

So maybe, maybe that’s the thing, like what was new in that? What was, what was novel in the episode that I have no reference of. So like, was there anybody, what was new?

Dr Aiden: Yeah, well, production wise, I think that’s actually kind of one of the fun parts with Star Beast is that actually this is, you know, an adaptation.

So we’re, we’re dealing with a Who story that has existed since I believe sometime in 1980, there was a weekly comic strip and that’s where this story first shows up. So in the opening credits, I believe you see along with Russell T. Davis, the original writers for this panel in particular, but in terms of new stuff, I think there’s still lots in there.

I would say, you know, for a lot of older Who fans the Sonic was doing a lot more in this episode than we’ve ever seen it do, which, you know, is some fans have bristled on it. The ones that I’ve been watching reactions from online, but at the same time, it is always like a lot of the elements of Doctor Who, you know, the sonic does what the writers needed to do in a particular context.

So it’s kind of always had that, but generally, as a tool, it’s really done underwhelming things, like it just, it unlocks a door, or it sets off an alarm, or it, you know, turns on a sprinkler, it’s, you know, very underwhelming, so when he starts to look at it as a visual display, very MCU like, which is a comparison that Ellie Littlechild made over there at WhoCulture, or later on where he’s, he’s building light shields out of it, that almost seemed, in a lot of ways, to use a kind of gamer culture term, a little overpowered for the sonic screwdriver, which is interesting.

But again, this is a Doctor who is coming back, which again is something we haven’t seen, so.

DRI: Okay, I just yeah for reference. I didn’t know that any of those abilities like the the shields and like even just the interface I didn’t know that was new. It seemed I felt they were seamless I really liked the like basically passive or non combative use of the screwdriver because it gave a like a different way of solving problems and even though it wasn’t… I guess maybe firefights aren’t that common in Doctor Who, I don’t know.

It did seem like they put a lot of budget in it, you know, blowing up a wall and having the whole chase through the house. But having those ways of reacting that isn’t necessarily offensive, I thought that was really neat. And the interface, I mean, we’ve seen that see-through interface in everything since like Minority Report with Spielberg, Spielberg put a lot of money and effort into the development of that interface for that movie.

And then we’ve seen it from Avatar and Matrix and that whole idea of a see-through interface, which really isn’t that useful, like from a user perspective, this is amazing visually. Yeah, we’ve seen that. So I didn’t realize that was new, but it seemed like an awesome way to like engage with it. What about like characters or anything?

Was there any new peeps that showed up?

Dr Aiden: Yeah, we do have some new people in there, but I, I just wanted to respond to something you had just mentioned there. It is actually, this is the, the classic Doctor Who thing is he almost never is overtly offensive in the way he interacts with other species.

So, you know, he will do things to stop a villain from, you know, achieving their plan. He’ll do things like he shoots the Meep up in the escape pod by the end of it, but like his, his initial reaction is almost always to run, you know, so it’s, it’s something that you’ll see him saying a lot and generally, that’s because he’s trying to observe what’s going on and figure it out, which is usually what you get revealed in the end.

So it’s his non combativeness is actually by design and it was, yeah. At various points in the run in the original run, I think it was the 5th doctor who put his hands on a gun and that became kind of controversial. And then even in this new who run Matt Smith, it was in a trailer at 1 point for an episode, it was the 3rd episode in the season and, you know, it just has him holding a handgun and firing it, which, you know, got a bit of a negative reaction, and then when you saw what was happening in context, you see that it’s not the Doctor using a handgun against a person. It was him shooting a piece of technology with reversed gravity at the time.

So, it’s the kind of thing that he doesn’t like, it’s, it’s rare to see him actually holding offensive weapons, which was interesting.

DRI: Okay. Yeah. That idea that it ties into some of our other more iconic heroes, like, you know, a Captain America or Spider Man or Batman, you know, or there’s generally that idea that they didn’t have offensive weapons.

So Batman’s probably an edge case in that one. And I know they’ve made some changes to cap as well, but for a long time, the silver age view of those heroes was like no guns. Now, some of that was from, you know, especially in America from the comics code, but you know, there was some other reasons for it as well.

That, okay. That’s fascinating. Interesting stuff. What about Peeps? Was there, because again, I kind of got that the family all knew each other, that there was relationships there, but was there any other new characters that were introduced?

Dr Aiden: New character, old organization. So, in the episode, of course, we’re introduced or reintroduced, I guess, to Unit.

This is the, basically the task force that deals with alien kind of stuff on planet earth. They are often associated with working with or working against, depending on the episode needs, the Doctor. And of course, in this one, we get the introduction of an actress who essentially, Ruth Madely, as Shirley Anne Bingham, the newest science advisor.

So, you know, as you saw in the episode through dialogue, the Doctor is the first science advisor for Unit. This is during the period in the original run when he was basically banished to earth for a little while, but Madely, had a role on Years and Years, which is a Russell T. Davis show for the BBC, and I guess that’s seeing her crossover from that now into Who was interesting, and her role was, was fantastic, like, I loved the positioning of her. It was the scene where, you know, “don’t make me the problem”, sending the soldiers on up to the mind control.

And then, later on, having, you know, weapons in a wheelchair, and when the doctor remarks on it, you know, her response is, yeah, we all have as if, you know, this is just, it’s standard operating procedure. All unit members who may or may not be wheelchair bound will have weapons in their devices, which was fun.

DRI: Yeah. There was, there was a lot of that stuff was just and maybe this leads to some of my confusion because they, they dealt with a lot of stuff just matter of factly. Right. Like it did not happen. I noticed there was… okay. so unit, I saw the badge on the lapel, but I didn’t, I thought maybe I was missing something that there was another word for it, but it’s just, it’s called the unit. Okay.

Like they had a Sikh member and there was a few others. associated with it. So there’s a broad spectrum of representation within the show. And like I said, I’m going into this as spoiler free as I can, but I guess there’s some issue. Is there some controversy around the whole woke moment there in the middle?

Dr Aiden: I’m sure there will be just given the, the internet these days and, you know, Doctor Who has run into various.,let’s say communities who perceive themselves as aggrieved, for representation issues in the past. The previous Doctor in particular was the first doctor to be female presenting during her run.

We see another variant, or in Doctor Who terms of regeneration, who is also female presenting and also, African Britain. So it is something that they have run into before. But this is one of the things that I think is again, emblematic of Russell Davis as a creator. He’s not afraid to touch those, those controversial rails or those 3rd rails and really, again, the matter-of-fact nature in which they deal with a lot of the more, I think, sticky issues like the conversation that Donna and her mother have in the kitchen about whether or not she should be, you know, complimenting her daughter Rose for being attractive when she didn’t before the transition, was a lovely kind of way of, again, not, you know, scolding or preaching like, you know, Donna could have, you know, yelled at her mother in that scene.

Like, you know, better stop doing this stuff, you know, whatever, but really just kind of lovingly interacting with her and, you know, modeling that. Hey, it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable for very long. We can actually just have a nice. Little matter of fact discussion, you know, she’s beautiful. She’s gorgeous.

And then, of course, you get the Catherine Tate humor about, you know, “you could be saying that about me”, the generational bit there. But I think that that was quite lovely. And I think the pronoun bit in the middle was also again, another way of making it matter of fact. This, you know, pronouns have been an issue now for a little while.

They tend to cause some people to get very upset about having to use them or not, and you know, turns out, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’ve been using alternative pronouns for a long time, because he’s the definite article. He is The Doctor, and Meep is The Meep. So, he idea that it’s Rose that kind of puts that as a question, I think was, it was nice to kind of nudge that conversation in there, and then, you know, to make it so that, you know, actually, the Doctor has an alternative pronoun of the definite article, and always has.

So, You know, pronouns are really not that big of a deal, right?

DRI: Yeah, I liked how they approached it, that it was, it was, a long time ago I talked about, like, I guess it would be framed as agenda-setting in media, like how we learn how to deal with things and everything from commercials to just, you know, how shows present things, especially things like sitcoms, like the Slice of Life stuff, how you might see how the video game or internet is incorporated into family life and then that kind of sets how we talk about it in, in the broader culture.

And so, yeah, just seeing that kind of embedded within it, treated matter of factly and the show moved on, I think was a really effective way of showing to its viewers. a good way of dealing with this. So I know we’re kind of getting a little bit tight on time here. So just in interest of not really spoiling things for any future episodes, but like, what are you looking forward to in the next couple?

Dr Aiden: Oh, for sure. So this is actually an interesting production thing as well. We’ve 60th leading up to this latest episode and it turns out, that most of the footage in those trailers comes from this 1st episode. So, Russell T. Davis himself, in an interview I was reading recently, has mentioned that, you know, they haven’t cut any footage into a trailer from this 2nd episode coming up.

So, we literally know nothing about what’s going to happen in this next episode. We know, of course, how the episode ended. The TARDIS is doing its TARDIS thing. Things look like it’s a crisis and it’s going to take us anywhere it wants in time and space, which is actually something they’ve done quite frequently in Doctor Who, the TARDIS is always enduring and fragile at the same time.

It seems to always be breaking down and going the wrong place and not doing what he wants it to do, but then also always doing what he needs it to do, which is actually a line from the Steven Moffitt episode, called the Doctor’s Wife, I think, and pardon me if I got that wrong, but it’s essentially where he gets to speak to the tardis, ’cause it gets embodied in a human- ish body, for a little while. So you get this idea that, you know, it’s always kind of had that, so that I’m, you know, eagerly anticipating, you know, what kind of surprise are we gonna get next for this next episode?

DRI: All right. And for me, I think it was that toy box at the end with a bunch of little critters.

Some of those I recognize from various… I think there’s a lot of cross pollination between media in, you know, in various, not necessarily transmedia ways, but just the influence from one cultural element showing up in other ways. I’ve seen some of those creatures in other forms and other formats before, whether it’s dungeon and dragons or Warhammer.

So seeing which of those actually show up as dudes in costumes or, as special effects, I’m kind of curious as well. So we will see what happens. So, with that in mind, I think we’re pretty close to our time. So I’m going to, let’s touch base in a week here or maybe less. I think, we’ll get this out probably around the release of the second of the specials, give or take.

And hopefully we can touch base before the third one as well and talk a little bit further. So again, Dr. Aiden Buckland, thank you for joining me. I appreciate the insight, as always. And, from someone with no…, who knows nothing, I appreciate again you taking the time to share with everybody here on the ImplausiPod.

Dr Aiden: Sure. Thanks very much for having me, Doctor, and look forward to talking again.

DRI: Okay. Thank you. And once again, thanks to our guest, Dr. Aiden Buckland. You can contact him at doctoraidenwho at gmail. com. And again, I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. Join us again in a week or so for the second of the Dr. Who Christmas specials. We’re going to try and recap that one as well, or give you my impressions as I become a little bit more familiar with the. Dr. Who cinematic universe here. And again, you can contact us at Dr. Implausible at implausipod. com. We have a few other episodes going up shortly, so we’ll keep on with the regular production, but we hope to talk to you again soon until then have fun.

Implausipod E0016 – Spreadable Media

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.

With a little help from friends

Two episodes of the Implausipod came out this past week:

(Though not necessarily in that order.)

The first one was stuck in a bit of a research and timing feedback loop, which is fine, it happens, but it kind of through off the order, and the urge and/or need to get the following episodes out meant it kept getting pushed back. (There was life reasons for some delays as well, which I won’t get into on the web.)

But I’m so happy to see both of them released this week, mostly because I was joined (figuratively or literally) by some friends on these episodes, and it made both experiences super fun, and I hope that came across in the audio.

Mr. Calvin Becker, a long time friend and amazing musician provided the music that formed the interludes for episode 16, and I’m so thrilled he was able to jump in. He’s made another significant contribution to the show which I think will show up in Episode 20 or 21, which should be available in about a week or so. You can check out his work at calvinbecker.com

And in episode 19, Dr. Aiden Buckland joined in to provide some amazing insight to the background of the Who-niverse that I, as a total noob, was completely unaware of. I’ve known Aiden in a professional, academic content for over 15 years, and have had many discussions in the past, and it was wonderful for him to be able to join in here too. You can reach him at doctoraidenwho@gmail.com

Again, thanks to both these amazing friends for joining in and making the podcast that much better as we dive deeper into this journey. I hope they can join us again soon.