Creativity in an Age of Strife

Was struggling a bit with the creativity over the holidays, which spilled over into the new year and the seemingly unending flood of bad news. As you can tell by the existence of this post, I’ve managed to get things moving a bit. The first step was turning off the firehose, and you can follow that link to read about some constructive actions to take towards your media health.

The second step is to keep creating. I mentioned my struggle in passing and was pointed toward this interview with Heather Cox Richardson via The National Press Club. The relevant bit is at the 57-minute mark (spoilers) which this clip below should link directly to:

(Link here as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDX0hxyYcJw ).

The gist of her advice is to “behave with joy”, as a means of resistance against an authoritarian government. “Do the things that matter to you, and that you can bring to the people around you.” “We can meet the moment, and as scholars, be honest”, and that by doing the best (scholarly) work we can, we contribute back to humanity.

Which seems like a lot to ask from a blog and media channels that mostly focus on the intersection of sci-fi and technology, but it’s what we’re doing. Maybe our project is a little bit wider in scope than we initially thought.

But the big takeaway, at least for me, is that moment of reflection that I like what we’re doing here, and I enjoy doing the podcast, the blog, the newsletter, the videos (about which I hope to show you more soon!) and the various other bits we have going on here.

So, after a brief period of stasis, we’ll get back to the things that bring us joy, and find the joy in sharing them with you as well. See ya soon!

Baked In: Social Media and Tech Determinism

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0032 on May 26th, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/14896508-e0032-baked-in-social-media-and-tech-determinism


How much of your experience online is dictated by the environment you’re
in, and how it was constructed?  What is you rebuild Twitter, and it
still ends up being toxic?  Did you fail, or succeed without knowing it?

These are the kinds of questions that arise when we look at technology from a
deterministic point of view: that technology is the driver of cultural and social change and growth.  And while this ideology has its adherents, many of the assumptions about technology, and tech determinism are already Baked In to the way we deal with tech in the world.


What if you rebuilt Twitter from the ground up, and it ends up being as toxic as the old one? Did you do something wrong, or were you just wildly successful? That’s the question we’re trying to address in this week’s episode, but perhaps we need to approach this from a different angle. So let me ask you, when you visit a website online, or use an app on your phone.

How does it make you feel? Do you feel happy? Amused? Upset? Angry? Enraged? And did it always feel that way? Did it used to feel good and then perhaps it took a turn for the worse? It became a little bit more negative? If it doesn’t make you feel good, why do you keep going back? Or perhaps you don’t, perhaps you move on to someplace new, and for the first little while it’s cool, it feels a lot like the old place used to be, but you know, before things changed, before other people came along, or before the conversation took a turn for the worse.

But the question is: How long before this place starts going downhill too, before the same old tired arguments and flame wars that seem to follow you around through the years and decades keep catching up to you? I mean, maybe it’s you, there’s always a chance, but let’s take a moment and assume we’re not slipping into solipsism here, as this seems to be a much more widely reported experience, and ask ourselves if maybe, just maybe, that negativity that we experience on the internet is something endemic.

It’s part of the culture, it’s baked in.

Welcome to The ImplausiPod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And in this episode, we’re going to address the question of how much of your experience online is shaped by the environment you’re in and how it is constructed.

Because there is no such thing as a natural online environment, all of these things are constructed at some point, but it’s a question of what they’re constructed for. We know that social media spaces can often be constructed for engagement, which is why it lends itself to rage farming and trolling. But how far back does it go?

We know we see commonalities in everything from Facebook and Twitter, to YouTube comment sections, to web forums, to Usenet, to email. Are these commonalities that we see related to the technology? Is there an element of what’s called technological determinism at play? Or are the commonalities that we see just related to the way that humans communicate, especially in an asynchronous environment like we see online?

Hmm. Or perhaps it’s something cultural. It’s part of the practice of using these tools online. And as such, it gets shared and handed down, moves from platform to platform to platform, which is what we seem to see. Now it could be a combination of all of these things, and in order to tease that out, we’re going to have to take a look at these various platforms.

So I’ll start with the one that was the genesis for this question for me. Mastodon, which is part of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon in many ways replicates the functionality of Twitter along with the look and feel with toots replicating the tweets, the short microblog posts that may include links or hashtags, an image or short video clips.

And depending on the client you’re using to access it, you’d hardly notice the difference. It’s this similarity that led me to the question that started off the show. What if you rebuild Twitter and it still ended up being toxic? So in order to explore this question, we’re going to take a quick survey of the field and look at the problems that can be seen in a lot of different social media platforms.

Then we’ll go into more depth on the potential causes that we mentioned, including the technology, the nature of communication online, as well as Cultural factors, and then conclude by seeing if there might be a more hopeful or optimistic way that we can approach this and our online interactions.

So when we look at these online platforms, you might want to see how they’re all just a little bit broken while we’re overwhelmingly a positive podcast here, and we try and accentuate the positive elements that exist in our society. I’ll admit. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard, and when we start looking at online platforms, we can see that much like families, each dysfunctional one is dysfunctional in its own ways.

However, that being said, we might be able to tease out a few trends by the end of this. Our baseline for all of this is, of course, going to be Twitter. Whether you call it X or Twitter, it’s been one of the most studied of the social media platforms, and that gives us a wealth of data. And it also allows us to make a clear distinction by calling it Twitter prior to the acquisition by Elon Musk and But regardless of whether we look at Twitter or X, the results aren’t great.

In a recent study of the University of Toronto by Victoria Olemburgo De Mello, Felix Cheung, and Michael Inzlicht, the authors find that there’s no positive effects on user well being by engaging with X. Even the occasionally touted greater sense of belonging by participating in the platform didn’t lead to any long-lasting effects.

Instead, what they found was an immediate drop in positive emotions, so things like joy and happiness are right out the window, and there was an increase in outrage, political polarization, and boredom. So using X, even if you’re a little bit bored, is probably a net negative. And this is just from a recent study.

It isn’t counting the systemic changes that have taken place on the platform since the acquisition by Elon Musk, and the platforming of hate speech, and the reduction of moderator tools, the increasing attack vectors by removing the ability to block harassers, and all the other changes that have taken place as well, including creators just upright and leaving the platform.

But that’s the state of things right now. The question is, Did Twitter always suck? And the answer is kind of yeah. The University of Toronto study we mentioned was collecting data back in 2021 prior to the acquisition by Elon Musk, and so if things have gone downhill since then for the reported outrage and lack of joy, then I can’t really imagine what the place is like now.

But enough about the service formerly known as Twitter. When looking at some of its competitors, what are their downsides? Are they as toxic too? There’s Threads, the Facebook owned offshoot of the Instagram platform, primarily focused on text-based messaging. Even though it launched in July of 2023, it came together rather quickly, seemingly as an attempt to capitalize on the struggles that Twitter was having, struggles that soon led to it being rebranded as X later that month.

One of the challenges with threads is they’re adding features as they go, and while they leverage their existing user base from Instagram, it hasn’t led to the same level of active retention that one might think. Despite the lack of explicit advertising, they still have issues with spam posts, for example.

And then there’s the whole challenge with Facebook ownership in general, which we’ve discussed on in previous episodes, like when we talked about Triple E back in episode 15. BlueSky, or B-Sky, was another Twitter alternative built on the prospect of having an open source social media standard, and up until May 5th of 2024, it had Jack Dorsey, a former Twitter CEO, on its board.

His departure is indicative of some of the challenges that lay there, that it’s somewhat lifeless with minimal community involvement, and that despite it being built as a decentralized platform, until that gets rolled out, it very much is a centralized form of control. Usenet, the almost OG social network, built off of the Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, that we talked about a lot back in episode 10, still exists, technically, but on the text-based servers it’s mostly dead with tons of spam and minimal community, though there are a few diehards that try and keep it going.

The existence of the binaries groups there as a file transfer service is a completely separate issue far beyond what we’re talking about here. LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, feels incredibly inauthentic and performative, and it feels like the functionality that you find there would be better served by being on almost any other social media platform.

Reddit, with all the pains that it had in 2023 with its shift to the IPO and the strike of the various moderators, is still a going concern with high user counts, but a lot of that content may be now fed into various AI platforms, turning conversations into just so much grist for the mill. Stack Overflow, the tech-based Q& A site, has done much the same thing, turning all that conversation into just so much AI fodder.

Platforms like Discord, which have, again, corporate control, and may lead to all the content they’re in being memory old. And that brings us back to Mastodon, which, despite all the promises of an open social web, can have, in certain places, an incredible toxic community. It’ll have Federation Wars, as various servers join or disband, based on.

Ideological differences with other active servers, there’s access problems for a number of different users, there’s differing policies from server to server, and there’s inconsistent moderation across all of it. And despite all these problems, it might be one of the best options when it comes to text based social media.

So this brings us back to our main question, why do they all suck? Is it something that’s baked in? Is it something that’s determined by the technology?

So let’s take a moment and introduce you to the idea of technological determinism. Tech determinism is a long running theory that’s existed in some form or other since the 19th century. Technological determinism posits that the key driver of human history and society has been technology in its various forms.

It leads to a belief that innovation should be pursued, sometimes at all costs, and that the solution to any issue is more technology, even if those issues are caused by other technologies in the first place. Tech Determinism exists on a bit of a spectrum, where its adherence can be more or less hardcore with respect to how much technology determines our history and how much attention is paid to any explanation outside the scope of technology.

According to technological determinism, all social progress follows tech innovation, and there’s a certain inevitability that’s part and parcel with that. If I was able to license music for this show, I’d queue up You Can’t Stop Progress by Clutch off their 2007 album From Beale Street to Oblivion. But, uh, in this case I’ll just ask you to go to YouTube or your other music streaming site, or grab your CD off the shelf and put it in and play along.

But back to our spectrum. Hardcore technological determinists don’t think society or culture can have any impact on technology, or at least the direction of it. And that goes back to that inevitability that we were talking about. There’s a softer form of technological determinism as well, where the technology can be dependent on social context and how it is adopted.

And this ties back to what Penelope Quan Haas talks about as social determinism. Social norms, attitudes, cultural practices, and religious beliefs are perceived as directly impacting how technology is used and what its social consequences are. This is a little bit more of a nuanced view and takes us away from the instrumental view where technology is seen as neutral and just a tool to be used.

But as pointed out by Langdon Winner back in 1980 in a rather famous article, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, that neutrality is something that’s very much circumscribed. The design of a tool can have very specific impacts about how it is used in society. And I think this starts bringing us back to those design spaces that we’re talking about, those online platforms.

Each of them present themselves in various ways and suggest various actions that might be taken. done. These are what Don Norman calls affordances or the perceived action possibilities of a certain piece of technology. When it comes to online spaces, it doesn’t matter whether that space is presented to the user on a smartphone or on a desktop computer, laptop, or some kind of terminal, the preferred form of action is going to be presented to the user in the most accessible place to reach.

This is why you’ll see the swipe or like or comment buttons presented where they are. On a smartphone, that’s anything that’s in easy reach of the thumb of a right-handed user. For X, it’s that little blue button in the right-hand corner, just begging you to use it. And by reducing the barrier to entry to posting, you get a lot of people posting really quickly.

Emotionally, reacting to things, getting the word out there. Because, heaven forbid, somebody is wrong on the internet. And this leads us to the second factor that may be leading to such horrible online communication. The very nature of online communication itself. And this has been recognized for a long, long time.

At least 20 years. On March 19th, 2004, in a post titled “Green Blackboards and Other Anomalies”, the world was introduced to the GIFT theory. And we’ll call it the GIFT theory because we’re on the family friendly side of the podcast sphere. As Tycho from Penny Arcade explained at the time, a normal person plus anonymity and an audience equals a GIFT.

And because that anonymity was kind of part and parcel with online interactions that you really didn’t know who you were dealing with. And that all identities online were constructed to a degree, it might lend people to say things online or behave online in ways that they wouldn’t if they were face to face with the person.

And because having an audience can allow for someone to get a larger reaction, people might be more predisposed to behave that way, if they thought their words could be traced back to them. Now, this is 2004, so pre social media. Twitter and Facebook would take off after that. And it became slightly more common for people to post using their real names, or at least a slightly more recognizable one.

And we found out that that really didn’t change things at all. So perhaps it has more to do with the audience rather than the anonymity. Regardless, the culture that had developed through early Usenet and then AOL chat rooms, through to online gaming, instant messenger apps, and IRC, kept encountering the same problems.

Which the tech determinants would take as a sign that suggests that the technology is the cause. But what if the social determinists are right? Social determinists being the flip side of the tech determinists, that all interactions that take place are due to social cues. This leads us to our third potential cause.

What if it’s the culture of online interaction? In 1993, Howard Rheingold published one of the first books on online societies, The Virtual Community, subtitled Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. This is based on his experience as a user in The Well, the Whole Earth Electronic Link, a BBS based in San Francisco run by computer enthusiasts that were part of the Whole Earth catalog.

Following up on his previous books on hackers and virtual reality, he wrote a book that took a wide-ranging survey of the state of the web in 1993. Or at least, what we now call the web, as much as the book focused on BBSs and other portals like The Well, terminal systems like Francis Minitel, commercial services like CompuServe, and email, all under the umbrella of CMC, Computer Mediated Communication.

Though this acronym is now largely forgotten, save for in certain academic circles, it bears repeating and reintroduction to those unfamiliar to the term, as it explains in the distinction it makes. And, open parenthesis, not that I’m saying that a term is acting with intentionality here, I’m not that far down the memetic rabbit hole, but rather that we can consider it as the focus for our agentive discussion. Close parenthesis. 

Rheingold was looking at early implementations of the web. Cross cultural implementations, when there are largely local phenomena, national at best, and rarely the international level that we now expect. You looked at France’s Minitel at CalvaCom, as well as sites in Japan and the well on the west coast of the United States.

Yes, they could all be accessed outside of that, but long distance was costly and bandwidth was low. And time and again, the same phenomena was observed. Talking with Lionel Lombroso, a participant with CalvaCom in France, about his experiences with 80s, one of the biggest challenges was dealing with like the perpetual flame wars, in this case one involving Microsoft and the evils therein.

Lombroso goes on to state that, quote, I think online is a stage for some people who don’t have opportunities to express themselves in real life. Again, this is the late 80s, early 90s. HTTP is just being invented around the same time. The web as we know it doesn’t exist yet, but online communication, computer mediated communication, does.

And they’re seeing this already. Where arguments based on politics or ideology lead to intractable discussions, which invariably force decisions to be made between censorship and free expression, and attempts to limit the flame war will invariably shift to this regardless of the forum, as has been seen in the Well, Twix, Calva, and so many other sites as well.

So, if antagonism online goes back this far, if we can see the roots of the quote unquote Seven Deadly Sins Then perhaps we’re close to finding our answer. Antagonism online can largely be a cultural thing. And just as a parenthesis, ask me sometime about those seven deadly sins and I can tell you how you can tell if you’re stuck in a 7g network.

If online toxicity is well and truly baked in, being part and parcel of the culture from the very beginning, is there a way to fight back against it? One of the biggest problems is the expectations of use. People coming to Mastodon, for instance, which looks and feels a lot like Twitter in many ways, is a lot of the initial participants are coming directly from Twitter and bringing all their old habits and patterns with them, for good.

The tech is static, but the new tech looks like the old tech and provides the affordances of the old tech, so it gets used in similar ways by people who expect it to behave in a certain way. And they may not be entirely conscious of that. That, much like Taylor Swift sings, It’s me, me, I’m the problem, it’s me.

So how might this be combated? There’s a number of options, and they’re not mutually exclusive. The first is to change the interface in order to change the interaction. This may be productive, as it would shake the users out of assumed patterns of use. However, it’s double edged, as one of the elements that makes a new platform attractive is its similarity to other existing platforms.

And to be clear, Despite the similarity of interface, tools like Mastodon are still facing an uphill battle in attracting or retaining users that are leaving X and or Twitter. And I’m saying and or, that despite it being X, we’re talking historically over the entire period that, say, tools like Mastodon have existed.

The second option can be heavier moderation. And this can be one of the big challenges for the Fediverse, which largely operates under donations and volunteer work. This approach has been taken by some private entities and the DSA in the EU, that’s the Digital Service Act, has required large social media platforms to disclose the number of moderators they have, especially in each language.

And in articles on Reuters and Global Witness published in November and December of 2023, we got a look at what some of those numbers were. For example, X had 2, 294 EU content moderators, compared with 16, 974 for YouTube, 7, 319 at Google’s Play service, and another 6, 125 at TikTok. And those numbers are largely for the English moderators.

The numbers drop off rapidly for non-English languages, even in the EU. And if large multinational corporations are challenged by and struggling with the lack the ability to moderate online, the largely volunteer versions that exist in the Fediverse can have even less recourse. 

So a third solution may be education on social norms and online toxicity. In this, networks like the Fediverse have some advantages, as they’ve been able to put in tools to assist users and creators that can modify the content in certain ways. Content warnings, which can hide certain content by default. Alt text for image and media descriptions for persons that need to use screen readers, using camel case for hashtags in order to increase readability.

But all of this is a long and constant battle as it’s on the user to institute them when they’re using it. And we’ve seen earlier forms of this happen online. As recounted in the Eternal September, and you can check out our old episode on that. But, as the name implies, it keeps happening as platforms need to acculturate the influx of new users in order to use the platform successfully.

And, as those new users still have all the same expectations of use that they’ve picked up in every interaction online that they’ve had up to that point in time. It’s still going to be a sticking point. So maybe we have to put it on the user, which leads us to our fourth option that the user needs to be the change that they want to see.

And I can see reflections of this in my own online interactions, that I realized maybe I wasn’t the best online citizen in the past, but, you know, we can all reflect about how we interact online and try and do better in the future. One simple method would be to follow George Costanza’s lead. And I’m serious on this, George Costanza in season 5 episode 22 on Seinfeld, this was the show called The Opposite, and Costanza tries doing the opposite of his instinct for every choice and interaction he has online, and his life ends up improving because of that.

He realizes that, hey, much like Taylor Swift, he might be the problem. And he tries to do better and make conscious decisions about how he’s interacting with people online. I don’t know if that’s something you can implement in software, but there are methods, like notifications that pop up when somebody’s going to reply to somebody they’ve never interacted with before.

Or, for instance, notifications for users when they’re going to post something online, letting them know that, hey, this is being distributed to a mass audience and not to your 12 closest friends. The other option for trying to be the change you want to see, you would just be actively working to try and make the internet a better place.

And we can see this in things like the happiness project on March 20th, 2024, the second day of the third FediForum, an unconference where individuals can come together online to discuss things related to the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon and other ActivityPub tools. Evan Prodromou, a co-author of ActivityPub convened a panel on happiness in the Fediverse, and the discussion centered around what makes us happy when we engage online.

How do we build those strong social ties and positive engagement that we’d love to see in our own lives? How do we ensure that our social networks lead to positive mental and physical health and well being? positive mindset overall? Those are not easy questions, by all means. One of the things the participants noted is that happiness requires active work, in that posting positive things requires an act on the part of the creators there, and it’s not always easy.

There can be a number of very stressful things that are inherent in social media, and especially the ways we use them now. As I participated in the panel, I mentioned some of the things that have brought up previously both in this episode and in previous ones, letting them know that we may need to be much like George Costanza and try and do the opposite.

But also I left the panel with a question that I began this episode, how much of your experience online? is dictated by the environment you’re in and how it’s constructed, that we need to consider both the architecture and the practices. And perhaps this is ultimately the solution. We create community by building a better place, supplemented by the technology, but created through the culture and patterns of use.

It has to be explicit though, as good interactions may go unnoted. And those who are unaware of them, or those who are new, may not notice that things are done differently. Ultimately, all these things can be incredibly positive for community. However, what happens when your community is taken away from you?

We’ll look at that possibility in the next episode of the ImplausiPod.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the ImplausiPod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Dr. Implausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 share alike license. 

You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we describe the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along.

There’s also a buy me a coffee link on each show at implausipod.com, which would go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time.

So consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes. Coming soon, we’ll be following up on this episode with what happens with the loss of online community. In an episode titled, Tick Tock Tribulations. After which we’ll have some special guests join, for a two-part discussion of the first season of the Fallout TV series, followed by a look at the emergence of the dial up pastorale, and then the commodification of curation. I think those episodes will be fantastic, I can’t wait to share them with you. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:
Chee, F. Y., Mukherjee, S., Chee, F. Y., & Mukherjee, S. (2023, November 10). Musk’s X has a fraction of rivals’ content moderators, EU says. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-x-has-fraction-rivals-content-moderators-eu-says-2023-11-10/

Drolsbach, C., & Pröllochs, N. (2023). Content Moderation on Social Media in the EU: Insights From the DSA Transparency Database (arXiv:2312.04431). arXiv. http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04431

FediForum.org. (n.d.). FediForum | Happiness in the Fediverse. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://fediforum.org/2024-03/session/4-d/

Green Blackboards (And Other Anomalies)—Penny Arcade. (n.d.). Retrieved May 19, 2024, from https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies

Oldemburgo de Mello, V., Cheung, F., & Inzlicht, M. (2024). Twitter (X) use predicts substantial changes in well-being, polarization, sense of belonging, and outrage. Communications Psychology, 2(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00062-z

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. MIT Press.

Excession – Bonus Episode

What happens when you encounter something so unknowable, that you forget to include it in the podcast episode that you did on that very subject? Well, you publish a Bonus Episode!

And you can find it right here: https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15791135-icebreaker-002-excession

I was reviewing the episode thanks to an email from a listener, and found that I managed to skip over a chunk of the explanation of main idea of the episode.

Whoops!

Implausipod on Peertube too

Seeing as the podcast is available on YouTube, it seemed logical to mirror that content on Peertube as well. PeerTube is a video player that supports the ActivityPub protocol that powers the Fediverse, that we’ve talked about in various podcasts and blog posts before. Using the PeerTube also lets us use the POSsE (Post Once, Syndicate Everywhere) philosophy for content creation that we’ve mentioned before too, so if YouTube or other platforms become inhospitable, it is still possible to keep one’s stuff and move.

The ImplausiPod on PeerTube can be found here. We’ll also upload AppendixW videos to a separate channel as those become available. And as we create more general videos, we have a home for those too.

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.