4). In other words, companies are feeling more pressure to think not just about how audiences might spread messages about a brand (and content from the brand) but also about how their own corporate presence might “spread” to connect with the messages audiences are circulating about them.
Participatory Culture Reconsidered
Spreadability assumes a world where mass content is continually repositioned as it enters different niche communities. When material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it imperfectly fits the needs of any given audience. Instead, audience members have to retrofit it to better serve their interests. As material spreads, it gets remade: either literally, through various forms of sampling and remixing, or figuratively, via its insertion into ongoing conversations and across various platforms. This continuous process of repurposing and recirculating is eroding the perceived divides between production and consumption.
Whitney Phillips’s doctoral work at the University of Oregon focuses on the cultural practices, productions, and performances associated with 4Chan, an online community that actively encourages behavior which is often described as “antisocial” or “troll-like.” Phillips argues that even disrespectful remixing is generative. In our enhanced book, she argues that 4Chan members have adopted a distinctive model for thinking about the “contributions” they make to culture, actively seizing on memes as tools for creativity and production:
As understood by trolls, memes are not passive and do not follow the model of biological infection. Instead, trolls see (though perhaps “experience” is more accurate) memes as microcosmic nests of evolving content. […] Memes spread—that is, they are actively engaged and/or remixed into existence—because something about a given image or phrase or video or whatever lines up with an already-established set of linguistic and cultural norms. In recognizing this connection, a troll is able to assert his or her cultural literacy and to bolster the scaffolding on which trolling as a whole is based, framing every act of reception as an act of cultural production.
For 4Chan members, the concept of the meme as a self-perpetuating phenomenon beyond human control might contribute to the spontaneity and disruption the group hopes to achieve. Phillips (2009) has argued elsewhere that 4Chan may have been the birthplace for widely spread images that represented U.S. President Barack Obama as Batman character The Joker, which some supporters of the U.S. conservative Tea Party movement adopted for protest signs during their public opposition to President Obama’s national health care plan.
While the Los Angeles Times (Grad 2009) identified the artist of one of the most widely spread versions as college student Firas Alkhateeb, the image emerged from a larger series of remixes by the 4Chan community as they toyed with marketing material produced for the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight. Other remixes included transforming John McCain into The Joker, along with Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, various pop stars, and, of course, pictures of cute cats. While most of these remixes didn’t circulate broadly outside 4Chan, some members of the Tea Party found particular resonance in the image of Obama as the antisocial Joker. Within 4Chan, memes serve as themes for ongoing conversations and fodder for creative activity, with each variation demonstrating and requiring particular cultural knowledge. Much as 4Chan hijacked images from Christopher Nolan’s movie, the Tea Party poached these images from 4Chan, changing their political valances yet again. All of this suggests the ways that the appropriation, remixing, and recirculation of content via the mechanisms of participatory culture are increasingly impacting conversations far removed from what once might have been seen as niche communities. As this happens, we are seeing the erosion of traditional boundaries—between fans and activists, creativity and disruption, niche and mainstream in the 4Chan example, or between commercial and grassroots, fan and producer in some of the examples we will consider later in this section.
This book will suggest a range of groups who are strongly motivated to produce and circulate media materials as parts of their ongoing social interactions, among them activists who seek to change public perceptions of an issue of concern to the group; religious groups who seek to spread “the Word”; supporters of the arts—especially of independent media—who seek to build a base to bolster alternative forms of cultural expression; enthusiasts for particular brands that have become signposts for people’s identities and lifestyles; bloggers who seek to engage others about the needs of local communities; collectors and retro audiences seeking greater access to residual materials; members of subcultures seeking to construct alternative identities; and so forth.
In particular, we will frequently use entertainment fandom as a reference point because fans groups have often been innovators in using participatory platforms to organize and respond to media texts. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, amateur publishers began to print newsletters about shared interests and to circulate them across the country, ultimately leading to the formation of the Amateur Press Association (Petrik 1992). The rise of science fiction fandom in the 1920s and 1930s (Ross 1991) built on this foundation, representing one of the most prominent and enduring examples of organized fan communities. Television fandom, in turn, has provided a supportive context through which many women, excluded from the male-only club that science fiction fandom had largely become, could develop their skills and hone their talents. By the 1970s, many women were remixing television footage to create their own fanvids, writing and editing their own zines, creating elaborate costumes, singing original folk songs, and painting images, all inspired by their favorite television series (Bacon-Smith 1992; Jenkins 1992; Coppa 2008). With the rise of networked computing, these fan communities did important work, providing their female participants with access to new skills and technologies as their members took their first steps into cyberspace, reversing early conceptions about the gendering of digital culture as a space only for masculine mastery. In particular, female fans were early adopters of social network technologies such as LiveJournal and Dreamwith, using the resources offered by new media technologies (podcasting, mp3s, video-sharing sites) to create their own distinctive forms of participatory culture.
These types of communities have embraced new technologies as they emerged, particularly when such tools offered them new means of social and cultural interactions. Rather than looking at platforms such as YouTube and Twitter as “new,” we consider these sites where multiple existing forms of participatory culture—each with its own historical trajectory, some over a century old—come together, which is part of what makes such platforms so complex to study. The popularity of Twitter, for instance, was driven by how efficiently the site facilities 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 microblogging platform only after its success was considered buzzworthy (a few exceptional early adopters notwithstanding, of course). Launched at the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive festival, a favorite event for people in media-related industries, Twitter quickly enabled individual marketers to build their personal brands, to connect with one another, to demonstrate their social networking abilities, and to share their “thought leadership.” Marketers, advertisers, and public relations professionals constituted a good portion of the early professionals using the site at a time when the rules of marketing were rapidly changing and a new crop of professionals were cementing their status and demonstrating their prowess in the “digital era.”
The same year Twitter launched, so too did Mad Men, AMC’s multi-Emmy-award-winning series about 1960s advertising agency Sterling Cooper. Mad Men celebrates what many people consider a “golden era” of U.S. mass marketing. The series serves as both a retrospective on the broadcast era and an exploration of another time in marketing when the rules were in flux and new advertising practices were developing around an increasingly important new media form (in this case, television).
It almost seems inevitable now that Twitter would prove a natural extension for the drama of Mad Men. Since season one, ad man Don Draper and fellow Sterling Cooper employees Pete Campbell, Joan Holloway, and Roger Sterling (or, rather, someone performing their identities) had been providing
