In the process, tension over who claimed ownership of the fan activity and which Twitterers took credit for this moment of success became public. For instance, when Bugbee created a South by Southwest Interactive panel about the Mad Men/Twitter phenomenon, Caddell (2009a) publicly discussed the politics of panelist selection, blogging about the omission of himself and other prominent “fans” who were pivotal in the movement.
The circulation of media content within participatory culture can serve a range of interests, some cultural (such as promoting a particular genre or performer), some personal (such as strengthening social bonds between friends), some political (such as critiquing the construction of gender and sexuality within mass media), some economic (such as those which serve the immediate needs of everyday individuals, as well as those which serve the needs of media companies). We are not arguing that fans are somehow resisting consumer capitalism and its intellectual property regimes through these various processes and practices, as many of even these unauthorized activities might indirectly profit media companies and brands. Whatever audiences’ motivations, they may discover new markets, generate new meanings, renew once-faded franchises, support independent producers, locate global content which was never commercially introduced in a local market, or disrupt and reshape the operations of contemporary culture in the process. In some cases, these outcomes are the direct goal of participatory culture; in others, they are a byproduct. Companies that tell audiences to keep their hands off a brand’s intellectual property cut themselves off from these processes, many of which might create and prolong the value of media texts.
The media industries understand that culture is becoming more participatory, that the rules are being rewritten and relationships between producers and their audiences are in flux. Few companies, however, are willing to take what may be seen as substantial risks with potentially valuable intellectual property. Fans’ desires and corporate interests sometimes operate in parallel, yet they never fully coincide, in part because even companies that embrace the ideals of audience engagement are uncertain about how much control to abdicate. Watching AMC and Deep Focus sometimes reject and sometimes embrace the efforts of their fans to promote Mad Men, regardless of these fans’ alternative motivations, provides a glimpse into the limits of current industry understanding of what we call spreadable media. The fans in the Mad Men case are themselves part of the branded entertainment industry, using their recreational time to consider how this new cultural economy might operate. Some have publicly acknowledged that their actions crossed the lines which normally separate producers from their audiences, while others were wary to speak out, unsure what was at risk as they ventured into this uncertain terrain. However, these marketers/fans and their fictional characters articulated audience desires to participate more actively in producing and circulating media and professional desires to make marketing and media texts more participatory.
Corporate interests will never fully align with those of participatory culture, and frictions will frequently emerge. For instance, people are deeply ambivalent about how media companies and corporate communicators participate in such an environment. With audiences’ greater autonomy, they seek more explicit acknowledgment from companies but are concerned with how the active participation of corporations might distort communities or that corporations will only embrace audience practices in the ways they can most easily profit from them. Participatory culture is not synonymous with the business practices that have been labeled Web 2.0, a distinction we will explore more fully in chapter 1. We are all struggling over the shape our culture(s) will take in the coming decades, a struggle being tackled on uneven terms and with unequal resources. We see participatory culture as a relative term—culture is more participatory now than it was under older regimes of media power in many places. Yet we are a long way away from anything approaching full participation.
All of this suggests ways we are revising the concept of participatory culture to reflect the realities of a dramatically altered and still-evolving mediascape. We are moving from an initial focus on fandom as a particular subculture to a larger model that accounts for many groups that are gaining greater communicative capacity within a networked culture and toward a context where niche cultural production is increasingly influencing the shape and direction of mainstream media. We are moving from focusing on the oppositional relationship between fans and producers as a form of cultural resistance to understanding those roles as increasingly and complexly intertwined. We are moving from a celebration of the growth of participatory opportunities toward a view tempered by concern for the obstacles blocking many people from meaningful participation. We will return throughout the book to debates about the terms of our participation, about how our participation is valued or blocked through various corporate policies and practices, and about which participants are welcomed, marginalized, and excluded.
Papyrus and Marble
The innovations, and struggles, of participatory culture that take place within the broad interplay between top-down institutional and bottom-up social forces have shaped the spread of media within and across cultures. There is a long history of such cultural exchanges, conducted through various channels and practices. The rise of networked computing and the ways its components have been absorbed into participatory culture and deployed through social network sites represents a new configuration of long-existing practices. (MIT media historian William Uricchio traces some key chapters of that history in our enhanced book, showing how media from coins to printed books have flowed within and across cultures.) Even if grassroots channels of communication may have disruptive effects on existing monopolies of knowledge, spreadable media needs to be understood in evolutionary rather than revolutionary terms.
How media circulates has been a central concern of media studies at least since the 1951 publication of Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication. In Innis’s formulation, the dominant means of communication in a given society influences the production and control of information. Calling for an approach to media studies centered on “the dissemination of knowledge over space and over time,” Innis noted that some media (stone or marble, for example) are “heavy and durable,” preserving information for long periods but also leading to top-down control over what information is preserved. Other media (papyrus, for example) are “light and easily transported,” allowing for their quick and easy spread across a geographically dispersed area (1951, 33). Often, those media that enable mobility are also low cost, allowing for their deployment by and among more people and resulting in more decentralized communication.
Innis argues that ongoing tension between durability and mobility—between marble and papyrus—has determined what kinds of information gained visibility in its own time and what has been preserved for subsequent generations. In his account, shifts in the technological infrastructure have the potential to construct or undermine “monopolies of knowledge” closely associated with other sources of institutional power. Innis’s focus on how different configurations of technologies may enable or constrain the circulation of information has been taken up by more recent writers seeking to explain the rise of phenomena such as digital rights management systems (DRM) as attempts to shape audience behavior. Tarleton Gillespie describes the system of constraints determining how users can engage with and share digital media texts:
Constructing technology to regulate human activity, such that it limits all users in a fair and effective way, is never simply a technical matter. It is a heterogeneous effort in which the material artifacts, the institutions that support them, the laws that give them teeth, and the political and cultural mechanisms that give them legitimacy, must all be carefully aligned into a loosely regimented but highly cohesive, hybrid network. (2006, 652)
Different technological choices, then, can shape the uses the public makes of media content, facilitating some while constraining others, but technologies can never be designed to absolutely control how material gets deployed within a given social and cultural context. Indeed, both popular and niche uses of technology always emerge far outside anything foreseen by the designer.
Yet the more companies and governments roadblock the spread of media texts, the more grassroots circulation requires
