are shut out of being able to meaningfully shape the circulation process. Gillespie describes user agency as a mixture of technical capacities (being able to “act with a tool and on that tool”) and social capacities (“the user’s perception of their ability and right to do so”) (2006, 661). Using transportation as an example, Gillespie discusses the range of cultural resources, economic incentives, and technological innovations which have encouraged some users to fix their own cars, even as he describes ways current car design has made this less likely than in the past and has limited which groups of people feel able to do so without causing more damage than they are fixing. Spreadability is coming to a head right now because a complex set of changes has made it easier for grassroots communities to circulate content than ever before, yet the requirements of skills and literacies, not to mention access to technologies, are not evenly distributed across the population, an issue which we will examine throughout this book.
However, we again do not wish to ascribe too much power to any particular technology or platform. While Innis’s formulation presumes there will always be a dominant communication medium “biasing” society in one direction or another, this present moment of media convergence is one when there are multiple (sometimes competing and sometimes complementary) media systems whose intersections provide the infrastructure for contemporary communication (as the Susan Boyle and Mad Men examples suggest about the interplay between broadcast and digital networks). Some of these structures (such as the digital rights management systems Gillespie describes) seek the weight and authority prescribed to previous durable media. Often, such structures seek to lock down content, limiting or controlling its circulation. Other current platforms (such as YouTube, which makes it easy to embed its content elsewhere) have the freedom and mobility once ascribed to papyrus, enabling their rapid circulation across a range of social networks. Some media texts are made to last, while others (such as Twitter) are intended to be timely and disposable.
If various platforms offer divergent opportunities for participation, preservation, and mobility—and each system of communication sustains different relations between producers and citizens—then the established geopolitical system also creates hierarchies which make it harder for some groups (and some nations) to participate than others. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, a leading theorist of globalization, is another who has followed in Innis’s footsteps. Appadurai observes that “cultural objects, including images, languages, and hairstyles, now move ever more swiftly across regional and national boundaries. This acceleration is a consequence of the speed and spread of the Internet and the simultaneous, comparative growth in travel, cross-cultural media and global advertising” (2010, 4). Appadurai sees this accelerated flow of information and culture being facilitated not simply by the efforts of multinational capitalism but also through the expansion of illegal and unauthorized markets. These markets often cobble together systems of exchange that support the spread of media content and cultural values (but also guns and drugs) outside official and commercial channels. Often, he suggests, these underground, grassroots circuits—which serve the needs of less-affluent or marginalized peoples—“ride on” older systems of exchange which emerged from even more longstanding processes of globalization.
Appadurai’s model concedes fundamental inequalities in terms of which countries have access to these different forms of circulation, which face roadblocks that make it difficult to meaningfully participate in such exchanges, and how these inequalities of participation shape which ideas get put into circulation. There are, as Appadurai’s work demonstrates, many different kinds of networks which reach many different layers of societies and which travel between many different nodes in the system. While our book details the potentials of spreadability as a means of ensuring that more people have access to the means of cultural circulation, we believe it’s crucial to always be cognizant that not everyone has equal access to the technologies and to the skills needed to deploy them.
Despite (or perhaps because of) these inequalities, though, we are seeing some spectacular shifts in the flow of information across national borders and, as a consequence, in the relations between the peoples of different countries. As Appadurai notes, “This volatile and exploding traffic in commodities, styles, and information has been matched by the growth of both flows of cultural politics, visible most powerfully in the discourse of human rights, but also in the new languages of radical Christianity and Islam, and the discourse of civil society activists, who wish to promote their own versions of global equity, entitlement, and citizenship” (2010, 5).
Journalists, bloggers, and other cyber-enthusiasts have celebrated the use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube by protesters across the Muslim world and their supporters from the West as a decisive sign that grassroots communicators might be able to route around government censors and that citizen journalists might be able to force international concerns onto the agenda of the professional news media. Consider, for example, the role such technologies played in the aftermath of Iran’s hotly contested summer 2009 elections. Between June 7 and June 26, the Web Ecology Project (2009) at Harvard University recorded 2,024,166 tweets about the Iranian election, involving 480,000 people. Meanwhile, CNN’s iReport received more than 1,600 citizen-produced reports from Iran (Carafano 2009), mostly photographs but including videos of the actions in the street, recorded and transmitted via mobile phones. (Our enhanced book features a more involved discussion by Henry Jenkins on how “spreadability” applies to these events in Iran and the 2011 Arab Spring movements as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States.)
Sean Aday et al.’s 2010 report Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics argues that Twitter participation inside Iran was too low to have made much difference on the ground (estimating that as few as 100 people may have produced most of the Twitter traffic out of the country) and that the regime in power likewise used social network tools to monitor the behavior of protesters and often to circulate counterrevolutionary materials. However, the report concludes, “Where Twitter and other new media clearly did matter is how they conveyed information about the protests to the outside world. Traditional media were at a disadvantage in covering events inside Iran because of restrictions placed on journalists, and thus ended up relying on new media for content. Hence, the outside world’s perceptions of the protests were crucially shaped by Twitter (as conveyed through blogs and other means), amateur videos uploaded to YouTube and Facebook, and other sources” (22). In Innis’s terms, what happened challenged two “monopolies of knowledge” which potentially regulated the flow of information from Tehran to the United States: the Iranian government’s desire to contain news of the protest and the mainstream news media’s ability to determine the priority it gave to covering specific events. For Appadurai, the same data might have illustrated continued inequalities in the speed and spread of communication, such that people struggling for power within Iran were forced to rely on influence and attention from the Western world to shape events within their own country.
Clay Shirky has argued that Twitter’s impact in this instance was more affective than informational: “As a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. […] Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the outside world is paying attention is really valuable” (2009). These strong emotions reflected the cumulative effect of an ongoing but always fragile flow of messages from the streets of Tehran. Much as daily digital communication about mundane matters led to people using social network sites feeling stronger personal ties to their friends, the flow of political messages through Twitter helped make them feel more directly implicated by the protest. Global citizens (including a strong diasporic community in North America and western Europe) helped the Iranian protesters evade potential censorship and technical roadblocks, translated their thoughts into English and other Western languages, flagged reliable information from rumors, passed what they had learned onto others, and rallied news outlets to pay closer attention.
Newsrooms are still struggling to figure out what their new roles may be in an environment where the demand for information can be driven by affect and shaped by what happens within online communities, where citizens may make demands on what journalists cover and may cobble together information from a range
