cultural practices in which they want to engage.
But, more fundamentally, we have to understand the cultural practices that have both fueled the rise of these sharing technologies and evolved as people discover how these platforms might be used. For instance, the Susan Boyle video was widely shared because the participating public is more collectively and individually literate about social networking online; because people are more frequently and more broadly in contact with their networks of friends, family, and acquaintances; and because people increasingly interact through sharing meaningful bits of media content.
Taken together, this set of social and cultural practices, and the related technological innovations which grew up around them, constitute what we call a “networked culture.” These cultural practices were certainly not created by new technologies. We’ve long known that news stories generate conversations; many of us have a cousin or grandmother who (still!) clips newspaper articles to put on the refrigerator, in an album, or in the mail to us. Social historian Ellen Gruber Garvey (2013), for example, has offered a glimpse into how circulation and value were connected in the scrapbook culture of nineteenth-century U.S. readers. Their primary activity was sifting through newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals, gathering material to archive. In an era when news publications themselves actively engaged in “recirculation”—local papers reprinted stories originally published elsewhere if they seemed of interest to local readers—scrapbook collectors stored the most appealing of these ephemeral accounts for future generations. In turn, newspapers sometimes capitalized on this early form of “user-generated content,” publishing retrospectives featuring reader-curated material. These archival practices accelerated with the twentieth-century rise of photocopiers, which facilitated easier reproduction and sharing of found material.
However, what happened in a predigital world now occurs with exponentially greater speed and scope, thanks to the affordances of online social tools. According to a CNN research project (“Shared News” 2010), the average global Internet user receives 26 news stories per week via social media or email and shares 13 news stories online. According to a report from the Pew Research Center (Purcell et al. 2010), 75 percent of respondents received news forwarded through email or posted on social network sites, and 52 percent shared links to news with others via those means.
This news gathering is shaped by a strong desire to contribute to ongoing conversations with friends, family, and co-workers. Of the respondents to the Pew study, 72 percent said they follow the news because they enjoy talking with others about what is happening in the world, and 50 percent said they rely to some degree on people around them to tell them the news they need to know. All of this suggests a world where citizens count on each other to pass along compelling bits of news, information, and entertainment, often many times over the course of a given day.
In this networked culture, we cannot identify a single cause for why people spread material. People make a series of socially embedded decisions when they choose to spread any media text: Is the content worth engaging with? Is it worth sharing with others? Might it be of interest to specific people? Does it communicate something about me or my relationship with those people? What is the best platform to spread it through? Should it be circulated with a particular message attached? Even if no additional commentary is appended, however, just receiving a story or video from someone else imbues a range of new potential meanings in a text. As people listen, read, or view shared content, they think not only—often, not even primarily—about what the producers might have meant but about what the person who shared it was trying to communicate.
Indeed, outside the U.K., most people probably encountered the Susan Boyle video because someone sent a link or embedded it in a Facebook update or blog: many people shared the video to boast their accomplishment of discovery. They could anticipate sharing the video with people who hadn’t seen it, precisely because the material was not widely available on television. Some may have heard conversations about it and searched on YouTube; for many more, the message came in the midst of other social exchanges, much as an advertisement comes as part of the commercial television flow. Yet, while an advertisement might feel like an intrusion or interruption, people often welcome spreadable media content from friends (at least discerning ones) because it reflects shared interests.
It is apparent that some people were passing Boyle’s performance along as a gesture of friendship to build interpersonal relationships, while others used the material to contribute to a community organized around a key interest. This difference is a key distinction: between friendship-based and interest-based networks (Ito et al. 2009). An avowed Christian, Boyle became the focus of online prayer circles. Science blogs discussed how someone with her body could produce such a sound. Karaoke singers debated her technique, reporting an incident when she was thrown out of a karaoke bar because she was now viewed as a professional performer. Reality-television blogs debated whether her success would have been possible on U.S. television given that American Idol excludes people her age from competing. Fashion blogs critiqued and dissected the makeover she was given for subsequent television appearances. Boyle’s video spread, then, as a result of the many conversations it enabled people to have with each other, whether among friends or within communities of common interest. (And, of course, many may have done some of both.)
From a commercial perspective, American Idol had a full season to build public interest in its finale yet failed to attract the scale of attention the seven-minute clip of Boyle sparked. Contrary to speculation that the Boyle phenomenon would be short-lived, her debut album released by Columbia Records months later enjoyed groundbreaking advance sales, surpassing The Beatles and Whitney Houston on Amazon’s charts (Lapowsky 2009). The album sold more than 700,000 copies in its first week, the largest opening-week sales of any album released that year. As Columbia Records chair Steve Barnett explained, “People wanted to get it and own it, to feel like they’re a part of it” (Sisario 2009). Of course, those who helped circulate the video already felt they were “a part of it.”
While such success makes for an impressive business story, the initial international popularity of the Susan Boyle moment wasn’t driven by a plan for counting impressions and raking in the cash. Most of the many millions of people who streamed the Boyle clip were part of a “surplus audience” for whom producers had not built a business model. Boyle’s performance was part of a British program with no commercial distribution in most other countries, so the majority of people sharing the video couldn’t turn on a television network—cable or broadcast—and watch the next installment of Britain’s Got Talent. They couldn’t stream the show legally online. They couldn’t buy episodes from iTunes. Despite relationships with multiple television networks, FremantleMedia couldn’t get the show into commercial distribution quickly enough for transnational viewers to catch up with the Brits. Given the global circulation of information about Susan Boyle online, anyone who wanted to know what happened on Britain’s Got Talent heard about it within seconds of its airing. In short, market demand dramatically outpaced supply.
The spread of Susan Boyle demonstrates how content not designed to circulate beyond a contained market or timed for rapid global distribution can gain much greater visibility than ever before, thanks to the active circulation of various grassroots agents, while television networks and production companies struggle to keep up with such unexpected, rapidly escalating demand.
The case also allows us to challenge the commonplace assertion that, in the era of Web 2.0, user-generated content has somehow displaced mass media in the cultural lives of everyday people. Lucas Hilderbrand notes, “For mass audiences, broadcast, cable and satellite television still dominate, […] and network content will continue to feed these streams. And I suspect that for many audiences, network content—new or old—still drives users to YouTube, and amateur content is discovered along the way, through the suggested links, alternative search results, or forwarded emails” (2007, 50). What Hilderbrand’s account misses, though, is that much of the mass-media content encountered on YouTube and other such platforms is unauthorized—not so much user-generated content as user-circulated content. While audiences’ sharing and spreading of Susan Boyle’s video
