Spreadable media

Spreadable Media is a work often quoted as being written by Jenkins but the book carries a huge amount of contribution by the co-writers Ford and Green as well who in their turns provide countless examples from a marketing perspective since they both are employed in digital strategy firms.

This heavy reliance on brand communication and fan communities fails the book to reflect on civic participation which might be the most crucial issue of the present era. The book recounts numerous cases related to a particular brand’s communication whether it is sticky or spreadable… Via these examples the reader can get a notion of what kind of an online communication strategy a brand should pursue but examples on democratic participation are few and serve as padding material between the sections on how to perfect corporate communication.

On the other hand, the examples on fandom are interesting in the sense that collective participation is made available through fan creation but the question of the applicability of these examples to a grassroots participation to political decision making remains largely unanswered. I have conducted a quick content analysis of the book which might illustrate the heavy reliance on corporate communication by counting the following words in the book:

Brand: 186

Company(ies): 313

Democracy: 15

Civic: 33

Citizen: 27

Grassroots: 86

Activist: 44