How sharing, linking, and liking have transformed the media and marketing industries

Spreadable Media is a rare inside look at today’s ever-changing media landscape. The days of corporate control over media content and its distribution have been replaced by the age of what the digital media industries have called “user-generated content.” Spreadable Media maps these fundamental changes, and gives readers a comprehensive look into the rise of participatory culture, from internet memes to presidential tweets.
The authors challenge our notions of what goes “viral” and how by examining factors such as the nature of audience engagement and the environment of participation, and by contrasting the concepts of “stickiness”—aggregating attention in centralized places—with “spreadability”—dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks. The former has often been the measure of media success in the online world, but the latter describes the actual ways content travels through social media. The book explores the internal tensions businesses face as they adapt to this new, spreadable, communication reality and argues for the need to shift from “hearing” to “listening” in corporate culture.
Now with a new afterword addressing changes in the media industry, audience participation, and political reporting, and drawing on modern examples from online activism campaigns, film, music, television, advertising, and social media—from both the US and around the world—the authors illustrate the contours of our current media environment. For all of us who actively create and share content, Spreadable Media provides a clear understanding of how people are spreading ideas and the implications these activities have for business, politics, and everyday life, both on- and offline.

"Content today, the authors suggest, can travel not only from the top down but also from the inside out. It is a remarkably different terrain than what we have been used to, one they effectively and stridently analyze." - Publishers Weekly

"In Spreadable Media, media theorist Henry Jenkins, formerly of MIT and now at USC, and his coauthors, digital strategists Sam Ford and Joshua Green, make a convincing case that fan involvement in the re-creation and circulation of media content is not just an interesting side effect of man-to-many multimedia networks and smartphone video editing apps, but a significant force for empowerment and exploitation in and of itself...If you are in the music, move, television, or game business, this book is a must read." - Strategy and Business

"Solid analysis and detailed examples to make it sticky enough for the intended readerships of media scholars, media professionals, and fans." - International Journal of Communication

"Spreadable Media is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand how media works today." - Deep Media

"A wide-ranging examination of the contemporary media environment as individuals increasingly control their own creation of content." - Kirkus