You Are Here (1968) by John Lennon

Part of the difference, of course, is the publicness of the content in Public/Nearby. My “shouts” on Foursquare are viewable only to my friends (unless shared through Twitter or Facebook). My location-tagged content on Twitter, while potentially public, is accessible if you’re looking at my feed, making the information very much personal in that sense.

Twitter and Google+ share the fact that you append location to content, rather than appending content to location, as with Foursquare. In that sense, Google+ and Twitter are primarily organized around people rather than places*. For Twitter, however, location is an added layer of data on a piece of content, but it is isn’t an organizing factor. So, if you look at your friend’s location-enable tweet, you can see where they were when they shared that information. However, you can’t see all tweets from your follow-list that have been shared in a given location. The location of tweets gives more information, but it doesn’t change how that information is encountered.

For both Foursquare and Google+, on the other hand, location can be a primary organizing structure for accessing, sharing, and classifying information. However, in Foursquare, the definition of “location” is based on defined venues, however flexible the spatial parameters around those venues might be (consider the many “moving target” check-ins to extreme weather conditions). If you’re sitting in a cafe, you might look at the public information associated with the cafe, or the cafe counter, or that neighborhood, or the nearby park, or a cab driving by, but you cannot see it all the information within the area around your position.

What makes Google+’s location features unique is the fluidity of the role of location data. It can, like twitter, be another layer of information about a post, but it can also, like Foursquare, serve as the organizing structure for accessing and producing information. But unlike Foursquare, if you hit the “public/nearby” feature in Google+, you get all the information shared publicly in a given area around your position. In sharing information, it’s structure of appending location data to content encourages more user-focused content, in the manner of Twitter. However, in allowing location to also be an organizing factor Public/Nearby uses place as a means to access information like Foursquare. To put it overly simplistically, it feels as if Twitter uses people or organize information about people, Foursquare uses place to organize information about place, and Google+’s Public/Nearby feature uses place to organize information about people.

Another potentially interesting, but far more difficult to untangle distinction, emerges if we think (very broadly) about space versus place. I don’t want to get into the complexities and nuances of the space/place relationship, but for the purposes of this post think of spaces as generally a geographical area and place as a specific space imbued with value and meaning that is, as Marc Augé defines it, “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” In that sense, whereas Foursquare emphasizes not only places, but particular places (given their policy of regulating “duplicate” venues), Google+ is more spatially-inflected, grouping information in relation to a given geographical parameter regardless of the boundaries and definitions of the places within it. But the space of Google+ nearby/public is not an undifferentiated space, but a position-specific one full of information and discourse. In that sense, we might think of it as a placed space — defined by the physical area but articulated as “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” Again, this doesn’t go anywhere near the complexity of space/place relations, nor does it take into account the technological functions of how Google+’s GPS system determines spatial parameters. Just some beginning observations on how different technologies shape our encounters of/in spaces and places.

I’m also curious if there’s other location-based services that address/define spaces and places in different ways, so would love to hear about your ideas and experiences.

*At least, in how I use Foursquare. As with Twitter or any other platform, different groups and individuals may use the tools in different ways, resulting in different experiences.

Image from CNN.com

Last week, amongst all the frustration, euphoria, and confused wonder surrounding the events in Egypt, Malcolm Gladwell and others got mired in another discussion regarding the relative efficacy of social media in creating political change.

I don’t want to rehash the back and forth (some thoughtful opinions here, here, and here), except to say that I empathize with Gladwell’s frustration, I really do, but I think that his push-back isn’t particularly illuminating or necessary. It’s true that some of the over-emphasis on the role of social media runs the risk of overshadowing more considered analysis of the historical context and implications of what happened in Egypt. And I have to admit that seeing some of the twitter and foursquare jokes made me bristle with annoyance briefly (not because they were making light of the situation, but because they made light of the privilege we had, as media and communications professionals in the US, in being able to be cute about it all). Maybe its a function of my youthful optimism, but I think Gladwell does a disservice in validating these strawmen as something worth arguing against.

For me, claims that social media brought forth the revolution in Egypt exist so deep within a territory of techno-narcissism that isn’t really even worth refuting. And it’s not unexpected — these technologies are still relatively new. We’re still trying to sort out what they can do. If we look at early film and TV criticism, so much focused on the “how” over the “why” in the same way that Gladwell laments, and it didn’t prevent the “why” (and the “what”) from dominating the discourse as the novelty wore off.

But more importantly, I think his arguments about social media not being relevant to revolutions makes the same awkward assumption as the claims that facebook changed Egypt: that what’s compelling about what happened online has everything (or anything) to do with Egypt per se. Maybe because I think of them as dramatically important in totally different arenas, I don’t see the emphasis on one or the other in competition with one another for column pixels. Because something significant did happen on and to social media, but to think it was what twitter and Facebook did (or didn’t do) for Egypt is to have things backwards. Twitter didn’t happen to Egypt; Egypt happened to twitter and is may be transforming how we think about the role of social media in our lives and communities.

Annie Paul makes the provocative suggestion that the crucial difference between these networked-enabled revolutions and their predecessors is that they’re essentially “leaderless revolutions.” The idea of a leaderless revolution is interesting precisely because it means that participants were able to conceive of and enunciate themselves as a public without need for a central voice.

In my work on transnational television audiences (pdf), I’ve suggested that what is radical about fan communities online is not only their collectivity, but their visibility, their conspicuous publicness that has implications for how we think about cultural citizenship. There is something of that here too, that what is compelling about what happened online is not only how information was circulated, but visibility of that circulation.

At the risk of over-stating, could we consider the pivotal role of social media use (and not the technologies themselves) as something that may have not brought about a revolution, but accelerated the formation of a manner of public sphere surrounding it? That it catalyzed and amplified one of the critical steps towards any politicized public, which is the recognition and articulation of itself as such?

The impact I think isn’t about the events are they were happening, but how we document for posterity. That in tagging tweets with a hashtag like #jan25, we were not only ensuring that they were included in information that was circulating in the moment. We were also making a declaration about its relevance and inclusion into the historical document of that moment. In lock-step with the recognition of a public as such is the increasing collective self-awareness of the historical. What is potentially transformative is the ability to collectively participate in the process of historicization, to influence the terms and organizing criteria for inclusion into the historical discourse through meta-data. And that ability is dynamic, accretive, and fluid in ways and at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before. Not to mention that the first major tag that blew up was a date — a clear recognition of the historical moment.

What are the implications of this sort of networked politics? Or what my close friend and fellow cms-alum Lan Xuan Le called a “flashmob politics” (a phrase that nicely encapsulates both excitement for the potential power of collective energy and the fear of that it may ultimately be impotent in creating lasting change). How does the use of these technologies change the ways we negotiate — articulate, mark, possess, surveille, construct — space, information, mobility, history?

So, in a way, this is part link-dump, part project-emergence-documentation.

I started thinking about these issues with the recent surge in discussions of brand collaborations with popular geolocation social games, especial with all the chatter in SXSW reports about the rise of location-specific (I know people are using the term geolocation, but I’ve yet to really embrace that tautology) games and social networking tools.

• Daniel Terdiman reported that Foursquare and Gowalla trumped twitter this year in terms of cutting through the noise of the conference backchannels.
• And the prevalence of location check-ins was one of the biggest take-aways from Jay Baer’s SXSW observations.
• Clement Yueng at Social Media Examiner writes about how businesses can leverage geotagging to build their brands.
• Last month a number of Entertainment and Media brands linked up with Foursquare
• And universities are jumping on the wagon, with Marc Parry at the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing the rise of “virtual graffiti” initiatives.

Location check-in networks therefore have two obvious precedents: display advertising and graffiti culture.

• For display advertising and public space, I’ve been digging into City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York by David M. Henkin, which discusses the way branded communications and marketing transformed public space and how we perceive information as a culture.

• One of the (geographic) sites of interest is Sao Paulo, a city famous for its unique graffiti culture and for banning outdoor advertising. Hector Fernando Burga’s briefly outlines [pdf] a number of papers given at the Decentering Urban Theory conference at UC Berkeley focusing on new productions of urban space, including one by Prof. Teresa Caldeira on the “auto-construction” of Sao Paulo, where citizens engage in slow, collaborative, ad-hoc rebuilding of the city. These and other sites like it reveal “another dimension of place-making” that geotagging and location check-ins also seem to fit into.
• Also on the urban theory front, I’m looking into a classic in the field, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City.
• And going in the other direction, I’m trying to think of how to situate the geolocation social activities between public and private, and starting with The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, which explores how we encounter the most intimate and domestic spaces.

Brands and Communities: 3 Core Principles

Brands understand the value of online communities and the power of social media in making sure a brand isn’t just a product, but a cultural resource and symbol. Online communities are one of the best ways to get to know your consumers, deepen loyalty, and broaden a brand’s cultural and marketing reach.

But building a community that is loyal, ef?cient, and real is about more than just getting talked about. It’s about more than just having a Facebook page, or twitter followers, or blog comments. It’s about fostering real engagement by understanding how communities work, how they use technology, and what kind of contribution
the brand can bring into the mix. In short, in thinking about

1. Courting (not creating) communities

Many brands, when building a social presence online believe themselves to be in the business of creating communities. But a brand’s community isn’t a coherent entity with the singular goal of promoting the brand. While an online community can certainly act as a full-throttle promotional team, they do so because being part of the community serves a variety of individual purposes.

Brands, therefore, must thinking of themselves as courting communities. The digital world is densely networked and no consumer is an island. They’re a part of active communities that have their own interests and goals. Brands have to ?gure how to make themselves of value to these communities if they hope to integrate themselves and build strong ties.

Find where your communities are and listen, learn what tools they use, what content they ?nd compelling, what tone they converse in. Find out what matters to them, learn from what they do, and how to participate on their terms. Only then can the brand build the trust and understanding it needs to cultivate a strong community. Look to key community members and get them to be intermediaries for you. They know better than any marketer how to speak to their own communities.

2. Be the means, not the ends

Brands can build strong communities by becoming the connective tissue between members. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Fournier and Lee state that in brand communities “brands are a means to an end, not an end in itself” (Fournier and Lee 2009). This seems simple enough, but it’s a misstep many brands make when the ask “how can we get people talking about us?” or even “how can we get people talking to us?”

The simple answer is that you don’t.

Brands build communities when they get people to talk through them, about and to one another. In a rich, lasting brand community, brands are the tools of communication, not the subject. It might seem counterintuitive, but acting as the connective tissue, brands can build deeper and more lasting relationships with their consumers because it integrates the brand into the rich social relationships consumers form with one another.

3. Cultivate, don’t control

One of the strongest instinct marketers and PR ?rms have when dealing with communities is to control them. No one wants people to say bad things about the brand, so there is an urge to stamp down con?ict or “misuse” of just negative feelings. However, trying to control conversations and opinion will only generate distrust and resentment. Instead, see con?ict as an opportunity to engage in conversation and get valuable feedback.

Be transparent in all your interactions in the community. Efforts to hide intentions, obfuscate mistakes, or redirect blame when con?icts arise will only fuel the ?re. Online communities operate on collective intelligence — you might be able to fool one person or even most, but you can’t keep things hidden from large communities, all working together and sharing labor and information. Transparency fosters trust, good-will, and can turn dissatisfaction into an opportunity to change minds and improve relationships.

I’m hoping to get up a full research page in the coming weeks, with all papers, short pieces, and presentations I’ve churned out over the last couple of years, so look for that soonish.

Anyway:

Conclusions: Locating Value and Courting Communities

Final Principles:

• Within market exchanges, things enter the transaction with a set value. In non-market exchanges, however, the value comes out of the transaction. So the value is actually created through. and comes out of, the context of the exchange, rather than being set before the good enters it.

• The difference, then, between gift and commodity exchange is not that one is socially regulated while the other is economically or rationally regulated, but rather the speci?c rules and regulations that come into play. The differences are in how these regulations are deployed, and the relative role of the context and terms of the exchange itself rather than the contents of the exchange.

• The networked and visible participatory practices online requires media producers recognize both market and non-market systems of exchange and the types of value and worth produced in order to engage audiences online.

• When we seek to build businesses around users generated content, or when we’re trying to engage in social media campaigns, or when we see violations of IP, all activities that are now becoming common in any media brand or property. We can’t simply take pieces of different systems of value and cobble them together and hope for the best, nor can we simply take one system and place it within the architecture of another.

• It does a potential disservice to media properties to simply apply the regulations of control from market systems onto non-market ones, such as in the case of DMCA takedown sweeps that remove content which not only fit within the boundaries of fair-use, but also stop audience activities that potentially generate more marketing value than cause damage.

• Ultimately, the essence to being able to court a community and build an enduring relationship with your brand requires an understanding what kind of system your fans and consumers think they’re in. That is to say, in trying to create a system that can be mutually beneficial, and generate both market value and social worth, you must fully acknowledge and honor the parameters of both systems of exchange.

Spreadable Media Across Market and Non-market Exchanges

To truly begin to understand how media spreads, we must come to understand how it comes to move across social systems, cultural forms, technological platforms, and modes of market and non-market exchange. All things used in exchanges — be they physical goods or more ephemeral things such as services, information, or experiences — carry three basic forms of interrelated value: use-value, symbolic-value, and exchange value.

• Use-value: An object’s use-value is most plainly the material characteristic of an object, that does not mean it isn’t subject to social or conditional regulation.
• Symbolic-value: The second dimension of value comes from an understanding of consumer culture. Symbolic-value is what differentiates goods or services that have similar use-values. Brands, for instance, are the bearers of symbolic-value.
• Exchange-value: Finally, exchange-value, is the translation of a good’s use-value and symbolic-value within a system of exchange. A good’s potential use-value to someone else determines the value that it can be

These then are the three key dimensions of value present in any form of exchange, whether that be one regulated by money and market logic or by social relations. It is therefore not a question of whether or not a form of exchange has value, but of the roles each dimension of value has in shaping the terms of the exchange.

The Social Dimension of Market and Non-Market Exchanges

The use-value and symbolic-value of an object is determined by its social context then translated into a monetary exchange-value. In a non-market gift exchange, it is the opposite wherein the context — the social relations — play the primary role. Rather than a question of whether something costs money or not, it is more a question of where the core value is determined, and for what ends.

There are three general distinctions that can be identified between market and non-market systems of exchange, as indicated in the table below.

Impersonal versus Socially Regulated Exchanges
Market exchanges, generally, are impersonal while non-market exchanges are socially regulated. The use of money as the primary token of value in market exchanges is precisely what makes them impersonal. The nature of the relationship between the parties involved in the exchange does not have an impact on the value of the good or service being exchanged in a market exchange. On the other hand, the value of an exchange in a non-market setting is heavily determined by the relationship between the people involved in the exchange.

Discrete versus Ongoing Transactions
Since market-exchanges are governed by asocial relations, they are also discrete in the sense that they don’t create an ongoing relationship. That is, market-exchanges are oriented towards acquiring the goods available for the cash you have; their purpose is not to make friends, or create an ongoing relationship. Non-market exchanges, on the other hand are engaged in “in order to evoke an obligation to give back a gift, which in turn will evoke a similar obligation — a never-ending chain of gifts and obligations” (Kopytoff 2006: 69). The completion of an exchange in a market-exchange situation finalizes and marks the end of the transaction.  In a non-market situation, the idea is to build an ongoing social relationship rather than to simply exchange goods and obtain the “counterpart value.”

Absolute Exchanges versus Legacies of Exchange
A purchase from a vendor demands no further obligations after payment because the exchange is ?nal and the producer of the good exchanged has no further say in how it can be used. In contrast, a non-market exchange creates a legacy of exchange where even when someone has given something, they have some expectations and claims to that gift and how it is used. In a system of market exchange, the symbolic-value is part of the goods and services being exchanged. Any copy of a book purchased from Amazon has the same symbolic value as any other copy. As long as what is exchanged is identical, so then is the value because the symbolic-value and the use-value is also identical. In non-market transactions, such as gift giving, the symbolic-value is tied to the actual exchange so that identical gifts given under different circumstances have different values. A book given to you by a close friend therefore has the same use-value as any other copy, but a totally different symbolic-value that is generated by the mutual ties expressed in the exchange.

Companies that try to make money from user-generated content must recognize that their users still feel some sense of ownership over the content they create, even after they’ve agreed to hand over their data and content in exchange for use of the service. Companies that fail to recognize this run the risk of alienating their user-base and leaving people feeling exploited, rather than served.

In the final installment coming next week, look for a rundown of conclusions, and a download of a full paper.

Enormous thank yous to the entire C3 team for their enormous brains, and to Joshua Green for his editing-fu.

A few of you caught a preview of it at our annual C3 Partner’s Retreat in May in presentation form, and I’ll be sharing those slides as well in the near future. For the time being, I’ll be posting the executive summary here in three parts, then providing the full paper in a pdf download once I do some much needed reorganizing of this blog.

In last year’s foundational white paper If It Doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead, we argued that participatory culture and the networked information society are making more visible systems of value which are not predicated on the demands of market economies and the exchange of commodities. The digital media landscape is, instead, based on principles of collaboration, collective intelligence, and social participation. Companies looking to succeed online should find ways to engage consumers and audiences that respect their practices of community building and recognize the role consumers play in the production of value online.

Building on that work, this paper provides a deeper, more nuanced and systematic account of how value is created and exchanged in socially driven systems. To do so, it compares the ways value is created in systems that privilege social exchange and those which privilege monetary exchanges. Looking at the creation and circulation of value in monetary and non-monetary systems, this paper suggests ways we might more clearly understand how media moves across and between these systems as it spreads. Understanding the way content moves between these systems provides insight into how to develop brands online, court communities, and produce successful digital media strategies that can address both the social and monetary demands of mixed economies.

Some of the most successful and innovative new media companies and projects — YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and even Google — rely on content and data produced through collective efforts of many networked individuals and the relationships they build with one another.  Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine, in discussing the work of Clay Shirky, identifies four categories of collective production, circulation and information gathering behavior online: sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. As more companies move into spaces predicated upon and shaped by principles of sharing and collaboration, we are seeing the emergence of mixed economies and models. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, or Hulu, for example provide services to users at no monetary cost, and in exchange monetize attention, labor, and the data of those users through more indirect means such as advertising. These companies, however, face challenges in responding to audience practices that run counter to expectations about media use. In some cases, this may result in “diminishing the level of trust within participating parties, and perhaps even wearing away the mechanisms which insure the legitimacy of economic exchanges” (Jenkins et al. 2008).

These challenges are the result of fundamental misunderstandings between the value is created within the socially driven circulation of content by consumers and the market-driven interests of media companies and content owners. We must therefore find new ways to understand the shifting nature of meaningful and fair interactions between consumers, producers, media companies, and advertisers in the contemporary media landscape. To do so, it becomes vital to understand the nuances and principles behind how different types of social value are generated online.

Gift Economy and the Fallacy of “Free”

A striking aspect of social sharing and collective activities online is that the participants gladly contribute their labor, creative content, and time without expecting any sort of monetary payment in return. People are uploading images under Creative Commons licenses on Flickr to be shared and used by all, or contributing their expertise and time to articles on Wikipedia, or writing fanfiction and editing fan videos to be enjoyed by the community at large, free of cost.

The gift economy provides a better way to frame and understand the types of exchanges that are increasingly being labeled “free” under the currently popular discourse of the “freeconomy,” or what Wired editor Chris Anderson has called “the economics of giving it away” (Anderson 2008). To understand how media spreads online, it is especially important to understand that whether paying for a good or service, or being given one with social obligations tied, both are transactions which involve the exchange of some form of value. It is not a matter of one having a cost and while the other doesn’t; Both exact a form of “cost” in return, though what is deemed a valuable and acceptable form of “payment” in each system is different. Many systems of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration online generate value through creating mutual ties and reciprocal expectations and social “payments.” Like the offer of coffee from your neighbor, these “free” content producers and laborers actually do expect a form of (social) payment in return for their work.

To do business online, we must recognize that nothing is absolutely free, only things that operate under systems of exchange in which money is not the main or immediate form of value exchanged. Value production and exchanges online involve a complex web of different transactions, through different systems of value that are codependent. Sites like Facebook and YouTube could not generate revenue, for example, if users were not using the sites to create social worth for themselves, and in the process producing the data and attention that advertisers desire. The framework of the gift economy thus gives us a way to analyze social worth as a core value. By acknowledging that what is happening is not a “giveaway” but another form of exchange operating under a different set of standards and regulations, we can begin to examine what those standards and regulations are, and how they are formed and negotiated, and how they can be most useful.

In the next installment: a breakdown of three core dimensions of value — use-value, symbolic-value, and exchange-value — and the critical social differences between monetary and non-monetary exchanges.

Back in March, I wrote a piece critiquing Anderson’s model of the “Freeconomy,” calling it a fallacy. My critique was not necessarily of the models he was proposing, but the way he was conflating things that had no cost with things that were “free.” I argued that rather than being “free,” no-cost goods and services (such as YouTube, facebook, etc) in fact were not giving anything away, but rather exchanging services with its users for things such as data, labor, attention, and social capital.

The debate around “free” as ramped up since then, with Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Anderson’s book in the New Yorker, where Gladwell takes Anderson to task through a series of examples of services and information that are emphatically not free:

The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide . . . in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws. (Gladwell 2009)

Anderson then responded by explaining that “free” also encompasses other forms of non-monetary payment that may in the long run lead to monetary payment:

* Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
* Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
* The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc). (Anderson 2009)

Many others have since jumped in the fray, including Valleywag’s slightly meta take on the accuracy of some of the numbers cited by Gladwell as well as the perhaps ideological frame of the debate itself. Perhaps more interesting is the piece at continuations that attempts to disaggregate some of the fuzzy economics behind “free.”

I will probably have more in-depth and articulate thoughts in the near future, once I polish off a draft of some of the transnational television research I’m currently mired in. But for now, I’d simply like to suggest that part of the problem and part of why we can’t seem to come to an agreement about the complex economic models being build online is that “free” is simply the wrong way to talk about it.

This is similar to the way “viral” media masked the agency of the users, thus preventing us from thinking clearly beyond whether or not something “goes viral” to how and why and for what social and cultural reasons. “Free” masks the systems of value-exchange that are in place in all of these models. Moreover, as Gladwell points out, it is not a matter of information simply “wanting” to be free:

And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. (Gladwell 2009)

These so-called “free” services are entangled with a number of players: content creators, users, platforms, advertisers, etc. All of whom have different investment, different needs, and different desired outcomes. Rather than paying attention only to one criteria of value — monetary cost — by calling it free, and ignoring all the other criteria and social contracts that are in play, we have to start looking at what different systems of value exchange are being enacted every time something is offered for “free.”

In just looking at Youtube, you not only have the exchange between the service and the content, data, and attention provided by the users. You also have an exchange of those things with advertisers. You also have a number of social exchanges between the users themselves, as they build communities and social capital through uploading content, commenting, responding, and sharing. And these are just some of the most immediately visible forms of exhange, each of which follow their own criteria of value and parameters and regulations. And more importantly, the are all interconnected and dependent upon one another. To gloss over it all as “free” ignores the complexity and the deeply entangled nature of both monetary and non-monetary exchanges. The iron law of the digital world isn’t that everything is free, it is that everything is connected, including different forms and systems of exchange.

So I’m guest lecturing later today at a class on Researching Media Audiences and it has me thinking about my initial, and admittedly lingering, resistance to considering myself as someone who does research on “audiences.” Part of it, I’m sure, comes from having emerged out of the “hard” humanities, where terms like social science and empirical research don’t have the best of reputations. Part of it a fear that, as Feuer argues, tactics like reception theory can sometimes be more a deferral of meaning-making onto the production of the “text” of the audience’s discourse rather than actual analytical work on specific texts. And of course, part of it is that I’m afraid someone is going to jump out and shout “ethnography, ur doin’ it wrong!” at me (like all graduate students, I live in fear of accusation “lacks rigor”).

Audiences to Audienceship (or, not just another neologism, I swear)
I have, in my work, been using the term “audienceship” rather than “audience.” The distinction for me, broadly, is that whereas I see “audience” as something that seeks to describe the subject position and context of the viewers, “audienceship” is something that looks to describe a context for the process of viewing, or perhaps more accurately, the encounters between the audiences and their texts. This is sort of important to me for a couple of reasons.

First is that in thinking of “audienceship” or the act of engaging with a text within a particular context steers us away from the audience as a category of person and towards audience as a sort of situation that describes particular sets of practices and engagements with texts and cultural materials. There has always been something presumptuous to me about audience categories — “diasporic audiences,” “working class audiences,” “minority and majority audiences,” and even perhaps less politically loaded ones like “surplus audiences” — that tempts us to presume some kind of coherence or neat alignment between identities/conditions of viewing and how meanings are made. Does being part of a diaspora and viewing texts from your country of origin automatically make you part of a diasporic audience? What determines which of the many axes of identity marks what kind of audience you are?

Of course, historical conditions, positions of race, class, gender, migration, and so forth, powerfully inform their view and understanding of the world and delimit the range of audienceships and set the parameters of viewing that you can be a part of, but no single condition or affiliation can wholly dictate or account for the whole of the engagement of any audience member with the text, or with the other members of the audience, especially as media moves across national and cultural borders and, coinciding with an increasingly complicated negotiations with cultural identity that has increasing dramatically with the rise of globalization.

So that in thinking of these modes of engagement as audienceships instead of audiences help me, at least, remember that we can slice an orange many ways and reveal different shapes and patterns of formation. That any member of an audience as whole, coherent subjects, we can think of them as participates negotiating across multiple audienceships, often simultaneously, producing both rich synergies and contensions.

Audience Publics, Audienceship/Citizenship
When I first started thinking in terms of audienceships, I wasn’t explicitly thinking of the linguistic evocation of “citizenship.” Honestly, I just didn’t like how “audiencehood” sounded like Robin Hood. But there is, I think, something compelling about that linkage, as new media forms and platforms make audience and increasingly public act, both in terms of visibility and in terms of the public sphere. I’m still sorting through some of these things, but it strikes me that many of the audienceships that I look at — particularly in the fan-driven online circulation of transnational media content — are not only collective imaginaries, but collaborative ones, communities of sentiment that are radically involved in creating, selecting, curating, and distributing the very text and images that shape them.

So if we can think of social imaginaries that are being constructed through audienceship, and that these social imaginaries, in turn, by being collective and collaborative, constitute, in some way, publics. Perhaps then what we have is an audience-public, not a public made from an audience nor an audience that also happens to be a public or is transformed into a public due to circumstance, but a public that is constituted through the very act of audienceship.

More then Money Can Buy: Locating Value in Spreadable Media

In our white paper “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead,” we propose that information and cultural materials — such as brands and advertisements — now circulate within a media landscape that is governed by both “commodity” market exchanges and non-market “gift” exchanges. Stemming from that work, the central goal of this white paper is map out and compare the social and cultural mechanisms that regulate these different systems of exchange. In doing so, I hope to provide insights on how to think about what value means in a spreadable media environment.

This research challenges the recent buzz around so-called “free” economies, led by wired editor Chris Anderson. I suggest that these examples of “free” goods and services available online are in fact, not free at all. They are only free if we continue to operate on the assumption that money remains the only thing of value. Moreover, this type of language is precisely what causes misunderstandings and controversy between companies and their user-base, such as the recent blow-up over facebook terms of services. In we continue to talk about these systems as “free,” we perpetuate the perception that there is no transaction taking place and overlook the forms of value that users are returning to companies in exchange for services. We must stop speaking as if social worth, brand goodwill, and fan advocacy are lucky byproducts and begin to examine what the new standards and regulations of value is in these emergent systems.

Central to this paper is a careful breakdown of the different forms of value present in every system of exchange — use-value, exchange-value, and symbolic value — as well as how these values operate differently and are worth different things and carry different meanings in market and non-market regulated exchanges. I outline some of the defining social logics of market exchanges beyond the use of money in order to better understand the potential accordances and challenges in trying to operate between market and non-market systems.

From there, the paper discusses models of what I’ve come to call “divergence” economies that characterize the Spreadable Media environment. Here, the use of “divergence” instead of “hybrid” is deliberate. It is meant to signal that we are looking at systems of exchange that move media and value back and forth between market and non-market systems, rather than fusing the two seamlessly. I seek to make the point that we must consider how to accomodate and transform the different types of value involved and satisfy the terms of both systems of exchange. Finally, through case studies, outline how — and perhaps more importantly where — we can find value in the spreadable media landscape.