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Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog.
For details about how Carnival works in Bahia, please refer to Ana Domb’s post.

It’s fitting that we’re closing in on the end of our Spreadable Media white paper series on the blog just as Ana and I begin to discuss our experiences and research in Brazil, beginning with our time spent in Salvador for Carnival. In Spreadability, we propose a model of thinking about media brands and properties as not only consumer products, but as symbolic goods that circulate and thrive due to the adaptability and customizability of their social value. That is, media is spread when we can make personal and social use of it.

In particular, the use of the required camarote t-shirts caught my attention as a particular apt example of how to spread “media,” or in this case, brands. Referencing Fiske, we suggest that the in part 6 of the spreadable media paper that advertising becomes spreadable when it becomes “producerly,” that is, when it tried not only to speak to consumers, but allows for consumers to speak to one another — communicating community affiliations, performances of identity, social values and so on– through advertising.

Logo-splattered t-shirts were the required dress for the camarotes (large private tents with capacity into the thousands for viewing the parade) and to ride inside or walk along with the trios (enormous truck riggings that carried bands and dancers), acting as part of your “ticket.” Thus each trio or camarote had their own shirts, covered in the logos of their sponsors. Here we already begin to see a merging of brands and social affiliation declaration — the color of shirt you wore declared your membership to a particular group, and in some cases your devotion to a particular musician or your socioeconomic status (since the availability and price of acquiring these shirts can range).

More interesting, however, was the practice of customizing the shirts. While looking into a crowd, you see a mass of the same t-shirt and same logos, the close-up view shows extraordinary variety and detail. Customizations ranged from basic scissors and safety-pin jobs to professional level alterations with detailed paneling using other fabrics, zippers, draping, and gathering. And while on the whole, the women were more inventive than the men, there were some stand-outs, such as an older gentleman who had not only altered his shirt to fit him perfectly, but had used the excess fabric to construct a dress-shirt collar.

Even more surprising was that within our camarote, there was a station provided by one of the sponsors with several girls who could cut and decorate the shirts of attendees with ribbons and other accessories for those who didn’t come with their shirts already customized.

While they had a couple suggested designs on display, most people gave them specific instructions for how they wanted their shirts altered. This transformed our boring t-shirts (which, with our recent arrival and limited resources, we were unable to alter ourselves) into much more lasting symbolic goods that both Ana and I packed up into our already overflowing luggage as we left, fully intent keeping them for good despite, which we would not have otherwise.

Though it might seem trivial to think about how people might alter and customize t-shirts they’re forced to wear, this act is an expression of taste and as sociologist Don Slater suggest, “Taste . . . Is seen as a ‘cultural arbitrary’, a matter not of instrinsic value but of classification grounded in social processes. But it is not socially arbitrary: tastes correlate closely with social division” (Slater 1997, 160). Thus, we are seeing a case in which branded good that are monetarily not terribly valuable are being repurposed into objects of more lasting social value. Not only does the customization provides individuals with the ability to express take and cultural values, but the customization inside the camorotes, during the party, transforms the shirt into a unique artifact of that moment, turning it from a uniform, mass commodity, into something far more meaningful.

In addition to being an unparallel social and cultural event, it was evident from the 500% hotel mark-ups and tightly and intricately produced events that Carnival is also very much an industry, especially in Salvador. And much of that industry has to do with event-based advertising and sponsorship. Thus, advertising at Carnival serves as a provocative example of precisely this hybrid social/commericial space, as Ana suggested in her post with the notion of “brand syncretism,” in which brands provide rich materials for cultural expression and the articulation of community or loose social affiliations.

Landed in Salvador yesterday morning and just settling into the whole Carnival flow of things. Sadly discovered that I had left my camera cable back in Boston, so I won’t be able to upload photos until I acquire an SD card reader, which likely won’t happen until Sao Paulo since roads are a mess here and most things are closed due to the persistent( . . . ly awesome) street parties.

Which is to say that there will hopefully be more substantial posts about Brazil towards the end of this week or early next week.

One unfortunately missed photo-op, however, was the Brazilian customs form, which had a space reserved at the bottom for promotional materials. It led to visions of one of those bright “You Ad Here” ads you see on subway cars and on the doors of bathroom stalls, but stamped below a list of questions regarding whether or not you’ve handled livestock in the past 15 days.

Sometimes the cultural ripples of globalization don’t have to be complicated to enjoy:

Sometimes, it can just be about trying to eat a surprisingly large hamburger with a few of your closest stylishly groomed pop star friends on national television while Bruce Springsteen plays in the background and you take turns wearing the leather jacket to match with your food.

[And okay, sometimes it's also about instances of audience-driven, unauthorized circulation of content across national boundaries and markets via fan communities online and transformative audience participation in the form of "amateur" subtitling. But that is one big hamburger.]

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium:

On Tuesday, the Participatory Culture Foundation launched version 2.0 of their non-profit, open-source internet video player, Miro. A detailed features list can be found at the Miro site and Ars Technica has a fairly thorough breakdown of the pros and cons of the interface.

What is immediately striking about Miro is the ability to aggregate, and share if desired, a library of videos from a variety of sites, platforms, and formats. Users have the freedom to create channels and libraries where broadcast content pulled from NBC.com can co-exist with the lasted vlogs taken from youtube.

After nearly a year since Henry Jenkins, Ana Domb, and I first unveiled the “Spreadable Media” research in a lengthy and dense (read: we talk fast) presentation at the Convergence Culture Consortium Partner’s Retreat last spring, we’re finally able to begin sharing our efforts in dismantling the faulty metaphor of viral media and moving towards a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how and why media content spreads online.

A condensed version of the roughly 100-page C3 white paper — drafted by Henry Jenkins, myself, and fellow C3 researcher Ana Domb, along with C3 Post-doc researcher Joshua Green — will be running in enormous 2,000 – 4,000 word chunks in Henry’s blog and on the C3 blog. I won’t be running it here, given that it’s already being posted to a blog that I contribute regularly to, but if my very tight pre-Brazil schedule in the next few weeks permits, I will be following along with additional links, insights, and commentary both on the development of the ideas we outline in the white paper as well as new thoughts and contributions from the work we have been doing this year as we dig deeper and wider with the spreadable media model, looking at new ways of thinking about commodity culture, audiences and audienceship, and global medial flows.

The first part of the condensed paper is already up at Henry’s blog here, and focuses on taking apart the current models and metaphors of so-called “viral media”:

“Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities . . . Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes,” a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain ‘purity’ of message . . . The metaphor of “infection” reduces consumers to the involuntary “hosts” of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design “killer” texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural “bloodstream.” While attractive, such a notion doesn’t reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes. A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations.”

While it may at first seem like an issue of “mere” language, the decision to analyze “viral” media by first taking apart the metaphor served as a turning point in our research last year, after agonizing months of collecting countless and increasingly slippery definitions of “viral” while constructing increasingly elaborate schema to account for all the various social, cultural, economic, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of the phenomenon. Ultimately, what we came to realize was that “viral” content so often seemed like the product of snake-oil and voodoo because we kept talking about it as if it were. That is, so long as we kept thinking of it as “viral” — and thus totally out of the hands of those who circulated it — we weren’t focusing on the real source and torque behind the circulation: individuals and communities of users with their own motivations and goals.

In discussions that followed a presentation and consequent paper I wrote entitled “From Pathogen to Pass-Along: Towards a Participatory Poetics of Viral Video,” Henry made a note of the slippage between the use of “viral” and its metaphor of infection, and “pass-along,” a concept that handed over greater agency to individual users and we began to think about “viral” videos as a mark of the this transitional phase in the digital media landscape, wherein content “producers” were eager to reap the benefits of user-driven content circulation, but not yet ready to accept the implications of the fact that people were beginning to pass content for their own purposes.

Anyway, for those who don’t want they eyestrain of reading the posts in their entirity, Henry’s first post includes a brief video introduction that Henry gave as the opening remarks at the Futures of Entertainment 3 conference this year. Additionally, you can see a very streamlined version of the original presentation that was retailored for an indie film industry audience that Ana and I gave at DIYDAYS Boston back in October.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

Last week I introduced Dramafever, a new content-distribution and community platform dedicated to bringing Asian entertainment content to the US (currently in closed beta) that is posing some interesting questions about engaging niche audiences in an increasingly global media landscape. This week, I had a chance to sit down for an informative phone conversation with the Dramafever founders, Suk Park and Seung Bak, about their goals, their tactics, and how they’re negotiating the space between fan communities and commercial interests.

Expect the full interview transcript in the near future, though for now (and for those of us pressed tight for reading time), after the cut is a brief summation of some of the stand-out revelations on how to approach established communities, unexpected surplus audiences and the broadening appeal of Asian entertainment, and what the future holds for global media flows online.

Asian Drama and Audience Engagement
One of the most provocative and compelling finding Park and Bak shared from their early data, was the fact that there was an unexpectedly large proportion of Asian drama fans and site visitors who were not of any sort of Asian decent. When the two first developed the idea for dramafever.com — they had noticed the enormous popularity of Korean dramas throughout Asia and in parts of the rest of the world, but there appeared to be a gap in the US market, where a majority of licensed Asian content (with Anime being a notable exception) was being distributed predominantly on premium satellite television stations and ethnic grocery stores. Even after taking stock of the flourishing online communities around the unauthorized circulation of Korean and Japanese dramas, they had expected their audience to be primarily Asian-American, and heavily Korean due to their currently all-Korean content and positioned themselves to advertisers accordingly.

What they discovered was that nearly half of their subscribers and fans were not of any discernible Asian lineage, and that the audience for Asian media was far broader than what the limited targeting of broadcast channels and grocery-store rentals suggested.
This finding, though preliminary and not strictly scientific, given the limited numbers of beta-subscribers (estimated around 13,000), fits in line with much of what I’ve found in my own research, regarding the much more ambiguous and diverse audiences in Asian drama communities that cannot be addressed by broadcast channels that target audiences based on a predetermined demographic. Furthermore, it suggests that online platforms are an ideal means to “test the waters” of new national markets and build a following for content without large capital investments, much in the way that unauthorized fan circulation of Anime in the 80s and 90s primed the market for its present mainstream popularity.

Community Relations
One of the seemingly obvious and yet refreshing tactics taken by Park and Bak when launching the project involved extensive familiarity with and observation of some of the central hubs of distribution and discussion around Korean dramas. They realized quickly that there was vast amounts of information available in terms of what dramas were popular with English-speaking audiences and why — they simply had to pay attention.
As a result, they’ve built a philosophy around being open with their audience, and highly responsive, listening to and soliciting suggestions from their users and from existing discussion forums.

Moreover, they seem to have taken on the controversy of monetizing fansubbed content in a straight-forward and thoughtful manner. The problem that other sites have faced with fansubbers, they suggest, is that they’re not in open communication with fansubbers when their fansubbed content is uploaded. The fact that these sites then make money from that content then exposes fansubbers to legal risk, without any consent or benefits on the part of the fansubbers. Dramafever.com seeks to avoid these problems, which often stir up bad blood between distribution sites and their audience base, by not only having licenses for the content (thereby negating the legal risk), but also opening up negotiations with fansubbers from the very start in regards to compensation and use of materials.

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

Some thoughts as Dramafever develops
The platform, of course, is still in development. They’re working out some bugs and implementing community-oriented interactive features. A couple of things on my wishlist as they move forward:

– Ability to share and embed clips and images taken from the videos, and easy screenshot tools to use while watching in order to facilitate what are known as “pimp posts” and recaps (like this one for the Korean version of Boys Over Flowers) that play a significant role promoting content.

– Places for fans to add their own self-created ancillary content: recaps, reviews, fanvids, fiction, etc.

– Tools or interfaces to schedule viewings with friends to share the experience, and possibly collaboration with services such as the open-source Boxee that Sheila just posted about recently.