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Friday, March 22, 2019

Spreading Ideas

        If I asked you to tell me the first thing that came to your mind when I said the words “sticky and spreadable” what would you say? Perhaps jelly or butter? Maybe even peanut butter or honey? Yesterday I would have said the same things if I was you. What if I told you that now the first thing that pops into my head is social media? You’d probably think I was crazy or making a joke, but I’m not. You might not usually think about social media as sticky, or even more so, spreadable. I know I didn’t. These words are generally meant for food, but after reading the definitions in “Spreadable Media” my mind was changed. Social Media is perhaps one of the most “spreadable” things available to us.

        In their book “Spreadable Media”, Jenkins, Ford and Green define spreadability in terms of social media as, “‘Spreadability’ refers to the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community’s motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes.” Social media allows our world to share things with each other in a way that has never been quite possible without it. One post or one click or one tap and anything you could imagine can be available to the 2.77 billion people connected in the world through the vast network that is social media. People can share and recreate other people’s posts multiplying it by hundreds, thousands, millions.. spreadable right?

        Going back to Humphreys and her book, “The Qualified Self,” she talks about “reckoning” within social media. She says, “reckoning allows us to see things about ourselves and others that we may not be able to in our own lived experiences. Media accounting is not just the recording of activities or experiences, but is fundamentally a reflexive process that can reveal aspects or characteristics of lived events. Reckoning through media accounting allows us and others, whether they be family and friends or others, to understand ourselves and the world around us.” Reckoning allows us to observe other people, but to also observe ourselves in the same way. In a sense, we become our own "general others" as Mead would say. Social media offers a new perspective of ourselves that we can't see in the present of our own real lives. It gives us the chance to view both the "I" and the "Me" in action. With social media, we can experience what others see when they look at us and how they might react. We can then decide what we want that reaction to be based on what we present there. When I'm on social media, I am constantly seeing other people’s posts and aesthetics and captions so I am constantly adding new information to the way I view society. We find things we like and things we don't and either consciously or unconsciously we further sculpt our identity through this. We can decide to spread other people's ideas or start our own thread that could change someone else's perspective on life or more simply just make someone laugh. People might decide to pull from someone else's aesthetic or even buy other people’s filters and edits to create an online presence that they can be happy with. It would seem that it's almost impossible to be original with social media, but is originality the same thing as authenticity? Can we be truly authentically ourselves while constantly having society flooding us with information, opinions, trends, humor, posts, the ideal image, photoshop, comments and likes? I want to believe that we all can become our own person with our own preferences and ideas. Perhaps that can happen as we learn and pull from the people around us and the people we interact with on social media naturally. Since we can't go through normal life without communicating and connecting with others, maybe it doesn't really make anyone any less authentic when it happens on social media...

        We share things in an attempt to connect with other people on some level. Whether it be to make someone laugh or make them think or even just to get social approval. One of the vessels people use to fulfill this need is through reaction videos. They can often be (and are often meant to be) very funny and playful. Most of the videos of this nature that I have seen have been made for this purpose, however, they don’t always have to be funny. The reactions that I watched recently to "This is America," a music video created by Childish Gambino, were indeed quite the opposite of comical. There was excitement at first in the beginning of the video, but the tone of the video transformed into a more heavy feel throughout the video and rightly so. Childish Gambino's artistic recreation of what America has become in his music video is a message many people don’t want to be aware of and one many people aren't willing to accept, but one that desperately needs to be heard. Reacting to these ideas in a video of your own allows for the "spreading" of the messages in the music video even further. It allows for more conversations to start happening and perhaps more minds to be challenged to the idea of change. Videos like these and many others sharing ideas can be very powerful. Theories like “reckoning” and “spreadable media” both use social media as a tool for change.

        Viral videos are a clear example of spreadable media. Viral internet challenges are one type of viral videos. They are challenges that are shared, tried, reposted, liked and commented on until thousands maybe even millions of people have tried them and seen them. Viral internet challenges can be both positive and negative. The Tide Pods challenge is a perfect example of how spreadable media can cause damage. Such a dangerous and quite frankly stupid challenge that thousands of people, including children, were trying demonstrates the harm spreadable media is capable of. An example of spreadable media causing a positive change is the video of the sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose that went viral immediately. This video caused many people to react and decide not to use plastic straws and to purchase reusable straws. Spreadable media has the capacity to be used for good, but we must be constantly aware that it can also cause damage.

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