Jenkins, H, Green,
J, & Ford, S 2013, Spreadable Media : Creating Value And Meaning In A
Networked Culture, New York: NYU Press, eBook Collection (EBSCOhost),
EBSCOhost, viewed 15 November 2015.
Henry Jenkins is a 'walking talking, youtube interviewing anti -Frankfurt school, pluralist ,counter-hegemony machine' when it comes to this avenue of Media Studies. His books on participatory culture and the uses of the internet are hugely influential and popular. This particular title is of interest because it confronts the topic of scale and how media can now operate on an instant, shareable platform that can spread quickly. If crowdfunded journalism is to grow and take away power from traditional journalism then it needs to spread, and spread fast!
He makes interesting points here, that grassroots movements don't always generate resistence and that it is clear that we are still having to resist against the large and omnipresent power of big media conglomerates.
Also highlighted here are the potential problems with the 'active reader = resistance' model as they have now been adopted by the very business models they sought to bring down. There are also problems in treating the public as a collection of individuals. They act in synergy as something more than the net sum of their individual abilties.
The book, despite having no reference of Gramsci or Adorno does have time to mention the 'public sphere' of Habermas and draw attention to the fact that coffee houses were just as much part of the capitalist system as anything else. Operating in a way that was meant to attract a particular target audience in the same way as Disney's Alladin attracts 5 year olds or Channel 4s countdown attracts pensioners and 2nd year university students.
The impact on business is acknowledged and examples of community projects acting against negative influences very much echo's the response of audiences to the Murdoch press for example in teh wake of the recent hacking trial.
During my research for this project one of the key factors to address around the impact of crowdfunded journalism is one of audience size. Can enough revenue be generated to expand and grow, enough to ever feasibly tackle the big players in the industry. There is an example below which states that only 5% of people who view or use the product will donate which helps demonstrate the huge problem crowdfunded start ups face. I will go into this in more depth in a later post.
After such important points it is acknowledged that counter culture niche market media activity isn't necessarily a new thing. Although i would still argue the scale and potential audiences are something profoundly different to the example of evangelical christian networks given in the book (below)
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