Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters

I. INTRODUCTION

The convergence between old and new communications and media is tied to broad-based changes in how power and information are distributed across society, geography, and technology. In this chapter, our focus is on emergent changes to public culture in this digitally networked era. Our conceptual focus is the changing relationship between cultural production and consumption. The trends addressed by this book—the rise of many-to-many distribution, aggregation of information and culture, and the growth of peer-to-peer social organization—manifest in public culture as increased visibility and mobilization of those actors traditionally associated with cultural consumption. These network characteristics, combined with low-cost digital authoring tools, have lowered the threshold for publishing and disseminating knowledge and culture to a public. Now even casual communication, personal stories and opinion, and amateur works can be made easily available to large audiences. In other words, those cultural artifacts associated with “personal” culture (like home movies, snapshots, diaries, and scrapbooks) have now entered the arena of “public” culture (like newspapers, cinema, and television).[1] More specifically, we see four domains growing in salience with the turn toward networked public culture: 1) amateur and non-market production, 2) networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, 3) niche and special-interest groups, and 4) aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation.

1. With the modern growth of professional and commercial media, amateur cultural production was ghettoized—home cooking, piano recitals, personal correspondence and everyday talk—these domains have always been among the most productive though undervalued dimensions of cultural life. The advent of mass commercial media created a spectacular arena of shared public culture and imagination that transcended these local knowledges, a cultural currency translocal and star-studded. But even in the heyday of television as mass medium, the means for the production of culture and knowledge have never been taken away from even those individuals most strongly associated with "consumption" (women, children, and couch potatoes). Yochai Benkler has theorized that we are at the beginning of a shift away from commercial media and centrally organized knowledge production towards “non-market” and distributed production.[2] Amateur and remixed music distributed over the Internet, fans producing derivative works of fiction and art, marketers appropriating the idioms of viral amateur culture, and bloggers jawing about the latest news—these are all examples of, in the words of John Hagel and John Seely Brown, “the edge becoming the core.”[3] Marginal and viral consumers and publics of commercial culture are creating their own cultural content and knowledge that both draws from and threatens the core of commercial culture.

2. Unlike commercial cultural production, which relies on professionalized, institutionalized, and capitalized systems, amateur and non-market production often utilizes more disorganized and socially distributed mechanisms for creating knowledge and culture. Benkler writes of how the processing power of many personal computers, distributed in “dollops” among individuals, if coordinated through smart networks, can be a source of considerable power. He considers the example of SETI@Home, a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, as a model for this kind of distributed processing and knowledge production.[4] In a similar vein, Henry Jenkins describes the activities of spoiler groups for the reality TV show Survivor. By gathering information from all over the world and communicating and debating over the Internet, networked fan groups can collectively produce knowledge that far exceeds what local fan groups could muster.[5] Amateur subtitling groups for Japanese television series rely on a globally networked team to produce and distribute their work. Blogs have also been touted as a kind of collective intelligence, where the fact-finding capabilities of individuals are pooled to gather knowledge that can challenge the authority of the professional press.

3. In an article for Wired magazine, and in his forthcoming book, Chris Anderson describes how networked distributors like Amazon.com increasingly make profits not from the “small head”—a small number of bestsellers—but from the “long tail”—a wide variety of niche products with small circulation.[6] Combined with the ability of digital communication to directly connect special-interest groups, these new distribution channels have enabled small producers and small audiences to find one another. The dynamics are similar to those that have always existed in local communities, with local theater, bands, and artists. Contemporary networks enable more specialization and esoteric associations. The case of anime (Japanese animation) fandoms is particularly pertinent in this respect. Post-Internet, overseas audiences for the foreign cult-media anime have exploded in quantity and diversity, aided by alternative distribution ranging from commercial sites like Amazon.com, Netflix, RentAnime, as well as various peer-to-peer alternatives. Similar dynamics are at work with the rise of micro-fandoms for alternative and amateur music and for the endlessly diverse material of the blogosphere.

4. In addition to the changes in the structures and networks of cultural production, networked public culture has also been associated with particular post-postmodern genres and styles. In this new-media ecology, works that can be produced quickly at low cost and appropriate the products of commercial culture have a new kind of cultural salience. These modes of production fit particularly well with parody and remix. The products of mainstream and commercial culture are recognized as the source material of the global imagination. By mashing up, remixing, playing out alternative narratives, and providing snarky commentary on commercial culture, niche publics can create new cultural forms. Jon Stewart, who is Internet as well as television famous, is a popular embodiment of these kind of cultural styles. Viral political mashup videos, remixed music, anime music videos, and much of the blogosphere also exemplify these aesthetics and discursive styles.

Taken together these new ways of making and sharing culture could have broad ramifications on the fundamental relations between production and consumption and on the traditional sources of authority for culture and knowledge. We are beginning to imagine how amateurs, file-sharers, and bloggers, by reshaping long-established standards of production and consumption, could fundamentally challenge existing institutional and professional authority. We are today barely seeing the first glimmerings of what a fully networked public culture might look like. Despite persistent pundit predictions of imminent doom for established content industries, or conversely, of the squelching of common culture by the iron fist of corporate power, the future of public culture seems to us very much up for grabs. We are still at the start of the trajectory of social, cultural, and technical change in the network era. Our goal in this chapter therefore is not to declare the forms of networked culture we describe as fait accompli, as inevitable forms of culture and media. Rather, we have specifically selected cases that suggest emergent and radical changes, but which are also sites of contestation very much subject to the forces of government regulation, technological engineering, and corporate maneuvering. The power of networked, viral, and laterally organized Internet groups is just one of many forces contesting these futures, but it is a newly energized player and the one we focus on in the cases of amateur music, anime fandom, viral marketing, and online news.

The cases we describe represent examples that disrupt the currently dominant logic of production/consumption relations, with a focus on the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers in various industry sectors with the growing prevalence of digitally networked media. While music file-sharing is the most well-known example of the present tensions in network culture, it represents an older form of antagonism that is currently being supplanted by new kinds of coalitions and business models based on different relationships between producers and consumers, businesses and customers, publishers and audiences. While new models of these relationships diffuse some of the antagonisms visible in the music case, they also raise new questions and controversies about the role of secondary markets, the validity of knowledge, and the breakdown of common culture. Our goal in this essay is not to produce a general survey of how digital networks are changing cultural production. Rather, we are focusing on specific cases that offer alternative models with which to frame thinking about evolving relations between production and consumption. We could have chosen from many other cases including other fandoms, machinima, online encyclopedias, scholarly publications, fashion, or design. But we feel that the cases we present exemplify an illuminating range of dynamics in emergent networked public culture.

II CASES

A: Amateur Music

The battle between the recording industry and file-sharing music fans is perhaps the most high profile example of shifts in the production and consumption of cultural products, and it illustrates some of the underlying issues associated with these changes. The sea change came about due to a “perfect storm” of trajectories and conditions including: 1) peer-to-peer network applications that allowed users to download and share digital files (e.g. music); 2) the advent of cheaper and easy-to-use digital audio workstations allowing people to easily and cheaply create CD-quality music; and 3) social software and networks that created communities of shared practice, knowledge, and expertise. The consolidation of record labels, the proliferation of consultant-driven radio programming, and the resulting homogenization of available commercial music made consumers and amateur musicians even more eager to embrace change. But how exactly do these new technologies and conditions impact the music industry, the music that is produced, and the habits and practices of music fans? How will the industry make itself relevant in the changing environment of music recording and distribution?

Peer to-peer file-sharing (P2P) hit the mainstream in 1999 with the appearance of Napster, followed by LimeWire, Kazaa, and others. P2P applications make files stored on a single personal computer available to other users for download over the Internet and smaller networks. Around this time the industry “Big Four (Universal, Sony-BMG, EMI and Warner Brothers) accounted for approximately 80 percent of all music sales globally. The emergence of P2P was an obvious threat to these behemoths, and as an industry insider said, “we are going to strangle this baby at birth.”[7]They mounted a four-fold strategy to battle P2P: extending intellectual property rights, litigating against P2P platforms and users, developing digital rights management restrictions, and creating a public relations campaign.[8] The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) argued that p2p use was directly responsible for lower CD sales.[9] Other research indicates otherwise.[10] In a highly publicized court case Napster was sued by the record industry and lost, eventually leading to the demise of Napster (note: the current Napster has nothing to do with this original incarnation, as Roxio bought the rights to the name following Napster’s bankruptcy). Despite the negative legal decisions P2P still is a dominant source of Internet traffic. It is estimated that as of 2004 the ratio of legal to “illegal” song downloads was 250 to 1 and still billions of music files are exchanged every week.[11]

Music file-sharing applications revolutionized the broader music landscape by creating an alternative to established distribution models. Musicians no longer needed a record label to distribute their music, and fans were no longer limited to the tastes of music industry executives and retail owners because file-sharing greatly increased the amount of available music. Digital files could also be easily sampled and remixed to create new innovative music, for example DJ Dangermouse’s The Grey Album,[12] or the collectively produced Deconstructing Beck.[13] This quantitative change in the variety of music and in the number of people who can now act as taste-making gatekeepers for themselves and their peers has signaled a qualitative change in the public’s role in the music industry and it reflects emerging changes in other cultural industry sectors. The blogosphere became a crucial element in the expansion of social networks and “word of mouth” recommendations. Independent artists such as M.I.A., previously relegated to local notoriety at best, now found broad audiences. The ability of music consumers to exert increased control over what music they have access to and what they do with “their” music signals a broader shift in trends of cultural resistance, from jamming (where cultural products and their presumed hegemonic force are interrupted) to poaching (where cultural products are taken up and refashioned to convey individualized tastes and messages).[14] Music file-sharing is most commonly framed in terms of the legal battle waged by the RIAA and other industry entities to protect intellectual property laws against copyright infringement. On the other side of this battle, copyleft activists argue that present intellectual laws are outdated and that they stifle innovation by privileging individual and corporate financial interests over the interests of the collective.[15] Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that “the copyright holder is very rarely the artist herself.”[16] And as such, the meaning of copyright as a mechanism to protect the interests of the artist comes into question.

Amateur production of recorded music is not a new phenomenon. Local live performances have always been located at a myriad of venues, from living room recitals to block parties to small clubs and theaters. Performers could also tour if they had the resources and enough time and/or connections to book gigs. Creating a music commodity, however, was a different story. Recording technology has seen a number of breakthroughs since the turn of the century.[17] The advent of widespread multi-track recording in the sixties allowed artists to overdub parts and enabled individuals to create multi-instrument works by themselves. In the seventies the cassette tape allowed portable recording as well as copying of album material, albeit with limited quality. The appearance of inexpensive multi-track recording equipment in the eighties provided another boost to amateur musicians, as the ability to overdub became easier and the sonic quality improved. But still there were limitations, and the final product had to be delivered on a hard medium, usually cassette. Issues of duplication and artwork still hindered expanding the reach of an artist's work.

The invention of the compact disc by James Russell,[18] followed by the first mass production by Philips in 1980 signaled a huge change in the production and distribution of recorded music. Digitally recorded music sold on optical media presented the consumer with a number of advantages. The music did not degrade over time, as it did on cassette tape or album vinyl, and the new discs were also relatively robust, small, and transportable. Along with the migration of consumption to CD formats, the tools for creating the music saw a massive transformation to digital. In 1987 a program called “Sound Tools” was released as the first tapeless recording studio. Later renamed “Pro Tools,” this software and hardware combination enabled people to record entirely on a computer. While the sonic quality and stability of the early systems were issues, the ability to easily and non-destructively create, edit, and apply effects changed not only the workflow in the studio but also the creative process for the artists. Previously songs were generally well organized and hashed out before being committed to tape. Studio time was expensive, tape was expensive, and editing was a chore, so you needed to write it, rehearse it, get it right, and then record it. But working digital, one could record in a manner fitting the schedule and temperament of the artist and editing became a larger part of the creative puzzle.

As computers and other digital technologies improved, project studios (semi-pro) could churn out music that was digital end-to-end, and independent pressing and burning of discs became cheaper and easier, mostly due to the availability of production houses via the Internet.[19] Due to common file types, often tracks could be recorded at home or in a project studio, and then taken to a larger facility for further work. Or conversely, tracks could be recorded in a professional studio (often with higher quality mics and rooms), and then taken home for post production or further tracking of instruments that are not at the mercy of room dynamics (e.g. electronic keyboards, etc.). This newfound flexibility began to blur the distinction between professional and amateur facilities and recordings. The proof of this transformation was seen in many areas, but perhaps most notable in the demise of the traditional “recording” portion of the music industry. In the winter of 2005 three major studios closed: Cello Studios in Los Angeles, Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, and the Hit Factory in New York City.[20] All three were based on the traditional model of recording, where labels paid huge sums of money to occupy the studios. As the production technology changed, the industry did not. “The business model of ”˜we have the technology needed to make records you don’t’ is gone.”[21]

One sub-class of computer application (designed to work with loops) had a profound effect on many genres and production capabilities (ACID, now distributed by Sony is the classic application). These provided the user with an easy way to take music loops, add other sounds, and change tempos and pitch by time stretching algorithms. Soon users were trading loops online via P2P, or could purchase audio CDs with pre-packaged loops that were ready to drop into these applications. As the software improved and computing horsepower increased, time/tempo algorithms became incredibly transparent, and began to make remix, or bringing together sounds from disparate recordings, not only possible, but easy to create. By the late nineties the music scene consisted of traditional musicians, rappers, loopers, djs, scratchers, etc.[22] Music was being created with no “original” content, but the results were clearly original. This ability to create music with no knowledge of how to play a musical instrument raises the question of who qualifies as a musician in the age of remix. It also brought issues of intellectual property to the forefront of the controversies surrounding changes in music. The digital revolution creates an atmosphere where traditional copyright laws are best insufficient, and at worst repressive.

The combination of DAW software, loop manipulation software, and the network led to many more facile routes to creating remixes. Some artists would not only create a “finished” version of a song, but also make available individual instrument tracks, loops, and other sonic bits with the express goal of having people use their material in remixes (e.g. http://simpleflower.com/remix.php). While P2P software allowed amateurs to easily share their music, either for consumption or remix, other social software tools greatly enhanced the end-to-end experience for music creators and fans. For the production end of things, bulletin boards and forums surrounding particular software and hardware products provide users the ability to ask questions, learn new techniques and solve problems.[23] Sites designed around supporting nascent artists also give content producers a place to find listeners, as well as locate possible collaborators. The fifth edition of The Indie Bible lists over 400 Web sites where independent musicians can distribute their music. [24] Blogs and wikis give users other places to distribute songs and other content, as well as provide insight into the bands/artists. The network also makes distant collaborations possible and breaks down the boundaries to working on musical projects. It has become easy for musicians to swap files and project sessions, allowing the players to move a song forward without being in the same studio at the same time or even in the same time zone. And perhaps most interesting is the rise of social and cultural capital in these environments.[25]

Music was the first culture industry to be threatened by the combination of low-cost digital production tools combined with online file-sharing. Music has always been a domain of robust amateur production, making it particularly amenable to more bottom-up forms of production and distribution in the digital ecology, and ripe for the disintermediation of labels and licensors. The fact that widespread music file-sharing happened relatively early on in the trajectory of Internet content distribution also meant that the existing music industry was poorly equipped to deal with the new online ecology, taking a reactive stance rather than anticipating new practices and potential business solutions. Although the story of digital music is far from over, already it reads as a cautionary tale of the current fragility of business models built on earlier media infrastructures. P2P is a cultural economy, and “consumption is part of a process that includes production and exchange, all three being distinct only as phases of the cyclical process of social reproduction, in which consumption is never terminal.”[26] Trading musical building blocks such as bass lines, back beats, and vocal hits is a never ending process, especially with the myriad choices made available to the artist through digital technology. On a broader note, John Ryan and Michael Hughes speak of “breaking the decision chain.”[27] This metaphor applies well to amateur production, consumption, and reuse of music. As late as 2001 the prevailing wisdom described local/amateur music being considered by fans, scholars, and musicians alike as “something to get beyond.”[28] In other words, the end game for the artist was still “getting signed” and following the traditional industry model, with the time-honored decision-making chain. However as the lines further blur, remix becomes embedded into the culture (even beyond music), and technological changes continue to occur, it would appear that perhaps “getting beyond” might no longer be the goal.

B. Transnational Anime Fandom

Fans are the lifeblood of commercial media, and yet they have often had an uneasy relationship with media industries. As enthusiasts of particular artists or series, fandoms are the source of P2P promotional buzz as well as the base of the consumer market. But when fans cross the line into producing and trafficking in their own cultural products derived from commercial content, they create their own subcultures and unique cultural forms that circulate in alternative and P2P networks under the radar of commodity capitalism. Fan fiction, art, music, videos and comics are forms of long tail media largely invisible to the mainstream but that have always existed in the shadow of commercial mass media. Much as musical mash-ups have both celebrated and challenged the products of commercial culture, fan art, comics, and fiction have disrupted the singular authorial voice of popular novels, movies, and television.

Commercial media makes its money off the one-to-many circulation of their content to mass audiences and not in the sharing of content between audiences. Activist fan groups disrupt the logic of mainstream narratives and copyright regimes, going against the grain of what Lawrence Lessig has called “permission culture—the regime of copyright restrictions that insists that all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased.[29] In the case of television, movies, and novels, at least in the U. S., the relation between fan-produced culture and commercial culture has been a site of ongoing tension and negotiation. For example, there have been high-profile legal battles between the industry and fans of Star Wars and Harry Potter. By contrast, at least two cultural domains—anime and machinima—have been characterized by a more synergistic relationship between fan cultural production and commercial production. Here we discuss the case of anime fandoms outside of Japan, a unique but illuminating example of how fans and industry have reached some compromises in dealing with fan-produced media and P2P distribution.

Unlike in the case of music, where the means of production are relatively ready at hand, most of us do not grow up creating animated television shows as an everyday cultural practice. Even now, in an era of relatively low-cost digital animation and game production tools, the level of production that goes into state-of-the-art for both of these domains is well out of the reach of amateurs. In this sense, the dynamics are similar to those of any form of dynamic visual media, particularly those forms that require sustained narrative production over long periods of time (games, anime series, soap operas, etc.). Television and filmic fan production is often a form of what Jenkins has dubbed “poaching”[30] or what lawyers call “derivative works”: using the narrative, characters, and images from commercial media to produce other media. What makes the relation between anime producers and overseas fans unique is that the commercial industries for the most part tolerate and exploit amateur cultural production, rather than ignoring it or trying to shut it down. The industries have recognized that activist and productive fans can create rather than detract from their business, and help to circulate their collective (commercial) imaginations.

Historically, Japanese manga (comics) and anime industries have taken a tolerant view of fan-produced cultural content. The doujinshi (amateur comic) scene in Japan is enormous and has thrived since the seventies.[31] The largest convention in the country, bringing together up to 300,000 fans, is the bi-annual Comic Market devoted to the sale of doujinshi. While these fan productions have been largely scorned by the mainstream, industry has largely let it be rather than cracked down on it, demonstrating that, given a looser copyright regime, fan-produced derivative works can rival the mainstream commercial market in scale. As cultural and human traffic between Japan, the US, and Europe grew in the eighties and nineties, the small audience for Japanese media overseas slowly began to grow. Until recently, in the English-speaking world, anime was a marginal form of cult media, restricted to relatively extreme fandoms that crossed over somewhat with the science fiction and fantasy world.

In these early years, leaders in the fandom had some degree of communication between the Japanese industry and the US licensors, and saw their role as evangelists for anime overseas. Anime were distributed at convention, local clubs, and via mail; and non-commercial fansubbing (fan subtitling) emerged, as this was the only way that English-language fans could gain access to localized versions of anime. It was during this period that anime fans began developing what Sean Leonard calls a “proselytizing commons,” the free non-market sharing of content for the purposes of promoting and creating a new commercial market.[32] It was also during this period that fans began to develop certain social norms about media sharing. Fansubbers were committed to keeping their work in the non-market sector and did not profit from their ventures. They also saw themselves as supporters of the anime industry, so would stop circulating their wares when a commercial English-language release was announced. The work of fans and some committed overseas distributors of anime is credited with opening up the market for anime in the US.

With the advent of p2p video distribution over the Internet, the circulation of anime overseas has reached a new order of magnitude. Now, most popular anime series released in Japan will eventually be released with fansubs and distributed via BitTorrent and IRC Fserve to millions of fans around the world. For the most popular series, “speed sub” groups might turn around a title within a day of its release in Japan. Thousands of fans watch the torrent listings or lurk on the fansub IRCs waiting for the group to give word that this week’s fansub is out. Now the niche cult media of anime is becoming more and more visible to the mainstream, at least among youth, taking over slots on popular cable channels like Cartoon Network and becoming a mainstay of the DVD sales and rental industry. According to a recent article in Fortune, the output of the top US DVD distributor of anime in the US is more than the combined distribution of Warner Brothers and Paramount, the two top US TV show distributors.[33] Anime is a case of the long tail of distribution wagging the head. Rather than cracking down on fansubbers and Net distribution, the Japanese anime industry has continued to take an accommodating stance, which in turn has kept organized fan groups toeing the party line. In the words of one popular fansub group, Anime-Empire, “We wish only to help expand the Japanese animation market to North America, without harming or impeding the business in any way. Therefore, once a title has been licensed in North America, we wish for fans to discontinue distribution of said title, and encourage others to purchase the newly released DVDs and mangas in their local anime/manga dealers.”[34]

Fansubs are not the only example of fan-level non-market production by anime groups. Although doujinshi have been slower to take off outside Japan because of the craftwork involved, fan art, fan fiction, and remixed anime music videos thrive in the contemporary network ecology. While fan fiction and fan art are forms of fan production that have a counterpart in Japan, anime music videos are a post-digital phenomenon that currently exist only in overseas anime fandoms that rely on digital distribution. Fans will take commercial anime footage, strip out the soundtrack, and re-edit it to conform to a song or another soundtrack of their choosing. Often these creations are parodies of the commercial narrative or illustrate latent themes or backstories. They also are cultural mash-ups that localize Japan-origin visual media for the sensibilities and cultural referents of overseas fans. Anime footage edited to Euro-American popular music is a new cultural form arising from the experiences of cross-cultural fandom. Although these are “derivative works” that don’t depend on the craftwork of drawing and animating, even a cursory review of these productions reveals often stunning new forms of visual literacy unique to the digitally networked age. Esoteric cultural referents to anime characters and narratives are embedded in visual cues edited to conform to the audio track through lipsync, rapid-fire cuts, and often-sophisticated labor-intensive digital effects.

Although there are a handful of cases where anime music video creators have been asked to take their wares off the Net by corporations, these moves have rarely been initiated by the Japanese anime companies. Rather, it has been the US licensors or record labels that own the soundtracks used in the mash-up videos that have been sending the cease and desist letters. It is difficult to know whether we are witnessing a momentary and fragile peace or the dawn of a golden era for overseas anime fandoms. As the market for anime overseas becomes increasingly established, anime industries may fall victim to the hubris of success and break from their historical tolerance of fan production and distribution. Larger audiences and fandoms also mean a less disciplined and tight-knit community. For example, fansub groups suffer the indignities of having their works sold over eBay by pirate distributors, while they make nothing for their labors. While the case of the transnational circulation and remix of anime provides hints as to some tolerable futures for networked publics, whether this model survives what seems to be an inevitable scaling up and scrutiny by mainstream powerbrokers remains to be seen.

C. Viral Marketing

The era of demographics-driven marketing is over. In an overcrowded media landscape, marketers are ever more dependent on fans to spread the word. They increasingly seek to tap into fan culture to channel fans' creative output and lower production costs. Here marketing is driven by a select group of empowered consumers known as prosumers, brand evangelists, or citizen marketers, who negotiate consumption standards and moderate product meanings.

According to Henry Jenkins, ever since Napster popularized file-sharing, the approach to new-media fandom has split along two general lines. The film, television, and recording industries have predominantly attempted to regulate fan engagement with their products, while Internet and games companies have been more willing to experiment, adopting an approach that enlists fans in the work of content production and brand promotion. Jenkins refers to these two models as prohibitionist and collaborationist.[35] The former, he says, will fail to accommodate network demand for participation, one of the key products of the new-media market, and thus lose fans to more tolerant media interests. If the relationship with fans is becoming increasingly significant in the network era, the role of marketing in mediating producers and consumers may also expand. How then do marketers adapt this collaborationist approach to creating campaigns in a deeply fragmented media landscape?

A variety of disruptive technologies allow consumers to customize their media by choosing more selectively form a wider array of sources and time-shifting their consumption patterns. Marketers are terrified of technologies that allow consumers to cut out ads, from podcasting to set-top boxes and video on demand. These disruptive technologies, as they are often characterized in the industry, are bringing about a transformation in the media landscape, moving it from a push to a pull ecology, where consumers begin to set the terms of their engagement . Rather than spending their entire marketing budget on thirty-second spots that dwindling audiences passively receive, marketers are increasingly interested in producing experience-driven campaigns, a phenomenon of convergence where New York advertising meets Hollywood entertainment, an intersection Advertising Age editor Scott Donaton refers to as “Madison and Vine.”[36]

Social-networking technologies from email to MySpace have given consumers the power to transform brands. Eager to channel this participation, while still wary of brand detractors, marketers are attempting to create fan-driven experiences adapted to a wide variety of media. “Viral marketing” assumes consumers, not firms, have the most influence in creating brands.[37] Using social networks to “spread the word,” viral media grew as an epiphenomenon of e-mail forwarding, which according to Dan Brooks (who became famous for his spoof Volkswagen-suicide bomber advertisement) echoes a tacit understanding in the age-old practice of telling jokes: “If you repeat it, you own it.[38]” The problem for corporations is that activist brand detractors can also get into the game. Take the instance of the Nike sweatshop e-mails initiated by Jonah Peretti. After Nike responded over email that he could not customize his shoes with the personal ID “sweatshop,” the e-mail correspondence, forwarded virally, became an Internet phenomenon, eventually landing Peretti a spot on the Today Show.[39]

Jim Banister provides a useful theoretical frame for viral social networking with his concept of the “enginet.”[40] In studying sites such as eBay and Friendster, Banister describes the enginet as an algorithmic structure that combines code, form, and function, to create community-driven experiences, in which the users themselves have found innovative, often unanticipated, ways to connect with one another. According to Banister, the successful enginet pulls visitors seamlessly through a variety of states, from producer to distributor to marketer to vendor, and of course to consumer. While Banister locates the antecedent of the enginet in the value-chain marketing schemes of Avon and Mary Kay, he claims that frictionless networked media has exponentially scaled them into entire ecosystems.

Enginets use shared-judgment systems to create reputation-based “value nets,” which Banister says leverage a complex combination of community impulse, egocentrism, and individual superego, with its desire to judge. The tension of these traits has produced the bizarre category of Internet fame, often shamelessly lowbrow, where for example a popular thirteen-year-old video blogger named “Bowiegirl,” whose fame appears to be as much the result of mockery as admiration, becomes the unintentional spokesperson for Logitech after having featured one of their Webcams in a late-night bedroom confessional.[41]

Although brand enthusiasts and detractors are growing more empowered with each passing moment, marketers are ill at ease letting their reputations be determined by amateurs. Some ambitious marketers are thus attempting to work from within the viral space, by creating campaigns cleverly dressed down in the aesthetics of amateur cultural production. The FX channel for example has used MySpace to great effect in creating a profile for a fictional character from their television program Nip and Tuck as a way to promote the show. The pioneers of the fictive technique, video game marketers, continue to push the technique forward, using fake blogs to seed elaborate online hoaxes. Working with the marketing firm Wieden + Kennedy, the game developer Sega, for example, created a viral campaign for the release of their game ESPN NFL Football 2K4, which passed itself off as a legitimate amateur homepage by a game tester named Beta-7. The imaginary tester claimed the game made him blackout and fly into uncontrollable fits of rage. The phony site featured “leaked” confidential memos of a cover-up by Sega, which supposedly had knowledge of the health hazards of the game.[42] In the world of the enginet, it seems that marketers are increasingly coming to resemble political spin doctors, carefully leaking disinformation to the press in order to advance an agenda, thwart detractors, and manipulate public opinion.

Media theorist Holly Willis proposes two categories for viral media: those that are “simply unseemly and outrageous,” such as Brooks’ Volkswagen ad, and those that “leave you very unsure about what you're viewing.[43]” The majority of successful viral video clips conform to the former category, the most successful being Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s Subservient Chicken Web site developed as a satire of online Webcam pornography and featuring a database of video clips of a man in a chicken costume. Developed for Burger King, Subservient Chicken became responsible for driving one in six visitors to Burger King’s main site.[44] Falling more clearly into the latter category is the emerging genre of alternative reality gaming (ARG). ARGs create entire self-contained worlds on the Web, often comprising a vast array of assets—logos, photos, scripts, movies, audio recordings, corporate blurbage, graphic treatments, flash movies—embedded within a network of (untraceable) Web Sites. Involving a variety of complex puzzles, marketing experiences such as “the Beast,” developed to promote the Spielberg film AI, take several weeks or months to solve and are far too complex to be solved by a single player. Audiences must work together to process more story information than previously imagined, building a more collaborative relationship with each other and with the brand. This technique was used with great success to market the film The Blair Witch Project (a tiny budget film, which set a record for the largest per-screen gross in motion-picture history), and is increasingly being used to market video games.

When describing the medium of ARGs, fans often note that the best-designed experiences explicitly blur the lines of reality.[45] Though an undeniably powerful new medium, uniquely adapted to the multimedia context of the Web, developing ARG’s as hype-machines could also potentially prove somewhat treacherous territory for marketers, as the online consumer is increasingly sensitive to being manipulated. Blogs have, for example, proven to be an extremely effective tool at “debunking,” as was famously seen in the case of so-called Rathergate during the 2004 election, in which bloggers responding to a 60 Minutes broadcast exposed documents critical of President Bush's service in the National Guard as likely forgeries. Likewise, when operating in the viral space, marketers may do as much harm as good. Cillit Bang, for example, a UK cleaning product brand, was forced to publicly apologize for conducting a deceptive viral marketing campaign in which members of its marketing team posed as fictional characters on the Web to place thinly disguised ads. The campaign unraveled when the marketers were exposed by bloggers.[46]

As the forces of media disruption proliferate and audiences are increasingly lured away from official distribution channels, marketers are challenged to either bring unique value-add propositions to their audiences or become irrelevant. When describing the medium, ARG fans will often invoke the ideal of TINAG (This Is Not A Game), as the best of these experiences are explicitly intended to blur the lines of reality.[47] Such developments will not be lost on marketers. They will have to adopt a view of the entire field of cultural production in order to successfully invite people to participate in constructing compelling marketing “experiences.” As the relationship evolves between production and consumption, Jenkins maintains there must be detente between political economy and audience research.[48] According to Linda Kaplan Thaler, CEO of the Kaplan Thaler Group, new-media cultural workers “need to work more by chaos theory than by linear thinking.”[49] Perhaps we will find that, as in nature, mutualism and parasitism are, in fact, often not discrete categories but should rather be perceived as a continuum of interaction. By creating a public arena shared by both non-market amateurs and commercial professionals, the Internet makes the engagements between these different parties unavoidably more intimate.

D. Online News

Journalism is also significantly transforming under the pressure of network-era convergent and participatory culture. Evolving digital communication tools and practices are clashing with those of traditional news media, resulting in paradox and contradiction. Stories filed by so-called embedded reporters in Iraq, for example, are being trumped by soldiers' personal emails and photos; western-trained journalists in Middle Eastern countries are criticized for lacking professionalism while western audiences surf to Arab outlets to get news absent from western reports; bloggers work out tacit ethical codes for themselves while editorial opinions leak as a form of branding into all aspects of mainstream news publishing and programming.

Echoing these contradictions is the fact that one of the central assumptions about the news—its tie to democracy—grows more complex each day. On the one hand, scholars such as Robert McChesney,[50] Edward Herman ,[51] and Cass Sunstein,[52] see civic culture as deteriorating, the flow of information and opinions limited by media consolidation, various forms of self and government censorship, and the fragmentation of audiences. On the other hand, scholars such as Benkler[53] and Jenkins[54] celebrate do-it-yourself media for expanding the ranks of informed citizenry and facilitating the development of an engaged and participatory transnational culture. Benkler argues, for example that what he calls “production modalities” of network information are being applied now to create and distribute politically relevant information, suggesting a vital transition from newspapers and TV, which suddenly seem but elements of the larger essential source file. He adds that the network, with its “variation and diversity of knowledge, time, availability, insight, and experience as well as vast communications and information resources,” has taken over the watchdog function of the press, a function that has become irretrievably a peer-to-peer activity.[55] Although many analysts faced with the complexities of the networked news environment have simply divided the landscape into two spheres, in effect pitting them against each other, it is increasingly evident that the landscape grows more fully integrated every day, a point that news industry professionals are acting on reluctantly but that media users-turned-producers have recognized instinctively for some time.

The balance of power between news providers and news consumers has shifted. Web publishing tools and powerful mobile devices combined with an increasing skepticism toward mainstream media has prompted readers to become active participants in the creation and dissemination of news. Bloggers, online do-it-yourself media activists, and professional journalists are struggling over the right to define the truth, and over what form and practice of news production yields more credible product. Is credibility the domain of elite media institutions that abide by professional codes or do bloggers, with their editorial independence, collaborative structure, and merit-based popularity more effectively inform the public? The “truth” as the exclusive domain of authorities and the journalists who use them as sources is receding, making way for communication created by the public based on peer-produced and distributed information, storytelling, and exchange. With this shift come anxieties. The news industry focuses on the viability of its business model and the sustainability of its products. Analysts of civic culture question how the public will get the information it needs to participate as citizens, concerned that the individualized new-media environment will serve less to weave society together than to break it apart. An era marked by millions of specifically tailored informational pods is viewed both as a democratic liberation and as a horror of narcissistic isolation. And new media scholars point out that contrary to claims that networks provide a platform where all voices can be heard, not all voices are given equal attention, as evident in the fact that a small set of so-called A-list bloggers account of the majority of the traffic in the blogosphere. Clay Shirky in his essay “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality,”[56] argues that these inequalities are not a failure of the system but rather an inevitable side effect of freedom of choice. According to power laws, he argues, “in any systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome.” For some this star system is evidence that digital networks merely reflect offline power dynamics, while for Shirky the merit-based process by which bloggers achieve star-status is an improvement over the status quo.

Despite millions of dollars spent on high-profile online editions, mainstream news outlets are largely reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities of digital technologies. Most traditional news organizations offer only the illusion of online interactivity, participation, and collaboration—failing to exploit the potential of the networked media environment. In the spring of 2006, for example, the New York Times debuted its first Web remodel in more than five years. The new site emphasized personalization and something editor of the site Len Apcar called “lean-in” design, which aimed to get readers “to read and click and keep clicking and dig deeper into the site.”[57] Coaxing readers to “lean-in” and to click more deeply into the New York Times news product, however, is very different than getting the reader involved in the news itself—encouraging comments on the news, contributions of stories and information, weighing in on what the news agenda ought to be, for example—which is what truly interactive news Web sites are designed to do, sites like those run by Current TV, Oh My News, and Digg. The distance maintained between the Times and its audience is not always beneficial to their business interests. Judith Miller's controversial and inaccurate reporting on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for example spurred strong responses from readers that mostly never reached Miller or her editors. Messages that got through were likely never read, were never printed, and failed entirely to influence editorial policy toward Miller and her writing. She remained a "loose cannon" in the newsroom, her stories an exposed agenda-setting debacle of insiderism and isolation that tarnished the Times brand.[58] Traditional news media are using the Internet as a new distribution channel, but they are not reconfiguring their fundamental stance toward journalistic authority and authoring conventions.

Resistance to the full participatory potential of new-media is defended by the industry on the grounds that, first, effective investigation, particularly on an international scale, requires resources and a certain amount of organizational and political clout. Second, that only corporate media have the financial resources to stand up to government and other corporate organizations in upholding the public interest. Defenders of emerging forms of journalism, however, argue that collaboration is a resource more valuable than institutional backing in both cases. Benkler refers to the network reportage that exposed the inadequacy and corruptability of Diebold Election Systems voting machines.[59] The P2P Diebold investigation is a compelling example of the potential of networked journalism. The voting system was partly decertified in California, and voting machine policy was altered as a result in several states.

The terms of debate, however, lag seriously behind the experience of news information as it is created and received. The 2005 riots in France, for example, saw sophisticated use of new media among people involved in the story, where the lines that may have formerly separated the participants, reporters, and audiences grew dim, elastic, porous. The Web was by far the most dynamic source of information of every kind, a flood of images, stories, podcasts, video, critiques, corrections, and meta-narratives. Mainstream outlets rushing to keep up came to mimic do-it-yourself formats on their sites. Reporters and editors grazed the Web as a way of generating content and adapted new technologies. The French daily Liberation, the Swiss weekly L'Hebdo, among other professional media, used blogs as an essential aspect of their coverage. Liberation promoted its blog as an up-to-the-minute wire-style stream of information, whereas L'Hebdo used its blog to publish in-depth pieces and analysis, eventually sending reporters on a rotating basis to Bondy, a Paris suburb near the origin of the unrest, to act as participant-observers. It also, in an ironic turn, provided training workshops for Bondy youth to teach them how to blog. Newspapers across the EU printed information including interviews that originally appeared as blog material.

Network discourse about the riots was equally influenced by the mainstream agenda. Bloggers responded to questions raised in the papers and on TV and commented on mainstream coverage or politician responses to the unrest. Banlieu dweller and gamer Alex Chan made a machinima film on the causes of the riots he titled “The French Democracy.” It features pre-rendered New York City sets and characters and English-language subtitles, another example of cultural mash-up embodying the current transnational media ecology. Distinctions between established and new media were also used to convey the story. For example, activists hacked the official Web site of Clichy-sous-Bois, where the riots originated, and posted a fake article reporting the resignation of the mayor, a satirical technique increasingly used by the anti-globalization movement and other activist groups, which create ersatz news broadcasts, mock PR and phony corporate and government Web sites. While listservs and blogs have long used mainstream media as a springboard for critique and discussion, now we see media activists mixing political critique with the tools and idioms of entertainment media, mobilizing hybrid cultural genres that challenge dominant cultural norms and mainstream media coverage.

With increasing opportunities for amateur cultural production, it is clear people are actively resisting the content and practices of mainstream news by using it as a launching point to offer contesting points of view and practices. And in the case of online news, the relationship between the commercial industry and DIY producers is less contentious than some of the other cases surveyed here. Text-based Web site and blogs have proliferated rapidly in part because text is the most accessible DIY media, yet this widespread emergence of DIY text-based journalism, which often depends on poaching mainstream news products, has not been met with the same contestation over intellectual property that is occurring in other creative industry sectors. Rather than trying to shut down online news, mainstream media are poaching do-it-yourself products, practices and, at times, values in order to remain relevant. In embracing key characteristics of network communication, however, especially interactivity, journalists will have to partly surrender authority, what Mark Deuze calls the "we write, you read" dogma of modern journalism.[60] But to many in the industry this is a rabbit hole. If mainstream outlets don't have the authority to deem what is news and what is truth, what do they have to sell? The reality is that news production has raced beyond industry control. Corporate news will not vanish any time soon but, much as music fans and game hackers are reconfiguring corporate entertainment media, alternative news provides a set of viewpoints and analyses that both depends on and critiques the news from the core, supplementing and altering news as product, information, and experience.

III. CONCLUSIONS

The future of networked public culture is contested and the only thing for certain is that it will be highly variable. Even if you accept our argument that there is a general trend towards more outspoken, unruly, and mobilized publics, the specificities of how this plays out in particular arenas is highly dependent on media type, industry make up, infrastructures, geopolitics, and cultures of consumption and production. Battle lines were drawn early in the showdown between P2P and commercial distributors of music, and are just now beginning to soften along some boundaries surrounding amateur music. Anime provides a counter-case of historical synergies across the boundaries of consumers and producers, and an industry that is just now starting to flex its muscles in the global arena. Marketing and advertising, a form of cultural production that is often maligned but stunningly influential, is perhaps the most responsive to each shifting tide in public behavior and whim, sniffing out trends and mimicking styles from the counterculture even as it seeks to reign in and channel these viral energies in ways that consolidate the corporate bottom line. The protean flexibility of marketing media contrasts with the paralysis of professional news media, wedded to their structures of authority and professionalism and their commitments to being the arbiters of the public sphere. Despite the turn towards news as entertainment, there are resilient and principled investments in maintaining the separation between journalism and opinion, newspapers and blogs, that go to the heart of the norms we continue to use to assess authority, fact, and credibility.

In this essay we have tried to describe some of the nuances and variability of how publics and industries have responded to the networking of public culture, while also working to identify certain trends that seem to cut across different cultural spheres. Networked cultural production assails traditional structures of authority and disrupts the received logic of consumption by breaking down barriers between consumers and producers. In the cultural genres outlined above, the members of what used to be commonsenically termed an “audience” or a “demographic” are now seen as integral to the process of production, regardless of the extent to which their power to shape the process has been accepted and integrated by existing authorities. Although networked music fans met fierce resistance from the recording industry, they have profoundly influenced music itself, reordering production and distribution in ways that have expanded understandings across genres. Definitions of the most basic terms—song, songwriter, musician, performance—have changed. Likewise, anime fans, who enjoy a mostly synergistic relationship with commercial producers, add layers of meaning and popularity to industry products by working off and remixing them, adapting them to local contexts and subjecting them to genre-bending reinterpretations, turning them into music videos of western heavy metal, for example. And where the advertising industry is embracing what some of its leaders view as the connective chaos of the network by using individual consumers or agency-created consumer avatars to push products into the depths of digital social networks, the news industry seems to be entrenching itself into a smaller but still bounded domain, reluctant to let its audience in, even as the definitions of journalism fade on all sides and the news environment expands over cultural, national, and genre borders to every corner of the blogosphere and beyond.

Although our voice throughout this essay is mostly a celebratory one, cheering on the emergent energies of what were previously smart but mostly invisible publics, our stance is not entirely uncritical. We are still at the beginning in the trajectory towards lateral networking of public culture. Although we agree with Benkler that we are at the dawn of what promises to be a significant shift in the modes of cultural production, it seems likely that the change will be more additive or accommodating than a coup d’etat. Each industry, each medium, and each fandom will need to find its own point of longer term stability, which is likely to include a somewhat chastened though still powerful commercial media apparatus. The standards of authorial voice, professional artistic vision, and journalistic integrity are cultural values that we are not likely to abandon entirely, even though we may welcome a louder voice of critique and remix from the peanut gallery.

More significant, however, than the compromises of the culture industries are the shifts in cultural referents and creative form that are on the horizon. Convergence culture is not only a matter of industry and technology but also more importantly a matter of norms, common culture, and the artistry of everyday life. Professional commercial media brought us a slick common culture that has become a fact of life, the language of current events, shared cultural reference, and visual recognitions that lubricate our everyday interactions with one another. Commercial media, for better and for worse provide much of the source material for our modern language of communication. The current moment is perhaps less about overthrow of this established modality of common culture, but more a plea for recognition of a new layer of communication and cultural sharing. At best, this is about folk, amateur, niche and non-market communities of cultural production mobilizing, critiquing, remixing commercial media and functioning as a test bed for radically new cultural forms. At worst, this is about the fragmenting of common culture or the decay of shared standards of quality, professionalism, and accountability. The history of networked public culture has opened with a narrative of convergence and participatory culture; we lie at the crossroads of multiple unfolding trajectories.

[1]. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge. “Why Public Culture.” Public Culture 1 no 1 (1998): 5-9.

[2]. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

[3]. John Hagel and John Seely Brown. The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

[4]. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 93-95.

[5]. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 44-92.

[6]. Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired 12.10 October 2004, 170-177 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.

[7]. Martin Kretschmer, George Michael Klimis and Roger Wallis, “Music in Electronic Markets,” New Media and Society 3 no 4 (2001): 426.

[8]. Andrew Whelan, “Do U Produce? Subcultural Capital and Amateur Musicianship in Peer-to-Peer Networks,” Cybersounds, ed. Michael D. Ayers (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 57-81.

[9]. Derek Caney for Reuters, “CD Sales Down,” DMusic.com, August 26, 2002, http://news.dmusic.com/article/5340.

[10]. Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf.

[11]. Fraser MacDonald, “Downloader's Guide to MP3,” Stuff, June 2004, 48-59.

[12]. Michael D. Ayers, “The Cyberactivism of a Dangermouse,” Cybersounds, ed. Michael D. Ayers, 127-136.

[13]. See Illegal Art, http://www.illegal-art.org

[14]. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture.

[15]. See, for example, Creative Commons at http://www.creativecommons.org, and Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

[16]. Carrie McLaren, “Copyrights and Copywrongs: Interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan,” Stay Free! no 20, http://www.stayfreemagazine.org.

[17]. For an overview of changes see, for example, Steve Schoenherr’s Recording Technology History Web site, http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/notes.html.

[18]. “Inventor of the Week,” http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/russell.html.

[19]. Louise Meintjes, Review of Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions by Kofi Agawu (Routledge, 2003).

[20]. Jonathan Sterne, “On the Future of Music,” Cybersounds (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 255-263.

[21]. Larry Crane, “It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” Tape Op (March/April 2005), 82-91.

[22]. For some interesting perspectives from DJ Spooky see http://www.djspooky.com/articles.html.

[23]. For example see: Digidesign User Conference, http://duc.digidesign.com, BigBlueLounge.com, http://www.bigbluelounge.com/forums/index.php. The RecPit forums at http://www.prosoundweb.com/recpit/ were particularly noteworthy, often hostile, but generally entertaining but are now defunct.

[24]. David Wimble, The Indie Bible (Ottawa: Big Meteor, 2004).

[25]. Andrew Whelan, "Do U Produce?” Cybersounds, ed. Michael D. Ayers, 255-263.

[26]. Alfred Gell, “Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption among the Muria Gonds,” The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 110-38.

[27]. John Ryan and Michael Hughes. “Breaking the Decision Chain: The Fate of Creativity in the Age of Self-Production,” Cybersounds, ed. Michael D. Ayers, 240-253.

[28]. Robert Drew. Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody (New York: AltaMira, 2001).

[29]. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).

[30]. Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1992).

[31]. Sharon Kinsella. “Japanese Subculture in the 1980s: Otaku and the Amateur Manga Movement,” Journal of Japanese Studies 24 no 2 (1998), 289-316.

[32]. Sean Leonard. “Celebrating Two Decades of Unlawful Progress: Fan Distribution, Proselytization Commons, and the Explosive Growth of Japanese Animation,” UCLA Entertainment Law Review 12 no 2, (2005).

[33]. Daniel Roth. “It's... Profitmón!” Fortune. December 12, 2005, 100.

[34]. Anime-Empire. “Mission Statement and History,” http://www.anime-empire.net/anime-empire/about.php.

[35]. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, 201.

[36]. Scott Donaton, Madison & Vine (New York, McGraw-Hill, 2004).

[37]. Paul Berry, "Paul Berry's Viral Marketing Advice,” G4 Attack of the Show, http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/blog/date/06302005/index.html.

[38]. Holly Willis, “Ad Libs: The virulent strain of commercials infecting the Web,” LA Weekly, February 17, 2005, http://www.laweekly.com/film+tv/screen/ad-libs/934.

[39]. “The Life of an Internet Meme. A History of the Nike Emails,” shey.net, http://www.shey.net/niked.html

[40]. Jim Banister, Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media (Los Angeles: Agate Publishing, 2004).

[41]. Greg Sandoval, “YouTube's 'Bowiechick' and the Spiders From Marketing,” CNET.com.au, http://www.cnet.com.au/software/internet/0,39029524,40061704,00.htm.

[42]. Max Lenderman, Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Brand World (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).

[43]. Holly Willis, “Ad Libs”

[44]. Mae Anderson, “Dissecting ”˜Subservient Chicken’” Adweek, March 07, 2005, http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=100....

[45]. Dave Szulborski, This Is Not a Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (Rochester, NY: Lulu.com, 2005).

[46]. Bobbie Johnson, “Cleaner Caught Playing Dirty on the Net,” The Guardian, October 6, 2005, http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,16545,1585731,00.html

[47]. Dave Szulborski, This Is Not a Game

[48]. Henry Jenkins, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7 no 1 (2004): 36.

[49]. Nat Ives, “Advertisers Learn From Candidates,” New York Times, November 2, 2004, C1.

[50]. Robert W. McChesney, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).

[51]. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).

[52]. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[53]. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.

[54]. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture.

[55]. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 264.

[56]. Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality,” Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet. http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

[57]. Robert Niles, “The Gray Lady Weaves a New Website,” USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review (April 9, 2006), http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060409niles/

[58]. Michael Massing and Orville Schell, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq (New York: DEL-New York Review Books, 2004).

[59]. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 237-245.

[60]. Mark Deuze, “Online Journalism: Modeling the First Generation of News Media on the World Wide Web,” First Monday 6 no 10, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/deuze/#d2.