Strategically Communicating

In Chapter Five of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture the authors discuss the different ways in which content producers design spreadability, or the qualities that spread content consumption. One method that immediately stood out to me was the “unfinished content.” The premise of this technique is essentially providing incomplete media to content consumers. This offers content consumers the opportunity to have their hand in the production of the content. This approach has been used in advertising, but is spilling into other realms—such as TV shows.

One innovative TV show expands on this idea of spreadability and uses it for complete collaborative efforts of multimedia pieces that are then broadcasted as segments to a TV show. It’s called Hit Record on TV (http://www.hitrecord.org/)  and is directed and hosted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Basically, anybody can upload creative works—video, writing, photographs, drawing, songs, lyrics—which can then be worked on or contributed to by anybody who wants to collaborate. This means that one single piece of media can have hundreds of co-producers. The best part is that each collaborator gets paid for their contributions based on the merits of their work.

How do you think collaboration on the global scale will change the media we consume and produce? Will having several co-producers strengthen or weaken the overall message being delivered?