Spreadable Media. Henry Jenkins

and dissatisfaction, displeasure well illustrated by a 2006 video of a Comcast technician falling asleep on customer Brian Finkelstein’s couch while on hold with the company’s own help line. Finkelstein’s video spread rapidly and widely and received coverage in a variety of traditional media outlets as well. The drowsy technician was fired, and Comcast received a steady stream of negative publicity online as frustrated customers added their own commentary to the video.

      The sleepy Comcast technician was only one of their spreading troubles. For instance, there was the much-recounted tale of LaChania Govan, the Illinois Comcast customer whose repeated attempts to resolve a customer service issue in 2005 led to employees changing her account name—and bill—to “Bitch Dog.” Similar attention was heaped on 75-year-old Virginia Comcast customer Mona Shaw, who became so angered at her customer service treatment in 2007 that she smashed up the office with a hammer (Yellin 2009, 2–8). Journalist Bob Garfield (2007) shared his own “Hell on Earth” story about Comcast customer service, beginning his Advertising Age column with the declaration “Comcast must die.” Garfield started a campaign against the cable operator on the site ComcastMustDie.com. And amid these videos, stories, and campaigns were the myriad individual complaints that Comcast customers increasingly voiced across blogs, microblogging platforms, and discussion forums.

      Companies now face building pressure to use their online presence not just to communicate their own messages but to respond to the demands of disgruntled customers as well. Comcast listened to some degree, one could argue out of necessity, over time creating a specific department to respond to issues raised online. In February 2008, Comcast Executive Support Manager Frank Eliason (who had been with the company six months) was named the company’s “Director of Digital Care.” The department Eliason created now reaches out to bloggers, Twitterers, and other online discussants, attempting to proactively resolve their problems. In the process, the “Comcast Cares” initiative has addressed thousands of customers and simultaneously generated significant publicity. BusinessWeek, for instance, named Eliason (who has since gone on to work for financial services company Citi as its head of social media) “the most famous customer service manager in the U.S.” (Reisner 2009). Although in 2009 Bob Garfield still called Comcast “a vast, greedy, blundering, tone-deaf corporate colossus,” he noted that the company “has heard our angry voices and taken concrete steps in the process of putting customers first.” Meanwhile, many people in customer service and communications look to Comcast’s online customer service response as an exemplar that companies should follow to create online communication platforms which respond to customer questions and reach out to those who complain.

      Despite the praise, Comcast’s customer service remains far from ideal. Its pioneering work using social media platforms to listen and respond to negative customer experiences still serves as a quick fix to the larger issues that plague service providers. In 2010, for example, Gizmodo published a letter received by a customer who was told his service would be disconnected if he didn’t pay the $0.00 he owed (Golijan 2010), while another customer who praised Comcast’s Twitter communication shared his ongoing frustrations once he was connected to others within the company (Paul 2010). These are only two of a regular stream of customers expressing frustrations with the company’s traditional communication modes.

      Further, the “Comcast Cares” initiative, and the general perspective that customer service issues become a higher priority when customers have their own online presence, means that some customers get better treatment than others. See, for instance, this account from Slate:

      People with more clout seem to get better service. One Twitterer with fewer than 20 followers told me that though he’s tweeted about Comcast frequently, the company has responded only to tell him its customer-service phone number. Another—with about 300 followers—told a better story: When she complained about a service problem, Comcast made special arrangements for a refund. And Glenn Fleishman, a tech journalist with more than 1,600 followers, got the best deal of all. [He] quickly got a call from an executive in the escalation department, who offered to waive [a $1,300 early-cancellation] fee. (Manjoo 2009)

      As long as companies treat customer service issues online with some degree of concern about whether the customer is “an influencer,” customers will receive different levels of response based on their perceived “public relations threat” (not to mention the lack of recourse for those who lack easy access to these communication platforms). And, in devoting significant energy to responding to those customers who complain loudest, without fixing underlying customer service issues companies might, if anything, encourage people to “spread their complaint” as their first course of action, influenced by the horror stories of phone trees and endless hold times awaiting them at a customer call center.

      Even though Comcast and all large companies still have miles to go in fairly and fully prioritizing customer service, the spreadable media environment has made listening to audiences a greater priority for many marketers and media companies. Public relations and corporate communication departments are increasingly using their online presence to address the messages customers are circulating, a sign of the power which visible and socially connected audience members have to shape the agendas of companies through the messages they spread (an issue we will return to in greater detail in chapter 4). In other words, companies are feeling more pressure to think not just about how audiences might spread messages about a brand (and content from the brand) but also about how their own corporate presence might “spread” to connect with the messages audiences are circulating about them.

      Participatory Culture Reconsidered

      Spreadability assumes a world where mass content is continually repositioned as it enters different niche communities. When material is produced according to a one-size-fits-all model, it imperfectly fits the needs of any given audience. Instead, audience members have to retrofit it to better serve their interests. As material spreads, it gets remade: either literally, through various forms of sampling and remixing, or figuratively, via its insertion into ongoing conversations and across various platforms. This continuous process of repurposing and recirculating is eroding the perceived divides between production and consumption.

      Whitney Phillips’s doctoral work at the University of Oregon focuses on the cultural practices, productions, and performances associated with 4Chan, an online community that actively encourages behavior which is often described as “antisocial” or “troll-like.” Phillips argues that even disrespectful remixing is generative. In our enhanced book, she argues that 4Chan members have adopted a distinctive model for thinking about the “contributions” they make to culture, actively seizing on memes as tools for creativity and production:

      As understood by trolls, memes are not passive and do not follow the model of biological infection. Instead, trolls see (though perhaps “experience” is more accurate) memes as microcosmic nests of evolving content. […] Memes spread—that is, they are actively engaged and/or remixed into existence—because something about a given image or phrase or video or whatever lines up with an already-established set of linguistic and cultural norms. In recognizing this connection, a troll is able to assert his or her cultural literacy and to bolster the scaffolding on which trolling as a whole is based, framing every act of reception as an act of cultural production.

      For 4Chan members, the concept of the meme as a self-perpetuating phenomenon beyond human control might contribute to the spontaneity and disruption the group hopes to achieve. Phillips (2009) has argued elsewhere that 4Chan may have been the birthplace for widely spread images that represented U.S. President Barack Obama as Batman character The Joker, which some supporters of the U.S. conservative Tea Party movement adopted for protest signs during their public opposition to President Obama’s national health care plan.

      While the Los Angeles Times (Grad 2009) identified the artist of one of the most widely spread versions as college student Firas Alkhateeb, the image emerged from a larger series of remixes by the 4Chan community as they toyed with marketing material produced for the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight. Other remixes included transforming John McCain into The Joker, along with Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, various pop stars, and, of course, pictures of cute cats.