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- Fast, Karin, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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A spatial approach to fan labor : Conceptualizing fan mobilization in transmedia marketing
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When Swedish artist Tove Styrke released her album Kiddo (2015) on Spotify, she mobilized her fans through an immersive marketing campaign that stretched across and beyond media platforms: an 8-bit game, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Dreamhack, and a major Swedish music festival were key campaign platforms. The campaign construction was hardly unique, but rather illustrative of current trends in cultural production, including transmedia marketing and the increasing reliance on fan labor.This paper argues that informed spatial approaches to fan labor, and business strategies aimed to cultivate such labor, are missing in the existing research on cultural production. While descriptions of our transmediatized culture often-times do include spatial metaphors, such as “flow”, “stream”, “fluid”, and “liquid”, our conviction is that a more serious engagement with geography is vital for understanding, mapping, and ultimately critiquing industry practices that potentially are exploitive, unethical, and even harmful.Therefore, this paper suggests a theoretical framework for exploring the geographies of fan labor and presents exemplifying cartographies of authentic music marketing campaigns. The framework is influenced by two recent ‘turns’ in media and communication studies: the labor turn and the spatial turn. From labor theory, we borrow the idea that consumer engagement can be read as labor that is typically unpaid, affective, and voluntarily given. Spatial theory, next, provides us with a conceptual toolbox to disentangle the spatiality of transmedia marketing, including the relationship between physical and virtual elements.The notion of ‘transmediascape’ is brought in to describe the embodiment of transmedia marketing – in mediated and non-mediated spaces and flows. Such transmediascapes, the paper argues, can be read as the perfect soil for fan labor since they mobilize consumers in more than one respect: they assemble fan affect and, at the same time, encourage physical as well as virtual fan movement. Due to its multifaceted connotation – pointing towards both affectivity and mobility – the term ‘mobilization’ fruitfully bridges labor theory and spatial theory and serves, ultimately, as a key concept for analyzing contemporary forms of cultural production.
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| 2. |
- Fast, Karin, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Geographies of free labor : Mobilizing consumers across immersive transmediascapes
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When Swedish artist Tove Styrke released her album Kiddo on Spotify in 2015, she simultaneously released an 8-bit game for her fans to play on kiddogame.com. By sharing high scores, users could win merchandise especially put together by the artist. The game was also promoted by one of the most well-known Swedish gaming streamers, posting his own Kiddo Game competition to his followers. A week after the release, Tove performed at Dreamhack, which also shared the game on their website and on Twitter. Later that summer, a live version of the game was staged at a major Swedish music festival, where Tove also performed. The game was easily shared via Facebook and twitter, and while playing the game the album played via Spotify.Worldwide, the music industry struggles to come to terms with how to make profit in times of illegal downloading, streaming, and Spotifyication. One apparent strategy is to rely on consumer engagement. The Tove Styrke campaign could be read as a contemporary example of so called transmedia marketing; that is, as a “holistic content creation approach” (Zeiser, 2015: xv) that simultaneously involves multiple content platforms. The attraction of transmedia marketing lies in its potential to foster engaged consumers who are ready to “haunt” a brand experience across several content platforms. In this paper, we join with the burgeoning critical scholarship that interprets consumer “engagement” as a form of labor. Since much of this labor gets paid in affect rather than money, such labor has rightfully been recognized as a form of free labor.While both transmedia marketing and free labor has been subjected to many studies over the last decade, there is a lack of research initiatives that explicitly address the spatiality of both of these phenomena (though see e.g. Stork’s [2014] engagement with the “transmedia geography” of the Glee franchise). What is more; if it is rare to talk about the geographies of transmediality in the first place, it is equally rare to talk about transmediality, at all, in relation to music. Perhaps not so surprisingly but all the more inaccurately, there seems to be a prevailing perception that transmedia productions are exclusive to, at least traditionally, more narrative-bound franchises such as television, film, game, or comic books. However, storytelling is becoming all the more important also to music brands. Consequently, we identify a need for studies that acknowledge that 1) the notion of transmediality is applicable also to music, and 2) that the spatiality of transmedia endeavors is worthy scholarly review. Our conviction is that just as work-places constitute obvious research objects in relation to other kinds of labor, so do the transmedia “social factories” warrant scholarly attention.As to compensate for the identified research lack then, this paper investigates several actual cases of transmedia marketing in the music industry – and the free labor that such marketing potentially engenders – by way of qualitative content analyses that employ a cross-disciplinary conceptual framework. The framework combines theoretical perspectives from the ‘spatial turn’ and the ‘labor turn’ in media studies and allows us to approach, and visually present, transmedia marketing as a landscape – what we call a transmediascape. Such transmediascapes, our results indicate, can be read as the perfect soil for free labor since they mobilize consumers in more than one respect: they assemble consumer affect and, at the same time, encourage physical as well as virtual fan movement. Thus, due to its multifaceted connotation, pointing towards both affectivity and mobility, we find that the term ‘mobilization’ serves as a fruitful link between spatial theory and labor theory and a key concept for analyzing the geographies of free labor.The era of transmediatization is marked by increased reliance, in all the more societal spheres, on content that transcend singular media platforms and, accordingly, by new modes of media consumption. Much research has recognized, confirmed, and explored this transformation, and ‘transmediality’ has hitherto been subjected to relatively extensive theorization. Nonetheless, the spatiality of transmediality remains largely undertheorized. As to correct for this shortage, this paper proposes transmediascape as an analytical tool for discerning the complex topographies of media ownership, technologies, texts, meanings, and practices that constitute today’s transmediatized culture. With inspiration from work in both the ‘spatial turn’ and ‘labor turn’ in media studies, we recognize the transmediascape as an arena of labour, where both paid and unpaid forms of work are carried out. Ultimately, we argue, the concept of transmediascape works as a tool for mapping geographies of free labour across institutional, technological, and textual levels. The present study illuminates current modes of ‘transmediascaping’ – or the practice of cultivating good “soil” for profitable consumer engagement – by focusing the transmedia marketing campaign that launched British/Irish boyband One Direction’s album ‘Made in the A.M’, in 2015.
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| 5. |
- Handler, Reinhard, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Open Data, Crowdsourcing and Game Mechanics : A case study on civic participation in the digital age
- 2016
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Ingår i: Computer Supported Cooperative Work. - : Springer Science+Business Media B.V.. - 0925-9724 .- 1573-7551. ; 25:2-3, s. 153-166
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of this paper is to shed light on the dynamics of civic participation, media agency, anddata practices. To do so we analyse an investigative journalism story run by The Guardian that combinedopen data, crowdsourcing and game mechanics with the purpose of engaging readers. The case studyhighlights how data can be made accessible to people who usually do not have access; how game mechanicscan be deployed in order to foster civic participation by offering users a sense of autonomy, competence andrelatedness; and how crowdsourcing can organise a large group of people into achieving a common goal. Thecombination of these three elements resulted in a case for civic participation in the digital era.
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| 6. |
- Ryan Bengtsson, Linda, 1976-, et al.
(författare)
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Share! Like! Create! How fan is cultivated and practiced in the contemporary music industry
- 2017
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Ingår i: 2017: AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- When the band One Direction released their sixth album “Made in the A.M.” they marketed it through several joint events within different digital platforms. They used google streetview to create a fictional room, in which fans discovered new material and share it within their social networks using #MadeintheAM. In a joint event with Twitter they launched a 24-hour competition, asking which “country” loves One Direction the most. The 10 countries that were able to mobilize the most Twitter-activity on their country’s hashtag during a set period of time were rewarded with their own One Direction emoji. Just before the album release One Direction joined with Apple Music to stage an international competition that ran across several social media platforms and offered fans the chance to win tickets to an exclusive performance by the band. Connecting the music industry with media platforms combining social media happenings and live events, the campaign mobilized fans be part of the marketing of the album. Recently the music industry has struggled with how to make profit in times of illegal downloading, streaming, and Spotifycation. One overarching strategy developed in response is to rely on consumer engagement, making the One Direction campaign a contemporary example of transmedia marketing involving multiple platforms simultaneously. The willingness of the music industry to use transmedia marketing is related to its potential to foster consumers’ engagement in brand experiences across several content platforms (cf. Jenkins, 2006). Like other actors in the entertainment industries, labels and artists are increasingly interested in exploring the potentials of transmedia entertainment and how consumers – without payment – contribute to the production and circulation of content across and beyond media platforms. In this paper, we understand online consumer engagement as a form of labor that reconfigures users as digital publics. Since much of this labor is paid for in affect rather than money, such labor has been recognized as a form of free labor (se for example Andrejevic, 2008; Baym 2009; Fuchs, 2014; Fast, 2012). But the One Direction campaign also illustrates the spatial qualities of such campaigns through the diversity of initiatives taken to mobilize consumers to perform different actions and move between different media platforms. While both transmedia marketing and free labor have been subjected to many studies very few studies address the spatiality of both of these phenomena (though see e.g. Stork’s [2014] “transmedia geography” and “performance space” of the Glee franchise). Spatial metaphors offer both a way to represent and visualize the movements of the consumers, as well as to understand how marketing campaigns construct immersive worlds where free labor is promoted and exploited. Using spatial metaphors also enables a methodological approach to transmedia marketing, positioning actions and actors in relation to each other in time and space. We develop the concept of transmediascape to refer to such contexts, a term directly inspired by Appadurai’s (1996: 35) ‘scape’-metaphor, which accentuates the global flows of people, technology, capital, media content, discourses, and ideas. Indeed, we suggest that the music industry purposely constructs digital narratives that spill over from one media platform to another forming transmediascapes. This paper explores how music consumers perform and act within music marketing campaigns, posing the question: How do music consumers navigate across the transmediascapes constituted by marketing campaigns? In this study we follow the music audience movement within the promotional campaign of one internationally known artist, capturing the audiences’ actions and interactions by using the artist’s hashtag and additional hashtags specified by the campaign. A network analysis allows us to map how the audience moves through the campaign in time and space, and how the prepared trails guide the consumer to various media platforms (e.g. from the official website, to Instagram, to Spotify, etc.) It is important to note that the analysis includes the trails that run from online to offline spaces, or from virtual to physical places (e.g. from Facebook to festival site, or vice versa). However, we also seek to understand users engagement in the production of content, and how this content is then recirculates within the campaign. Thus we have chosen a nethnographic approach to the campaign material. The quantitative material guides us to instances where content production occurs, allowing a close study of these specific events. Thus this is an exploratory study, following the case study approach (Yin, 2003), to approach one specific campaign in depth by adopting a multi-method approach rooted in digital methods (se for example Kozinets 2009; Hjort & Sharp 2014). Our preliminary results indicate that consumers within the music industry are mobilized as they assemble consumer affect and promote physical as well as virtual fan movement. The consumer follows a path constructed by the marketing campaign, making consumers migrating between various spaces located in different platforms. We identify audience engagement in these events and how audiences both produce and share content with the campaign as well as within their own networks – thus giving the campaign access to their social media networks and their productions. We also detect instances of resistance, where the audience use the hashtag or distributed material in a way that was not intended by the campaign. Finally, our paper also contributes with methodological development where acknowledging the spatial dimensions of free labor and transmedia marketing provide an analytical approach to media consumers within the contemporary transmediascapes.
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| 7. |
- Baack, Stefan, et al.
(författare)
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Journalism Is Not A One-Way Street : Recognizing multi-directional dynamics
- 2022
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Ingår i: The Institutions Changing Journalism. - London : Taylor & Francis. - 9781000615708 - 9780367690854 ; , s. 103-117
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The field of journalism studies places huge emphasis on researching how journalism (as a profession and institution) is changing due to the influence of “non-journalistic” actors. Paired with a “Western” focus and a tendency of journalism researchers to reproduce the boundary work of professional journalists, this has led to valuable, but one-sided strand of research that considers the influence on journalism, but much less journalism’s influence on others. This chapter explores the multi-directional interdependencies between journalists and peripheral actors while expanding our view toward wider professional and geographical realities. We present three case studies from our empirical work that show how certain journalistic practices and imaginaries about journalism influence the work of peripheral actors from around the world (Chequeado, Mozilla and Open Up). We argue that studying a broader set of dynamics between journalism and others, and thereby better understanding journalism’s outward influence, can lead to a shared and strengthened idea of what journalism is and what role it has in society. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Patrick Ferrucci and Scott A. Eldridge II; individual chapters, the contributors.
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| 9. |
- Cheruiyot, David, 1982-, et al.
(författare)
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Data Journalism Beyond Legacy Media : The case of African and European Civic Technology Organizations
- 2019
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Ingår i: Digital Journalism. - : Routledge. - 2167-0811 .- 2167-082X. ; 7:9, s. 1215-1229
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Research has paid relatively little attention to two aspects that are increasingly important in understanding data journalism as a maturing field: (a) journalism today is increasingly provided by a diverse set of actors both inside and outside of legacy media organizations, and (b) data journalism has become a global phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped within national contexts only. Our article brings both of these aspects together and investigates the roles and practices of peripheral actors in European and African contexts. We engage with research on the role of non-profits and civic technologists in journalism to interrogate further the entanglements between civic technology organizations and data journalism. Following in-depth interviews with 29 practitioners of data-driven non-profits in Europe and Africa, we conclude that practices and roles of these non-profits in relation to journalism are similar, but transcultural and contextual influences shape how they complement or expand data journalism.
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