Allie Wisniewski Journal #5

According to the article by Jenkins, Ford, and Green, “spreadability” refers to “the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community's motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes.” While I do not always immediately consider the potential for spreadability in my every day composing, it has been, in the past, a major factor in certain contexts and rhetorical situations. 

In the fall semester of my freshman year, I wrote for an online, college student-run publication called Spoon University. The website essentially revolved around Buzzfeed-style click bait articles—all related to food. The main goal for each article was collecting as many Facebook shares, Pinterest posts, etc. as possible, in order to increase traffic for the site and entice readers to view other articles that could be related. We were constantly reminded to choose topics that could be relatable for either a specific or extremely broad audience, in order to appeal to as many readers as possible and increase the potential for spreadability. We brainstormed—thinking of subjects and issues that we ourselves, as college students, would want to click on and read if we were to come upon it while scrolling or simply surfing the web. The more a reader resonated with a particular article, the more likely they were to share it to their own timeline, successively reaching more and more viewers as articles graced the news feeds of friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. We were told to use tags on each post—essentially generating buzz words that would allow each article to be more easily stumbled upon if someone were to search a related topic. 

There are multiple online techniques that are frequently used to increase the spreadability of web content, including CSS feed, HTML, and hyperlinks, to name a few. Links are provided to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even Google Plus (Do people actually use that?), for the sole purpose of encouraging the viewer to make our job easier by sharing the article on all of their preferred social media platforms, increasing the accessibility of the content to a broader audience. Spreadability has become increasingly simple with the rise to prominence of social media.