Journal 5 Carly Gillingham

For my own everyday composing, spread ability is actually very important. I co-run a magazine at FSU called Burning Tree Magazine, and assist in doing the marketing for it. When we post stories to our social media, a number of factors come into play for stickiness and spreadability. Jenkins et al. define spreadability as “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.” They define stickiness, on the other hand, as the broad “need to create content that attracts audience attention and engagement.” In short, therefore, spreadability relies on social connections and outside resources, while stickiness relies on attractiveness and audience appeal.

For my magazine, when we post articles on social media, we consider what resources we can consult for spreadability. On Facebook and Twitter, we can utilize hashtags or tagging users if the given topic is something that has been recently trending or if it is about a person of some importance. For instance, we have written an article about Donald Trump in the past, in which we tagged Trump’s twitter on the tweet of the article. Another resource that we often consult is pursuing other organizations on campus that may be able to promote our article. For instance, we have written movie reviews that were subsequently promoted by the Student Life Cinema; we have also written articles about being transgender that we submitted for promotion by the Pride Student Union. Having these connections is vital in marketing our articles. We do not choose to use Facebook’s promotion, which you have to pay for, but that is another possible way to promote everyday writing.

Stickiness, as a part of spreadability, is also important for the magazine. We like to make our articles have “clickable” titles. So, we make sure the title is short and not cut off by the link preview. We also want to make it intriguing.

For my own personal writing outside of the magazine, I do not focus on spreadability so much as stickiness. When I post on Instagram, I want to get likes, so I make it “sticky.” But I do not necessarily want it to spread to a wider audience. The only time I am focused on spreading to a wider audience is when I share magazine articles.