Jack Quinn - Journal #5

Spreadability is something that I both do and do not consider while writing. On one hand, there is absolutely a part of me thinking how a piece or a paragraph might be interpreted by someone other than myself. I will be writing and read back the information as if I was someone else. During this part of the editing process I make many revisions and alternations to sections that at first did not seem at all problematic. Afterwards I will be more comfortable in sharing the piece with others and publishing it online. For example, for a recent assignment we were tasked with was writing a story. My first draft was very much a story written for me in the sense that it was something I would thoroughly enjoy. Upon rereading this story, I realized some parts to be potentially inaccessible to others and made some changes in hopes of remedying this.

            On the other hand, the question of spreadability can be a harmful prospect in my mind.  When writers alter their work to appeal to a wider audience it can sometimes weaken or completely dismantle the effectiveness of the writing. With this in mind I try to keep my initial message and goal in mind when re-editing one of my essays or articles. Going back to the example of the story I wrote recently, upon a third read through I attempted to ensure that I still enjoyed the story myself. After finding it to be a bit weaker I again went through and performed several edits.

            In my opinion spreadability is a question of balance. Writing pieces that no one will enjoy or be able to share will hurt the power of the piece and ensure that it has no readers. However, editing simply to please can harm the integrity of a work and make it ultimately pointless. Writers should strive to achieve a balance between these two. With this being said I am not at all proficient at achieving this balance, with many of my compositions favoring one side or the other. I think this is an issue many writers struggle with. Spreadability is an important thing to consider.

Journal 5 - Van Williamson

I think when I’m writing something, I always have the audience in mind before I start so that I can put myself in the right mindset. Usually when I do an assignment that involves writing (and maybe not a lot of formality), I try to inject something witty or thought-provoking for my own entertainment. I don’t really consider the possibility of what I write being spread via digital media, but there is a part of me that hopes someone will be amused by what I have to say. I also have several personal notebooks, where I jot down thoughts, jokes, and little images in my head. The other day a friend of mine looked through one of them and said that I should be careful with them. I was a little perplexed, until he pointed at my doodles, which resemble the illustrations in the children’s book from The Babadook. He told me they could easily become my manifesto if I ever went insane. I was shocked when he told me this. Besides the fact that he was implying something pretty messed up, I had never considered the idea that my writing could be spread that way. 

There’s a lot of content on the internet that has nothing to do with its creator, because it gets thrown into one of the many aggregators online. But there are also texts that are inextricably linked to their author, because it has something that makes it uniquely theirs. The most common reason for this would be because they became famous, drawing in an audience with their actions and personality. A good example of this is Kurt Cobain, whose fan base leaves no stone unturned when trying to learn about the Nirvana singer. The HBO documentary about him, Montage of Heck, digs so deep into his life that it almost begins to teeter on the edge of voyeurism. I’m sure he expected some of his everyday composing to gain importance once he became the voice of a generation, but there are plenty of tapes and home videos of him that don’t reveal much of anything about him. His spreadability might have become too great for his ghost to live up to, and yet for some reason I feel like I would want the exact same thing.

Journal 5 Talia Colarusso

I never really though much about the spreadability of my writing until I was in college. In high school sure I had twitter and Facebook, but that was about as far as my writing ever spread. I would always put though into my tweets though, twitter was a very popular social media outlet in my high school and news spread on twitter usually fast than it did in school. Once I came into college I started working with the art and literature magazine at my previous school TCC. I was an editor so my job was usually to pick what pieces of work I though would work the best for the magazine and what pieces would appeal to the largest audience. If I didn’t take this into consideration and just picked any random pieces I thought were interesting the magazine might have failed due to its unpopulatirty. “Our message is simple and direct: if it doesn't spread, it's dead. “I think that’s a great quote from the Jenkins article, it’s harsh yes but it is true. Coming into my third year of college I started blogging for the clothing store I work at. I now more than ever realized just how important spreadbilty truly is to writing. Whenever I don’t post much on the blog very often I notice a decline in store traffic. Whenever I do happen to be blogging a lot I notice an increase in traffic to the website and the store. It is not always easy to continuously blog just about the items in the store so I recently started blogging more about events happening in the Gaines street area, or different places we will be holding our pop us shops. So yes in the past few years it has come to my attention just how important the spreadbility of ones work truly is. Not that doesn’t mean I like how important it is. I have realized since I started writing in a more public eye just how scrutinized I feel about my work, say if a blog post doesn’t get quite as many views as I would like or if a piece I selected for the magazine wasn’t approved by the rest of the staff. I also notice my writing takes on a different voice when I am blogging for the store than if I was writing for myself. Having to worry about the spreadbilty of your work is defiantly an added pressure and will make you doubt yourself as a writer at times, but if you can get through that, it is a major key to success in writing.

Violet Soliz JR #5

When I think of social media, I think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. All of these platforms, with the exception of Instagram, have the ability to share posts publicly. Twitter you can "retweet", Tumblr you can "reblog", and Facebook you can "share post". All of these platforms also have the ability for users to "like" and "favorite". "Like" and "favorite" go hand in hand with sharing posts, or "spreadability". There is no doubt that users of these platforms craft their posts in a way that they know it will receive many "notes", "likes", and "favorites". The higher the number of these, the higher the chance for it to be shared among its users, spreadability. When posts go viral, its because it has been easily spread. Viral posts are either funny, sad, or offer insight that social media users have felt are worthy of sharing, or spreading, to their "followers", "friends", etc. 

Personally, I do account for spreadability when I am making a funny or insightful tweet, part of this may be due to ego, but I am no people pleaser when it comes to this. I make posts on social media that are relevant to me and that I can connect to. If other people agree then great, but I do not post just so it can be spread among users and go viral. Those people definitely exist, as exemplified by parody Twitters, Facebook fan pages, etc., but I do not consider myself one of them. I am a true lover of content over popularity. If I tried to please everyone I would not be pleasing myself because I would not be true to who I am. I enjoy insightful posts that are relevant/political/spiritual because I feel that they help me become a more educated, happier, etc. person in society. I try to contribute to these posts, and yes I try to word them in a way that will grab the attention of others, but I do not try to frame them so that they purposely go viral.

Spreadability is very important, but it's not the only important thing in my everyday composing via social media.

#5

When asked “do you think about the potential for spreadability in your everyday composing, and if so, how?” the answer is an obvious yes.  In fact, I would argue that the only writing not done with spreadability in mind would be writing in a diary or some other form that is meant for the author’s eyes only.  In today’s culture, the vast majority of writing is done on platforms who’s primary function is to spread the word.  On twitter, all it takes is one simple click and your text is communicated to anyone who is a member of twitter.  The hashtag in itself is a tool of spreadability, as it connects any tweets of the same subject.  Blogs are the same- the author contructs a post in hopes that their followers will read the content and share it to their own audience- and so on and so on.  Even when I consider writing that I have to do, not writing that I choose to do, nearly every platform is used with spreadability in mind.  Take this very journal refelction for instance.  I When I am done with this, I am going to post it on a blog.  Because I am posting to a blog, I am not including personal information that I would not want an audience of somewhat-strangers to read.  Because I am writing this paragraph knowing it will be posted to a blog, I am writing this with spreadability in mind.  Furhtermore, most people these days get pretty excited when a tweet gets a good number of retweets, an instagram gets a good number of likes, or a facebook status gets a lot of likes.  For many, “likes” are a way of measuring success.  And each like is a measure of spreadability.  The term “communication” in itself implies spreadibility. 

Max Dietz J5

            I, personally, do not like to think about the spreadability of my work. It detracts too much from the creative flow and severely negatively impacts my final product. I am speaking from experience and I have actually thought a lot about this before this assignment. Last year, I worked for a clickbait, Buzzfeed-esque, online magazine called College Magazine (CM). I started out as a writer and then became an editor. The first two articles I wrote for the magazine were good; I enjoyed writing them and people enjoyed reading them. They only got a few hundred shares, so nowhere near viral, but still respectable. After that, my senior editor told me to focus more on the spreadability. I did what I was told and my final products were horrible (to my standards). I loathed writing them and apparently readers did not like them either because they only got, at most, a few dozen shares. Some barely broke double digits. A few months later I was promoted to editor with the contingency that I could have more freedom over what I wrote (editors had to write biweekly for this magazine as well as manage a team of writers). My final products started to improve. I did a few interviews, which I enjoyed tremendously, but did not get many shares (I guess our readers do not like interviews) and I tried to tackle some political journalism, but my ideas were always shot down. I quit the magazine at the end of last school year. Before I left, though, my very first article and one of my interviews were published in CM’s article compilation, Left Swipes & Love: A Millennial's Guide to Hookups, Dating and Tinder (https://www.amazon.com/Left-Swipes-Love-Millennials-Hookups-ebook/dp/B01BN772JA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476362867&sr=1-1&keywords=love+and+left+swipes+college+magazine).

Those are actually the first two articles in the book. Download a sample and check them out. After my ordeal at CM I learnt that I had to write for myself and forget about spreadability. If I enjoy the writing process, the reader will too. I think they can subconsciously tell how the author is feeling. This is not to say I do not care about the audience of a piece, no, that is very important. I just don’t give a damn if the reader wants to click the share button.

Journal #5 Chelsi Chang

My initial answer to this question was no. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do want some level of spreadability in my posts. When I tweet something funny on Twitter, I want it to be shared or liked. I want people to engage in my posts, to respond to me, to share whatever I posted with their friends. In some ways, these things make us feel validated. I also write for a student publication and they make sure that our stories are shared with others. They ask us to share our stories on a minimum of three social media platforms to ensure that as many eyeballs are seeing our stories, and subsequently, their website as possible. For my online presence, I am way more aware of who is engaging with my posts and possibly retweeting or sharing what I wrote.

However when I write in a journal, I am not at all concerned about whether or not my posts have potential for spreadability. In fact most times the things I write on a physical medium never see the light of day. They are usually ways for me to simply an avenue for me to let out my innermost thoughts and emotions. I am usually also more thoughtful when I put pen to paper. Every word is well thought out before I put it on paper.

I believe my feelings have a lot to do with the medium itself. For some reason, I view physical writing as more serious and important than writing on a computer. Some of it, I believe, comes from the very idea of spreadability. Many times on social media we try to maintain a certain presence whether it be witty, self-deprecating, silly, or philosophical. We put on a show for people online and hope they will retweet or share it so others too can view us through very highly curated lenses. Social media also encourages us spreadbility by placing retweet, share, or like buttons directly under our content. Our ideas online are meant to be shared with everyone, even people we may not know.