Cyber-cascades and Superdistribution
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Historically, media outlets manufactured popularity by pushing content on consumers by taking advantage of their lock on power law. Now there are many fast-changing dynamics that constantly create new opportunities. As we have seen with YouTube and Twitter, new platforms create new stars, usually those who are first on the scene. Industry volatility and lower competitive barriers mean that new players can establish a beachhead on a new platform and leave incumbents behind. Yet today, more than ever, independent media has the chance to break through since dominant companies no longer have this advantage. If independent media can strategically innovate, they can leverage their existing audience to become first movers of new technologies and platforms that will inevitably emerge.
Social Cascades on Steroids
The web’s viral dynamics cannot be fully understood without considering social cascades, which describe how information spreads socially. They reinforce or oppose conventional thinking depending on their source.
Cass Sunstein, head of President Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, described this phenomenon in Republic.com 2.0. He explained that cascades either lead people to conform in order to protect their reputation, or form an opinion based only on others’ opinions instead of their own judgment. In either case, the “behavior of the first few people can, in theory, produce similar behavior from countless followers.”
“One freak-out that is just getting started is superdistribution,” Clay Shirky notes, which is an approach to distributing digital products free of physical distribution limits that amplifies the effects of social cascades. Since information sharing no longer has transactional costs and has risen to warp speeds, the social cascades that have always existed are now on steroids—which Sunstein called “cyber-cascades.” As a result, online social networks simultaneously ratchet up both amplification and filtering. Shirky says, “Superdistribution’s remarkable property is that content can spread widely without being sent to people who don’t care about it.”
People have been talking about viral spread for a long time, but superdistribution takes it beyond an important threshold: A single story can now hurdle the readership of its original publication. For instance, Shirky explains that an article in the Boston Globe about the priest abuse scandal had a bigger distribution than the entire nominal circulation of the newspaper. “It used to be that an article was a subset of a newspaper, but that’s not the case anymore,” he notes.
Superdistribution is the new “mainstream”
Superdistribution, which underpins mainstream media’s new distribution system, has potential value to create social good. Sunstein described old mainstream media as a “solidarity product” that was valuable in generating a widely shared experience. “General-interest intermediaries [such as newspapers or TV], if they are operating properly,” he claimed, “give many people, all at once, a clear sense of social problems and tasks.” The scale of their reach can help ease social interactions and promote shared hopes, goals and concerns.
Independent media has been valuable in creating alternative influences to the shared mainstream experience. A popular metaphor in progressive circles is the “echo chamber,” in which a message pushes the larger public or the mainstream media to acknowledge, respond, and give airtime to progressive ideas because it is repeated many times. If done well, the message within the echo chamber can become the accepted meme, impact political dynamics, shift public opinion and change public policy. If the messages in the echo chamber are not done well, they simply remain insular and preach to the choir.
Today, alternative and mainstream conversations are less clearly differentiated. Since superdistribution’s mega-hits can far surpass a single publication’s circulation, the story itself drives shared experiences more than its source. In many ways, superdistribution determines the new structure of mainstream media, and it is much more unpredictable.
The major implication of superdistribution is that independent media needs to adjust how it promotes shared conversations that challenge convention. Instead of fighting for mainstream media’s attention, independent media organizations have greater opportunity than ever before to bypass them altogether, if they focus on understanding their customers and mastering new social media. In fact, the new target of independent media might be more ephemeral: The crowd. While the problem of oversimplifying complex issues is nothing new, cyber-cascades and superdistribution feed a decentralized populism that blunts nuanced thinking more than old centralized mainstream media ever did.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
[...] Cyber-cascades and superdistribution may lead journalists to counterintuitive reporting practices. Journalism organizations that make news more entertaining and enjoyable will have much farther reach. According to a 2008 Pew Research Center survey, “Enjoyment of the news has consistently been associated with higher levels of both news interest and news consumption.” In fact, the report claims that no single attitude is more important. [...]