Picked this up as part of my reading of things related to fandom and fan studies. Of the books I've read recently on the subject, I feel like this one was the most well-written and is a great overview from someone who has become known as one of the foremost scholars in this area. It focused more on media consumption and integration than fandom activity, I felt, but it still provided a good overview of how media creators are using new methods to engage with their audiences and how audiences are using that engagement to influence media. Definitely worth a read if this is a topic of interest. ( )

Is this where it all started, what we have now. A quote from this book:

In the spring of 2004, a short video, edited together out of footage from newscasts and Donald Trump’s hit TV show, The Apprentice (2004), was circulating across the Internet. Framed as a mock preview for The Apprentice, the narrator explains, “George W. Bush is assigned the task of being president. He drives the economy into the ground, uses lies to justify war, spends way over budget, and almost gets away with it until the Donald finds out.” The video cuts to a boardroom, where Trump is demanding to know “who chose this stupid concept” and then firing Dubya. Trump’s disapproving look is crosscut with Bush shaking his head in disbelief and then disappointment. Then came the announcer: “Unfortunately, ‘The Donald’ can’t fire Bush for us. But we can do it ourselves. Join us at True Majority Action. We’ll fire Bush together, and have some fun along the way.”

Who would have imagined that Donald Trump could emerge as a populist spokesman, or that sympathetic images of corporate control could fuel a movement to reclaim democracy? A curious mix of cynicism and optimism, the video made Democrats laugh at the current administration and then rally to transform it.

True Majority was founded by Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream). Its goals were to increase voter participation in the 2004 election and to rally support behind a progressive agenda. According to its Web site (www.truemajority.org), the group has attracted more than 300,000 supporters, who receive regular alerts and participate in letterwriting campaigns.

Interviewed a few weeks before the election, Garrett LoPorto, a senior creative consultant for True Majority, said that the core of viral marketing is getting the right idea into the right hands at the right time. This video generated a higher than average response rate, he argues, both because it expressed a widespread desire to end a failed administration and because The Apprentice provided a perfect metaphor to bring that decision closer to home: “We aren’t here talking about this grand cause of appointing someone as the leader of the free world. We’re just trying to get some guy who screwed up fired. It’s that simple.” Their goal was to get these ideas into the broadest possible circulation. To do that, they sought to create images that are vivid, memorable, and evocative. And most important, the content had to be consistent with what people more or less already believed about the world. Locating people who share your beliefs is easy, LoPorto says, because we tend to seek out like-minded communities on the Web. Each person who passed along the video reaffirmed his or her commitment to those beliefs and also moved one step closer toward political action. A certain percentage of the recipients followed the link back to the True Majority site and expanded its core mailing list. Repeat this process enough times with enough people, he argued, and you can build a movement and start to “nudge” the prevailing structure of beliefs in your direction. At least that’s the theory. The real challenge is to get those ideas back into mainstream media, where they will reach people who do not already share your commitments. As LoPorto acknowledged, “All we needed to do is to get NBC to sue us. If they would sue us over this, this thing would go global and everyone will know about it. That was our secondary hope. . . . NBC was too smart for that—they recognize it was a parody and didn’t bite.”

Hoping to make politics more playful, the True Majority home page offered visitors not only the “Trump Fires Bush” video, but also a game where you could spank Dubya’s bare bottom, a video where “Ben the Ice Cream Man” reduces the federal budget to stacks of Oreo cookies and shows how shuffling just a few cookies can allow us to take care of a range of pressing problems, and other examples of what the group calls “serious fun.”

Is this where it all started, what we have now. A quote from this book:

In the spring of 2004, a short video, edited together out of footage from newscasts and Donald Trump’s hit TV show, The Apprentice (2004), was circulating across the Internet. Framed as a mock preview for The Apprentice, the narrator explains, “George W. Bush is assigned the task of being president. He drives the economy into the ground, uses lies to justify war, spends way over budget, and almost gets away with it until the Donald finds out.” The video cuts to a boardroom, where Trump is demanding to know “who chose this stupid concept” and then firing Dubya. Trump’s disapproving look is crosscut with Bush shaking his head in disbelief and then disappointment. Then came the announcer: “Unfortunately, ‘The Donald’ can’t fire Bush for us. But we can do it ourselves. Join us at True Majority Action. We’ll fire Bush together, and have some fun along the way.”

Who would have imagined that Donald Trump could emerge as a populist spokesman, or that sympathetic images of corporate control could fuel a movement to reclaim democracy? A curious mix of cynicism and optimism, the video made Democrats laugh at the current administration and then rally to transform it.

True Majority was founded by Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream). Its goals were to increase voter participation in the 2004 election and to rally support behind a progressive agenda. According to its Web site (www.truemajority.org), the group has attracted more than 300,000 supporters, who receive regular alerts and participate in letterwriting campaigns.

Interviewed a few weeks before the election, Garrett LoPorto, a senior creative consultant for True Majority, said that the core of viral marketing is getting the right idea into the right hands at the right time. This video generated a higher than average response rate, he argues, both because it expressed a widespread desire to end a failed administration and because The Apprentice provided a perfect metaphor to bring that decision closer to home: “We aren’t here talking about this grand cause of appointing someone as the leader of the free world. We’re just trying to get some guy who screwed up fired. It’s that simple.” Their goal was to get these ideas into the broadest possible circulation. To do that, they sought to create images that are vivid, memorable, and evocative. And most important, the content had to be consistent with what people more or less already believed about the world. Locating people who share your beliefs is easy, LoPorto says, because we tend to seek out like-minded communities on the Web. Each person who passed along the video reaffirmed his or her commitment to those beliefs and also moved one step closer toward political action. A certain percentage of the recipients followed the link back to the True Majority site and expanded its core mailing list. Repeat this process enough times with enough people, he argued, and you can build a movement and start to “nudge” the prevailing structure of beliefs in your direction. At least that’s the theory. The real challenge is to get those ideas back into mainstream media, where they will reach people who do not already share your commitments. As LoPorto acknowledged, “All we needed to do is to get NBC to sue us. If they would sue us over this, this thing would go global and everyone will know about it. That was our secondary hope. . . . NBC was too smart for that—they recognize it was a parody and didn’t bite.”

Hoping to make politics more playful, the True Majority home page offered visitors not only the “Trump Fires Bush” video, but also a game where you could spank Dubya’s bare bottom, a video where “Ben the Ice Cream Man” reduces the federal budget to stacks of Oreo cookies and shows how shuffling just a few cookies can allow us to take care of a range of pressing problems, and other examples of what the group calls “serious fun.”

Is this where it all started, what we have now. A quote from this book:

In the spring of 2004, a short video, edited together out of footage from newscasts and Donald Trump’s hit TV show, The Apprentice (2004), was circulating across the Internet. Framed as a mock preview for The Apprentice, the narrator explains, “George W. Bush is assigned the task of being president. He drives the economy into the ground, uses lies to justify war, spends way over budget, and almost gets away with it until the Donald finds out.” The video cuts to a boardroom, where Trump is demanding to know “who chose this stupid concept” and then firing Dubya. Trump’s disapproving look is crosscut with Bush shaking his head in disbelief and then disappointment. Then came the announcer: “Unfortunately, ‘The Donald’ can’t fire Bush for us. But we can do it ourselves. Join us at True Majority Action. We’ll fire Bush together, and have some fun along the way.”

Who would have imagined that Donald Trump could emerge as a populist spokesman, or that sympathetic images of corporate control could fuel a movement to reclaim democracy? A curious mix of cynicism and optimism, the video made Democrats laugh at the current administration and then rally to transform it.

True Majority was founded by Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream). Its goals were to increase voter participation in the 2004 election and to rally support behind a progressive agenda. According to its Web site (www.truemajority.org), the group has attracted more than 300,000 supporters, who receive regular alerts and participate in letterwriting campaigns.

Interviewed a few weeks before the election, Garrett LoPorto, a senior creative consultant for True Majority, said that the core of viral marketing is getting the right idea into the right hands at the right time. This video generated a higher than average response rate, he argues, both because it expressed a widespread desire to end a failed administration and because The Apprentice provided a perfect metaphor to bring that decision closer to home: “We aren’t here talking about this grand cause of appointing someone as the leader of the free world. We’re just trying to get some guy who screwed up fired. It’s that simple.” Their goal was to get these ideas into the broadest possible circulation. To do that, they sought to create images that are vivid, memorable, and evocative. And most important, the content had to be consistent with what people more or less already believed about the world. Locating people who share your beliefs is easy, LoPorto says, because we tend to seek out like-minded communities on the Web. Each person who passed along the video reaffirmed his or her commitment to those beliefs and also moved one step closer toward political action. A certain percentage of the recipients followed the link back to the True Majority site and expanded its core mailing list. Repeat this process enough times with enough people, he argued, and you can build a movement and start to “nudge” the prevailing structure of beliefs in your direction. At least that’s the theory. The real challenge is to get those ideas back into mainstream media, where they will reach people who do not already share your commitments. As LoPorto acknowledged, “All we needed to do is to get NBC to sue us. If they would sue us over this, this thing would go global and everyone will know about it. That was our secondary hope. . . . NBC was too smart for that—they recognize it was a parody and didn’t bite.”

Hoping to make politics more playful, the True Majority home page offered visitors not only the “Trump Fires Bush” video, but also a game where you could spank Dubya’s bare bottom, a video where “Ben the Ice Cream Man” reduces the federal budget to stacks of Oreo cookies and shows how shuffling just a few cookies can allow us to take care of a range of pressing problems, and other examples of what the group calls “serious fun.”

Explores the ways audiences become creators in a new media setting, looking at examples of fan culture transformations from film, television, and books.