MySpace as a Marketing Tool (and More)

We've talked a lot over the course of the semester about the extent to which networked culture is being produced from the bottom up or manipulated from the top down, and how this tension in cultural production online will play out. This came up last week in our discussion of YouTube, which is struggling to balance user-generated content with commercial video sometimes used to market movies. We're also used to the idea that social networking sites like MySpace are now routinely used to market bands, singers, TV show, and movies. There's an article about this in today's New York Times entitled A Fictional Video on MySpace Puts a TV Show's Promotion Into Hyperspace. It's about yet another TV show that has created a MySpace site to pump up its viewership. But it adds a new wrinkle, reporting on how the show, "How I Met Your Mother," is actually moving to produce scenes for the show too racy for TV broadcast that will be posted for viewers to see on the show's MySpace site. The show's producer is quoted as saying that "we'd like to get to the point where people will know that if they hear in the naration, 'but I can't tell you that part of the story,' then they'll know they should go looking for it online." So we've got another kind of convergence apparently going on here, one in which content produced for TV and content produced for online consumption are going to become interactive. Stay tuned.