In his final Poptimist column, Tom Ewing is predictably perceptive and articulate about what he refers to as the nanoculture:

“But what gets made, and who controls it? In a series of posts several years ago on ‘spreadable media,’ the academic Henry Jenkins put his finger on the great faultline in nanoculture— its equivalent of ‘major label vs. indie,’ except far more fundamental. Jenkins’ posts were intended to destroy the concept of ‘virals’— criticizing the idea for casting people as unthinking hosts for information and giving all the power to the media owner. Instead, he proposed, the same marketers and creators who cared about virals should start thinking about ‘spreadable’ media, putting the emphasis on the people who passed it around, changing it and deepening it in the process.

Of course the idea of ‘viral’ was not so easy to shift, because the concept— far from being wrong— tallies precisely with the interests of a lot of players in the online ecosystem. Jenkins’ opposition to viral and spreadable content is at root an opposition to two kinds of copying: replication and imitation. Replication is perfect— the content is preserved unaltered. Imitation is imperfect— the content changes as it spreads. On the side of replication are advertisers looking for a spot that will ‘go viral,’ Facebook and its ‘frictionless sharing,’ Apple and its beautifully sealed interfaces, and most content owners. On the side of imitation are fan communities, wikis, and the great meme-hives of the web like 4chan and Reddit. Most of the big social-media services have feet in both camps. Twitter, for instance, birthed the hashtag, a beautifully imitative conceit— but it also changed its protocol on retweets to make them pure replicas of other people’s content, cutting off one avenue for cultural mutation.”