A Rhetorical Analysis of Pandora

What makes a website tick? What makes a user stay on a page? What makes that same user share their web discoveries with one friend or one hundred? According to Henry Jenkins and his colleagues, all these questions can be answered by what they call “stickiness and spreadability.” In an article called “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead,” Jenkins and Co. introduce these two new terms into digital terminology. Stickiness  refers to how long a user will stay on a page and interact with it, while Spreadability refers to how share-able the site and its content are. The presence of both in a site is paramount to its lasting success in such a fast-paced, digital media-hungry culture. The article by Jenkins and his colleagues maps out nine distinctions between stickiness and spreadability, and an analysis of Pandora Internet Radio shows that the site is a case study on the effectiveness of striking a balance between the two to create a complete and engaging user experience.

A sample main page of Pandora – my own

Stickiness

1. “Stickiness seeks to attract and hold the attention of site visitors.”

Pandora is one of few free, reliable music websites that provides a space for customized radio stations of high-quality, unedited versions of songs by a wide range of artists. The site also does not assume that the user will know everything about navigating the site and provides detailed instructions for easy use; the unassuming nature of the site is very attractive and not intimidating to new users.

Detailed, drop-down instructions like these are a crucial part of Pandora’s interface.

Finally, a Twitter Smackdown that Doesn’t Smack of High School – Reblog

Twitter has again proved itself to be a powerful social tool. According to an article on CNN.com, a Twitter campaign forced Juror B37 and Sharlene Martin to abandon their tell-all book project.

Literary agent Sharlene Martin is the same agent who helped OJ Simpson publish his If I Did It about his crimes. Oh, sorry… alleged crimes.  

No matter what you think happened that night between Martin and Zimmerman, a young man is dead. And I cannot think of anything more ridiculous and disrespectful to all involved than trying to capitalize on this tragedy.

On the other hand, I cannot think of anything more inspiring than people learning to take back their voices and using a free platform like Twitter to rise up and encourage people to gather under a noble cause.

“I definitely believe in the power of Twitter. I’m in shock, really, about the whole thing… I’m glad that people didn’t brush it off and just say, ‘Oh, it’s just Twitter, and … nothing will come of this.’ ” – Genie Lauren, leader of the Twitter uprising against Juror B37 and Sharlene Martin.

Sometimes Pandora Gets It Right

Life is notorious for throwing  curve balls. After a pretty stressful night followed by fitful sleep, I woke up this morning feeling drained and more than a little discouraged. I stepped outside into a humid haze and lit a cigarette as I sat down. I put on my headphones and opened the Pandora Internet Radio app on my iPhone and scrolled through the long list of stations I have spent so long fine-tuning but decided on a newer, less polished one: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis Radio.

(via Bobby Owsinski)

Pandora kept offering killer tracks but also songs by artists that I’ve rarely voluntarily listed to. But each one, whether through lyrics or beat, spoke to me this morning. And as someone who hasn’t been to church on Sunday in years, I think I was caught off-guard by how touched I felt. It was – to borrow a rather cliche phrase – a religious experience. The songs on the playlist don’t fit together like puzzle pieces, but I felt each was amazingly right from where I sat. Here it is, the initial random order unaltered.

A Religious Experience on a Stormy Sunday

Music is such an extraordinarily personal thing, but give it a shot.

Get comfortable. Light a cigarette (or don’t — I hear they’re pretty bad for you). See if it speaks to you.

Aca-memes

photo via whattalking.com; text adapted from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well

Pictured here is John Dean, White House Council for Nixon during Watergate. Dean is referenced by Edward Zinsser in his essay On Writing Well as Zinsser describes the problem of fighting clutter in writing: 

Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind. New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech. John Dean holds the record. In just one day of testimony on TV during the Watergate hearings he raised the clutter quotient by 400 percent. The next day everyone in America was saying “at this point in time” instead of “now.”

The meme is designed to be attention-grabbing. Dean’s pensive pose is what I think readers will notice first. He is seated in front of a microphone and appears to be deep in thought about what he is going to say. I thought it was an interesting to juxtapose the image and its subject matter against the claims leveled against him by Zinsser of causing an epidemic of clutter.

Zinsser’s text is so important to spread because wordy writing is a turn off for most readers. With the fast-paced modern age upon us, people want things quick yet accurate.

Zinsser also says clutter “blunts the painful edge of truth,” which is particularly poignant considering Dean’s role in the Watergate scandal.

I doubt this will be a wildly popular meme, but its message is no less important.

Torn Apart Again But in a Good Way – Reblog

“…Unlike sadness in daily life, sadness experienced through art actually feels pleasant, possibly because [it] does not pose an actual threat to our safety. This could help people to deal with their negative emotions in daily life.”

ScienceDaily reported on a study performed by Japanese scientists who discovered “sad music might actually evoke positive emotions.”

Music is a way to live vicariously through someone else for three minutes. If a sad song is done well, the music and lyrics work together to take the listener on a voyage through the loss, heartbreak, anger, misery that they’ve accumulated in their own life. Also, like poetry, songs often carry a “what can it mean?” connotation. With music, the listener can dictate their own level of involvement. While it’s true there are musicians who will come right out and say what the meaning or inspiration of a song was, the sad songs that affect me most are the ones I interpret myself, the ones I get caught up in. I’ll get a little choked up and revel – just for a little while – in some memories I’ve tried to forget. But as the song ends and the next begins, I admit I do feel some relief. The benefits of such an exercise are apparent:

“Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotion such as sadness. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion.”

I want to somehow incorporate investigating this emotional attachment into my future career. I want to write articles on musicians and ask them about the infinite, perfect emotional storm created in a finite window.