Viral is a term that we’re all familiar with as we have all seen those viral videos on Youtube, the laughing babies and the endless amounts of cat videos. But what makes these videos go viral while others do not? Rushkoff compares a media virus to a biological virus where its main characteristic is its ‘stickiness’. Like a virus, it creates a shell to protect its genetic code, it uses a ‘protein shell’ that could be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, visual image, clothing style or a pop hero – the main point is that it catches our attention by drawing on popular culture and stick on where it is noticed (Rushkoff 1996:10). Here’s an example of a viral video that reached insane virality and gave this girl instant ‘Youtube Fame’:
If we analyse this from Munster and Rushkoff’s theories we can see why this works. Firstly it has “stickiness”, it draws on a musical riff and a simple idea that is both funny and unpredictable. Bilton (2010) suggests three characteristics in networked things that go viral: speed of spread, quantity of views or users accessing something being spread, and the unpredictability of what will spread.
The spread of viral media simply could not happen on one platform, it relies on the interconnectivity of several platforms to create Perretti’s (2005) multitutdinous network that is parallel to that of a biological virus. It is made possible by what he calls the ‘Bored at Work Network’, involving people who make things go viral by forwarding, blogging, messaging, chatting and basically sharing viral media.
The affect of viral videos aren’t isolated to the videos themselves. There is a huge potential for the viral video to create other forms of virality through its contagious nature. Take for example PSY’s ‘Gangnam style’ that like Munster says, ‘erupt out of nowhere, gather momentum and behave like the dynamics of nonlinear systems’. The ‘Gangnam style’ phenomenon gave birth to a plethora of other imitation videos, and parodies, some of which went viral.
Increasingly viral videos are emerging because of this multitudinous network. Whereas previously perhaps the main platform would be Youtube, and unarguably it still is, the inundation of social media apps such as Vine, Instagram and even Snapchat have escalated the opportunities for virality. As Munster said what becomes crucial for contagion is not what is spreading but the movement between networks. “Going viral comes to signal a condition in which the biological, the communicative, and the affective all pass between one another” (Munster).
I’ll end today’s post with a viral video on Vine that my friend tagged me on Facebook (clearly a participant of Peretti’s ‘Bored at Work Network’) that uses a current pop song as its ‘stickiness’. Starting off as a Vine, to being reproduced onto Youtube into other forms, and shared thousands of times on Facebook, Twitter #wigglewigglewiggle and so forth. Enjoy
References
Munster, Anna (2013) ‘Going Viral: Contagion as Networked Affect, Networked Refrain’ in An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 99-123
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