A British baby named Charlie bites his older brother’s finger. A youngster named David wigs out in the car after a trip to the dentist. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney writes off 47 percent of the voting public “as people who take no responsibility for their livelihoods and who think they are entitled to government handouts.”
And this past fall, a high school student posts a selfie on Twitter also showing his pregnant teacher suffering labor pains behind him.
The only thing that links these very different moments in modern history: They all went viral.
According to University of Washington professor Karine Nahon and doctoral student Jeff Hemsley, virality is “a social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a specific information item, over a short period of time, within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own (social) networks to different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number of people who are exposed to the message.”
Or more simply put: It’s when people share something and it blows up crazy big online.
For their new book, Going Viral, Nahon and Hemsley explore this craziness, “where a tweet can be instantly retweeted and read by millions around the world in minutes, where a video forwarded to friends can destroy a political career in hours and where an unknown man or woman can become an international celebrity overnight. Virality: individuals create it, governments fear it, companies would die for it.”
In the brief interview below, Nahon shares a bit about the viral process and its impact on our culture and the people involved with the viral content. She also explains how “the picture of society at a certain moment in time” is more and more being shaped simply by what we like, retweet and share.
Q: What inspired you both to dive into this topic and write the book?
A: We started to work on it in 2008 at the time of the elections in the U.S. We noticed that social media and viral information was impacting the election system very strongly. … If you recall the 2008 election, the first time Obama was elected … we had interesting kinds of viral information such as Sarah Silverman and the Schlep video and Will.i.am’s song. That was really the first time we thought, ‘Oh, there’s something here.’ …
Three hundred years ago, the only information that came out was what traveled through the main gatekeepers, the institutional gatekeepers. So if you think about any information you remember learning about from 300 years ago, you would probably answer wars, academics, things that are really, really important in the sense that they changed history. Now we have The Cat That Plays the Piano [one example] and the Gangnam Style dance. Suddenly it’s not only about the institutional gatekeepers, but what society kind of votes on and decides to share and make meaningful in various ways. For me, virality is the picture of society at a certain moment in time.
Q: Why do some things go viral when so much else does not?
A: In order for something to become viral, the information needs to be social. We know that factors like humor, quality of content, emotional affect, resonance and interest will obviously help your information go viral, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee it will happen. The context also needs to be present – like the right timing. There are so many factors that must combine and only when they all go together just right do we get full virality.
Q: What’s especially interesting to you about the viral process?
A: What’s interesting about virality is that at a certain point it becomes uncontrollable. … It is the moment information really spreads – the moment it travels so fast to so many nodes and so many networks it is hard to keep track of them all. The uncontrollability comes from the fact that its impact on every person who is sharing it is different. They will get it and consider it with their own interpretation.
So as information travels around the world in minutes, in seconds, millions and sometimes billions of people will see the same thing. But they will all interpret it at least slightly differently from what the original information source intended it to be.
Q: How did something go viral prior to the social media age?
A: Virality is not something new. It happened in the past. I’ll give you an example from Israel: the Yom Kippur War. It was in 1973. One important thing about that war is that it began on a date people fasted in Israel. There was no radio, no television, no newspapers, nothing. People didn’t drive, so there were also no cars.
So imagine a war happening exactly on a day when everything is shut down. The way information about it spread was by people basically running from one synagogue to another and passing along the news and telling others they need to go out and fight. That is how information spread in an hour in all of Israel. That’s virality.
Q: One viral phenomenon you feature in the book is the infamous 2011 images of the police officer at the University of California, Davis, pepper-spraying student protesters. What played a part in that photo’s virality?
A: If you look at the pictures of John Pike spraying the students, you notice he’s surrounded by around 100 people taking photos and videos from different angles. So there are 100 kinds of nodes, small gatekeepers, distributing this data from one point, all at once. The moment was also very important, its resonance with people. What compels people to share information with others is partially if it resonates with them.
When I see a policeman pepper-spraying students who are sitting down, their hands closed, looking down, not doing anything to really provoke it, it immediately evokes in my head a sense of a strong institution abusing its power against the weak. It evokes so much emotion. When you see the picture, it’s like, ‘What’s going on? Something needs to be done about that.’ …
When you have 100 million people tweeting, sharing information, joking and posting memes about [Pike], that creates a lot of pressure on UC Davis and other people who were involved. That pressure was part of the reaction we saw — he was fired, his boss was fired, they got into an agreement in court with the students who were there and the regulations were changed about how university police officers handle protests. So there were a lot of changes that occurred because of that virality and I don’t think if there wasn’t any mass and fast reaction the impact would have been the same.
Q: In that respect, what sort of impact does virality tend to have on the content creators or stars?
A: Virality has the power to make you very famous. Think about Psy and Gangnam Style. It can also destroy you. Think about the ‘Romney 47%’ video, which had a big impact on the election. Or think about [former CIA director David Petraeus]. How many days did it take until he resigned [over a scandal involving an extramarital affair]? Virality has power. Whether it’s positive or negative, it’s very hard to say. History will judge that. But it has a lot of power, that’s for sure.
Story by Dan Reimold, USA Today, January 14, 2014