Abstract
Virality is not new according to Nahon and Hemsley, pointing to the rapid spread of protest movements in previous times, but the velocity, extent and frequency of virality has increased in recent years, particularly with the emergence of social media where content can be hosted and shared among interlocking acquaintance groups. ‘Virality’ is when people forward or share information with friends in their networks and where the message subsequently spreads rapidly beyond these networks to distant others so that a large number of people are exposed to it. While the frequency of going viral has increased, the term demarcates a significant difference from the norm. A few pieces of information get shared among tens, sometimes hundreds of millions, even billions of people, while the majority, if not ignored, are rarely shared. The authors’ emphasis on social media does not mean that they ignore the importance of the relationship between old and new media. Their first example of contemporary virality, for example, is Susan Boyle, the Scottish singer, who did indeed rapidly ascend to celebrity status but only after appearing on one of the most popular television shows in the United Kingdom. Very few contestants on this show go viral, of course, and so we need to find more causes (her considerable talent, her incongruity with the frame of star or celebrity, the willingness of network gatekeepers, who link networks together, to promote Boyle, individual and social sharing behaviour). This raises the broader question of whether virality is a bottom-up or top-down phenomenon that requires us to examine the process of becoming viral. The authors argue that virality follows a standard S-curve of technological diffusion, put forward by Rogers, where the speed of diffusion follows a pattern of slow-fast-slow over time. Top down messages (e.g. movie trailers) appear faster and fall away more sharply than more organic viral messages that first spread relatively slowly before attracting the attention of major media institutions.