What Going Viral Means

Computer viruses emerged in the 1980s. But in the internet era, we decided not to beat viruses, but to join them. “Going viral” became the goal of any piece of content, from a movie to a Facebook post. Bill Wasik is the author ofAnd Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. He explains that the metaphor of virality goes back to Richard Dawkins coining the term “meme” as a parallel for gene, a biological idea about how culture spreads. He also mentioned that it was like a virus.

What has Wasik learned about how things go viral? “Well, there’s cats, and porn,” he laughs. “Once we get beyond the cat/porn industrial complex, it’s stuff that hits us very quickly and speaks to the relationships we already have.” Which is why funny things spread quickest: “We want to make our friends laugh.”

But Wasik has become skeptical of the viral metaphor. “‘Virus’ conjures up a passive group of spreaders and imagines that the creative act is all — if you craft the thing in just the right way, it compels people to spread it,” like a highly contagious organism. “But we’re in the opposite situation. Things can spread quickly in this truly viral way but the reason is that the spreaders have a lot more agency. They call the shots more.”

(Originally aired March 8, 2013)