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Other Reactions to Viral
We’ve seen a wide range of other authors with their own thoughts, reactions, and studies “going viral” and which have drawn on Spreadable Media. Here are some of them:
- In his 2011 piece “Recombinant Comedy, Transmedia Mobility, and Viral Video,” David Gurney draws on one of the original white papers that were part of the Spreadable Media project to look at the distinction between “viral” and “spreadable” and considerations for how comedy works in relation to spreadability.
- Clare Wells draws on Spreadable Media in her blog post at Digital Universe, “You Can’t Make It Viral,” looking at the ways in which some media makers and advertisers try to force “vitality,” only to have it backfire.
- In his work on “Can the Retweet Speak? Agency in Viral Video Diffusion,” Jay Owens draws on Spreadable Media to help set up his quantitative study of how videos are shared via Twitter. This abstract is based on Owens’ presentation for Theorizing the Web ’14, held in May.
- On his A Simpler Creature blog, Abe Stein writes about whether, and what, the “tipping point” will be for eSports to reach widespread interest. In the process, Stein mentions Spreadable Media’s critique of the “viral” metaphor and its argument that the agency of those doing the sharing must be taken into account.
- Responding to Tiziano Bonini’s review of the Italian version of the book, Virginia Fiume responds (in English) in “A Seed Is Better Than a Virus” about how a strong critique of the idea of “going viral” corresponds with frustration she has found as a consultant.
- In his July 2013 post on “virality,” Pedro Ivo Rogedo (in Portuguese) starts with Spreadable Media’s challenge to the ideal behind “viral media,” before exploring the aspects of a particular network that make it more likely that a media text could “go viral.”