VIRALITY 2.0

Abstract

Media virality is a current fetish object in a number of overlapping contexts including marketing, IT design and academia. The desirability of media ‘going viral’ is confirmed by efforts now undertaken to categorize viral success through a range of typologies and metrics, conceived in order to predict and achieve virality. A recent online ad campaign, staged as a ‘how to make a viral video’, signals the complexity of the concept of manufactured virality. This article takes as a point of departure a moment of conceptual slippage in the commercial to argue that the current discourse of media virality has paradoxically expelled its own progenitor, the virus. Contrary to Henry Jenkins's claim that the discourse of virality is ‘a kind of smallpox-soaked blanket theory of media circulation’, I argue that as transmission has been rebranded as ‘sharing’, questions of personal and moral responsibility attendant to transmission and infection have been erased in favour of a bland ideology of interactivity. The concept of ‘virality 2.0’ is proposed to account for this double movement: that the discourse of digital virality has relegated viruses to the past, while structurally exploiting their dynamic of circulation. Moreover, virality 2.0 reinscribes viral subject positions with normative values drawn from this same cultural past. The argument is supported by three main claims. First, behaviour deemed risky and marginal within a heteronormative discourse of promiscuity has been reappropriated as ‘sharing’ and ‘leadership’. Second, practices of digital media transmission may be as much about systemic functionality as active and engaged participation. And third, post-viral media virality works to stabilise and fetishise the active ‘sharing subject’ in neoliberal and heteronormative terms, at the expense of other practices and pleasures.

Keywords:

• viral media
• viruses
• HIV/AIDS
• heteronormativity
• neoliberalism
• promiscuity