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VIRAL | Noah Brier

Spreading Against Your Will

Some thoughts on viral ideas that spread without the consent of their hosts.

November 27, 2008 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 12 COMMENTS

The "viral is a dumb name for media that spreads" is hardly a new conversation, but Faris summed it up quite nicely the other day, explaining that viruses spread without the consent of the host. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is different. "LOTS OF PEOPLE CHOOSE TO PROPAGATE IT. It requires people to do something. Voluntarily. For their own reasons. It is not simply a new way to broadcast our messages through populations. It suggests we push, when in fact they pull."

But then I read something about the Sarah Palin turkey murder interview and got to thinking. New York Magazine's Daily Intel blog wrote that the cameraman told Palin and her aides of what was going on in the background and they said, "no worries." As the Daily Intel wrote, "It’s been speculated that Palin would have trouble staying in the national spotlight until 2012 while holed away up in Alaska, where news travels by sled dog and darkness shrouds the land for months at a time. But this video proves that Palin knows exactly how to continue to attract attention: Take a normally mundane gubernatorial event like a turkey pardon, Palin it up with something irresistible to the elite east-coast liberal media, and watch the coverage follow."

This, I'd argue, is actually closer to the way viruses spread. People and media are sharing this video not because they like the message, but because they're so amazed by what's going on. It's almost like they're doing it against their will. (As my sister put it, it's kind of like watching a car crash.) Think of political combat generally and this is how things work. When the republicans started the Bill Ayers thing, for instance, the hope was that they'd get everyone talking about it. Even the people who were saying how terrible it was to try and connect Obama and Ayers were actually pushing forward the republican cause, further cementing a connection between terrorism and Obama.

I recently watched Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story and this is precisely the kind of politics he created. One of the more famous moves was in making Willie Horton a household name (here's a clip from Boogie Man about it). While the world argued about the ad, the final outcome was that, as Atwater had apparently predicted, the country knew Horton's name (and presumably connected it with Dukakis) by the end of the campaign. The Obama/Muslim connection was similar in that even when people on the left argued how ridiculous it was they were still spreading the idea.

Basically the best way to fight this kind of behavior is to not talk about it. But most people can't help themselves. To give one more political example, remember September when everybody could talk about nothing but Sarah Palin? While democrats were panning her as an inexperienced choice they were still pushing her further into the collective consciousness (and I would guess making her seem more experienced: After all, how could you be famous and inexperienced?)

In a non-political sphere, think about Wired's blogging is dead article and the firestorm it created. Most of what I read was disagreeing with the idea, but in the process they were also strengthening the meme (both from a pagerank and collective consciousness perspective). While lots of people opened their posts with something to the effect of "I don't even want to respond to this," they followed it with a response, thus justifying it as a worthwhile bit of thinking (inasmuch as it made them feel compelled to write a retort).

Anyway, all of this is to make the point that while I do think viral is overused in marketing terms, I also think there are viral ideas that spread despite their hosts best effort not to push forward the idea.

Oh, and happy thanksgiving.

Update (11/29/08): My buddy Eric wrote a very interesting response to this post over at his blog. It's specifically about how even if you disagree with something you may be accepting the framing of the issue and thus pushing forward the idea. Well worth a read.


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COMMENTS

1Eric Nehrlich

Interesting thoughts. I'd had this vague intuition for years that arguing against an idea still supports the idea in the way that you suggest, but it was made clearer to me by reading George Lakoff's work on framing. In other words, if somebody else presents a proposition and you start arguing against that, then you have implicitly accepted the frame in which the proposition is presented (e.g. "Have you stopped beating your wife?") We have a tendency to get sucked into the zero-sum game of arguing over a specific and trying to "win" the argument, rather than stepping back and trying to come up with a non-zero-sum solution that serves the interests of both sides.

Okay, wow, there's way too much packed into that paragraph for anybody but me to understand - guess I should write a blog post :)

November 28, 2008

2Alan Wolk

Thought-provoking as usual.

Was wondering when you were going to get around to posting your conspiracy theory on Bloomberg and the traffic ;)

One reason for all this virality (and it ties into the whole blog-is-dead thing, as you'll see momentarily) is the unfortunate way that technology has enabled our "everyone is a champion" society.

That means that everyone has a voice and is encouraged to use it, even if what they're saying is ill-informed or careless. It hit me the other day when there was a post on the infamous Copyblogger site billed as "The Ultimate Blog Writing Guide" that was actually hailed on Twitter by several people we know in common. The post in question read like something my son is currently learning in the fourth grade: organize your thoughts, get to the point quickly, etc.

And it hit me that why would someone who needed that sort of remedial guidance feel that they were qualified to write a blog? I mean I don't hold myself out as an artist because I can't draw very well. Why would someone who can't write very well feel that they should and could produce a blog?

I'm thinking the culprit is our societal pull towards mediocrity, towards the notion that everyone's a winner and everything is equally valid and good. You're a lousy athlete? You still get a trophy. You're a lousy writer? You still get to put out a blog which your friends will tell you is wonderful. (Mostly because you've been telling them their blogs are wonderful.)

So that same urge is why we all feel the need to comment on Sarah Palin's turkey video and talk about William Ayers as if we were experts. Because for years we've been hearing that everyone is.

The negative conversation that is Atwater's gift to us also relies on the sense of outrage of the other side and so often hinges on something that is so patently false as to be absurd. Obama being a Muslim was (evil) genius because the more apoplectic people got over the absurdity of it, the more ridiculous and out of control they looked.

Finally, as per Wired and blogs-- that's just New York magazine style bad journalism. (You know, "Blue Is The New Black!" "We're Eating More Cheese!" "Poverty Chic!" Blogs, like yours or mine, are sort of a private bully pulpit, an online op-ed column of sorts. Certainly we're not competing with sites like HuffPo which are blogs in name only. I did a post on this last week (or the week before) but if you can tell the difference between say HuffPo and a well-done newspaper or magazine web site, you're a lot smarter than me. (Other than that HuffPo does not have an offline version, that is. Oh, and that she doesn't pay her writers.) But point is those sites are no more blogs than noahbrier.com is a television station.

November 28, 2008

3ana

hey noah

read this which reminded me some old conversation of mine with duncan (watts) where he claimed that there are 3 rules of viral spread. i remembered only one, and that is that a message gets spread regardless of its content - positive or negative. having a bad memory, i have asked him again to tell me the other 2, and here's what he said (try to ignore the academic language; point 2 seems to refer what you are talking about):
1. Small changes in virality (probability that x will be infected when a neighbor y is infected) can yield very large changes in the total number infected
2. Virality is not the same as engagement, and may even be inversely related. What this means is that the sort of thing a user finds engaging might not be the sort of thing they are inclined to spread. So there's probably a trade-off between packing a lot of content into your message and getting lots of people to see it.
3. Nothing gets big without the mass media. This may be less true with You Tube than it was three years ago. But it is still the case that many "viral hits" are helped along by the attention they receive from mass media. Maybe a better way to put it is that word of mouth and mass media pretty much always interact.

ana

November 28, 2008

4Noah Brier

@Ana: Thanks for the comment Ana. Really awesome stuff.

Re: #3 - The definition of mass media/media is the thing that I found most open-ended in reading Watts' last paper (I wrote about it a little here). Essentially he talks a lot about how things spread but seems to define media exclusively in the old terms (TV, print, etc.), which excludes blogs, YouTube and the other tools that allow regular folks to broadcast their message far wider than they were once able.

November 29, 2008

5Noah Brier

@Alan: As always, thanks for the thoughtful comment.

(And as almost always, I'm going to argue with you a bit on it.)

I don't know that I think we're looking at the pull towards mediocrity. While I do agree that the whole everyone is a winner thing can be a bit over the top, what makes a good writer, or even better a good artist, is and always has been completely subjective. (See R Mutt.)

In this case I'm more of a free market believer: If there is an audience who eats the stuff up, who is anyone to say what's "good or bad."

Re: Your second point. I couldn't agree more. Nick Carr put it quite nicely in a blog post recently that I summarized with, "Blogging is the new amateur radio. Basically he argues that while the long-term impact of amateurs will be remembered, the big players will continue to get sucked in to larger sites or turn into businesses." Interesting, though I don't think I completely agree (though still haven't formulated exactly why.)

My friend Charles replied to that post with a really thoughtful critique: "Even though a blog is "dead", it still might be what someone is looking for. In amateur radio, if you stop broadcasting, people can't get your old content. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping people from accessing old blogs. It's all digital, and it's all additive. Dead blogs do nothing but add to the mix. In that sense, I don't even think it's fair to call them "dead". They're just part of history."

Anyway, thanks again for the comment.

November 29, 2008

6ana

Hey Noah, thanks. I think that I can use this (see below) as the answer to your comment - it's also from Duncan's paper, Viral Marketing for the Real World, http://tinyurl.com/6l9c3k

I think that Duncan does distinguish between the two, mostly in terms of the mechanism of influence (immediacy?). While I agree with you that the media landscape is far more complex now, what Duncan was aiming at (in my understanding) is the instant reach of mass media broadcasting. Altho i can def see this changing, the reach is still often greater than the instant online reach of even the most popular people/content on the web. Cumulatively (over an extended period of time), web's reach may be - and often is - greater.

and relevant part from Duncan's article:

There is an important flaw in the epidemic analogy, however: Companies, unlike diseases, can use standard advertising methods to create potentially enormous seeds. If the initial seed is big enough, then even if R is less than 1, the burnout process will persist for multiple generations, thereby reaching many additional people. By providing social-sharing tools that are easy to use, moreover, marketers can reliably increase the reproduction rate of their message—an important point, as even small increases in R can dramatically increase the number of additional cases.

November 29, 2008

7Noah Brier

@Ana: That all makes sense, but I'm still a bit unsure. For the most part it's true that the reach is nowhere near mass for most, but where is the mass crossover point? Seems to me that my reach, for example, while small in comparison to mainstream media is still large in comparison to regular folks (around 2500 readers). It's a funny middle space and I wonder what effect it has ...

November 29, 2008

8ana

yes, that's true - but my point was about the immediacy of the reach, and not about the scope of the reach itself. That is, even with the shrinking audiences today, when something is broadcast it immediately reaches the same amount of people that you may reach over the course of days. And I do get what you are saying - I am just not sure if (since there are very different mechanisms of influence at play) "web broadcasters" can be compared to traditional mass media. But then again, maybe the def of broadcasting should change.

November 30, 2008

9stephanie gerson

my unsubstantiated prediction: this may change as the web moves from treating links as binary (yes/no link) to spectral (stronger or weaker link) or typological (type of link). in other words, instead of treating all links as equal, and as votes of confidence, this (ok....semantic) web will differentiate between friendly links pointing to Palin's turkey murder or WIRED's blogging article, versus critical ones which point for purposes of disagreement. if this doesn't make sense, take the above and imagine the implications for semantic web search.

December 1, 2008

10Noah Brier

@Stephanie: You make good points and may be right, but a) I'm still unconvinced that the semantic web is coming anytime soon and b) I don't know that that fixes the problem (if you want to call it that) anyway. I mean, if we are to assume that most people's web identity is some extension of themselves (which is fair in its vagueness), then we can assume most people are spreading that message anyway. What's more the link may be less important than just the discussion. As an example, I never read the Wired piece, but I certainly read lots of people's reaction to it.

December 1, 2008

11stephanie gerson

@Noah a) that's why I don't consider this "the semantic web" but a possible characteristic of a semantic. which is generally how I think about semantic x web, not as a fixed thing, but as characteristics of an ever-evolving web. and b) I also don't think this 'fixes the problem,' per say, but it would do something. which is why I referred to search: imagine searching for Palin turkey murder on current Google vs. differentiated-link Google.

ps. I guess I shoulda posted my response on only the Barbarian blog, sorry for cross-posting.

December 1, 2008

12Noah Brier

@Stephanie: Your point about the semantic web as a continually moving/evolving thing is a great one. And I also think that it does provide some interesting implications for this sort of conversation. Though I wonder how many people are engaging with this conversation (at least on the web) by way of search. I guess what I mean is that the power here is that it's primarily direct person-to-person.

I guess at the end of the day the question is whether this type of behavior is more a reflection of deeply ingrained human behavior or representative of some new type of web behavior. (Ultimately I expect it's somewhere in-between.)

December 2, 2008