The Internet is a Disease? How Fitting...

     It just seems that talk about something spreading amongst people or something being viral cannot escape the internet these days. Fortunately, I will be talking about something that will not make us social distance or wear masks, in fact, this has been a topic of discussion for many years. Today we will be talking about the contrast of two different ideas, "spreadability" and "virality". These two concepts explain why pieces of media are shared and why people are attracted to certain types of content as well.

    Virality vs Spreadability

    We can understand the idea of a picture, video, or other pieces of media being shared because it seems entertaining or because it aligns with our beliefs. However, this idea actually goes deeper than many people realize when it comes to why we share these pieces of media. You more than likely have heard of something "going viral" as people share these pieces of media on their social media pages or with their friends and it quickly explodes on the internet to the point where almost anyone with some social media account has heard of it. Many marketers seem to want to try and reach this explosive sharing of content for their company, in a positive way of course. After all, who would not want their product or service to be shared in large numbers? This idea of "viral marketing" though is sort of an oxymoron though as viral pieces of media are not supposed to be active necessarily. The idea of virality comes from a passive audience being "infected" by a "virus", which of course would be the media itself. One reason why people share this kind of content is that they want to entertain their audience in a performative way. Think back to the GrubHub ad that went viral not long after its release. As of writing this, the video has over 9 million views, which is fairly impressive for an ad as people usually do not go out of their way to share company ads. However, that does not mean that virality will equal to follows or even people caring about your brand. As Tiffany Luther states in her article, "viral content is not great at sustaining interest for a long time, but more of a 15 minutes of fame reaction". This is especially true for the Grubhub company. They only have 44.8k subscribers on their YouTube channel and have a massive dislike to like ratio, which tells us quite simply that people thought this ad sucked and it sucked so bad that people shared it. Of course, we might be more familiar with viral content like the infamous Numa Numa kid dancing on YouTube, which really had no rhyme or reason to be shared except the fact that people found it entertaining and loved the energy of the guy dancing in the video.

A little nostalgia for us who remember the early days of YouTube

    So, what exactly about spreadability? It's probably not exactly right to think of it as virality's opposite. Instead, imagine it as virality's more active cousin that does not rely on the terms of "infectivity" or "contamination". Audiences, in this case, play a more active role in what they want to share instead of serving as a carrier as the book, Spreadable Media by Jenkins, Ford & Green would suggest. An audience based on spreadability means that the audience shares the content because it was their choice based upon their own agendas, what they value, or for more personal reasons. With that in mind, Tiffany Luther also tells us, "shareable content is targeted to a specific group of people who overtime will trust your brand's opinions and they will continuously be inspired to take action (share)". This what companies really should be striving to achieve. It would be nearly impossible to interest EVERY single person on this planet in a certain product or service, so instead of trying to achieve virality (which is not necessarily bad, but not the right way to market), finding what your target audience is within your niche is much more effective for spreadability. 

Reacting to a Reaction Video

My favorite reaction channel, which features a couple reacting to different pieces of media

    An interesting phenomenon that seems to play off both of these ideas is reaction channels and videos. If you think about it, reaction channels like to react to content that is "viral" as many people know about it, which is how they ultimately get views and make their content shareable. More than that though, the reason why their content seems to be popular amongst people is that we love to see other people's reactions to certain pieces of media. We want to see if they react similarly to us or if they have a different viewpoint from what we have seen before. Mirror neurons might also be able to explain this as neuroscientist Lisa Aziz-Zadeh tells us in an article by arstechnia that mirror neurons '"support a system that could simulate other people's actions onto one's own motor representations, it is thought that they contribute to social understanding"'. This might explain why we resonate with people and their reactions to media, it all comes down to how we socially interact with media and want others to join in on seeing it with us. I would even argue that it really also depends on the reactor themselves. As I mentioned above, Dwayne N Jazz is my favorite reaction channel on YouTube. I even watch their videos even if I have not seen the original video because I love their energy and dynamic together. They make new content out of the content we are both viewing, which is not too distant from the feeling we feel when we are watching a movie with family or friends.

    All this talk about things spreading and becoming viral may seem a bit off in today's climate, but this is certainly a more pleasant conversation to have than talking about rising Covid cases. We see that virality is more passive and we are infected by that media, whether we like it or not. Shareability is more active as we want to share that content based upon our ideologies and interests. If you ever want to see a unique blend of these two, reaction videos are typically the best way to see these combine in a unique way. Whether you realize it or not, we are sharing content constantly and we want people to see what we see. Yes, you are actually more social on the internet than you realize, even if you never go outside and see the grass as "realistic textures".