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‘Going Viral’ No Longer Means What You Think it Does
Every morning as part of my job I open my laptop and survey what the internet is talking about. And just about every morning these days I am assaulted by a host of videos, posts, and articles claiming some new trend is ‘going viral.’
People are looksmaxxing, frictionmaxxing, regularmaxxing, or even Catholicmaxxing. CEOs are chomping burgers. Kids are yelling 6–7. Indie bands are breaking through. Cool kids are carrying ‘analog bags’ or ‘Japanese walking’ or looking to birds to improve their relationships. (I’m baffled by that last one too.)
It’s a lot. Even if your work doesn’t involve inhaling the internet daily, you’ve probably asked yourself some version of the same things I often ask myself: Are all these social media trends real? Why are there so many of them? And how much should I pay attention to the next odd thing ‘going viral’ online?
I didn’t know there was an expert I could turn to for answers until I stumbled on the work of Ruby Thelot. An NYU professor, cyber-ethnographer, and author of the forthcoming book In Defense of Being Online, Thelot’s research focuses on figuring out how people really use the internet and how the noise online relates to offline life.
I called him up to ask for help sorting out which trends to take seriously. But I ended up getting a deeper…
