The Dark Side of ‘Virality’
The ideal of “going viral” seems to have taken a most important place in the minds of content producers Everyday something new goes viral, which leave people with this agony, anticipation, and eagerness in wondering by every second: “How can I be the next?” But how does this whole “viral” thing really work? And what does it really mean to become “viral?” The Atlantic Senior Economics Writer Derek Thompson, also the author of Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, provided some excellent analyses and explanations to these questions in an interview with Tanya Basu,.
Answering to Basu’s question of whether being popular equates “going viral,” Thompson first debunked this myth by pointing out that, in most cases, the “viral hits” are broadcast. In other words, the information did not arrive at your timeline through a course of “infection” like viruses, but simply broadcasted from some limited big sources which cover, maybe, millions of followers. People also tend to make two false assumptions, as he points out, that quality is destiny, and vitality is veracity.
For content producers, it is easy to assume that the higher quality their products are of, the more popular they will become. But the truth is that distribution plays a bigger role than content in terms of popularity. On the other hand, when content consumers receive the same message from multiple sources, they deem it to be true. Thompson, however, urge that “we shouldn’t trust anything; we should seek out provenance.” This error results from humans’ tendency to gather truth from familiarity; and media provide this exact sort of familiarity by rebroadcasting the same (but maybe faulty) information to the people. Thompson describes this as “the dark side of virality.”
The idea that popularity is more concerned with the method of distribution aligns with our previous formal analysis in the structure of social networks. Thompson also introduced a new model depicting information flow involving simple broadcasting, which complements the game-theory cascade model from class. More importantly, the article’s argument provided a social context of the abstract “information cascade” model: if false information could travel through this information cascade as well as, if not better than, truth does, what should we do in face of this post-fact era? This article provides an outstanding perspective in attempting to provide an answer..