Going viral (by accident)

Another fall semester here at the University of Alabama brings another media-related kerfuffle involving our students. Last fall, a student made a threatening comment on a UA sorority's YouTube video, which set in motion a campus-wide panic that circulated through social media (YikYak in particular) and lasted several days. This week's incident involves yet another UA sorority's YouTube video, but this time it centers on the video itself rather than a comment on a video. And, like the last incident, it makes for a teachable moment that is highly relevant to all undergraduate students (particularly those who were actually in the video, some of whom may be in my classes).

The video, which may or may not be available by the time you read this, was a recruitment video depicting the members of a sorority smiling and waving at the camera, dancing around, and doing what I would describe as frolicking. This is the first lesson: part of the difficulty of discussing any kind of media content is describing it. Each person will likely highlight some aspect of the content and leave out other aspects. One could note that all of the sorority sisters were white, or good-looking, or thin, or that the cinematography and editing was very professional looking for a student production, or that the young women don't seem to actually do much in the video. Coverage of the video in mainstream news and in blogs provide an excellent example of media framing: the aspects of the video that are mentioned are not chosen at random, but rather chosen so as to promote (or at least discuss) one of many possible interpretations.

The spread of the video also provides a good case study of audiences in the age of viral content. Many lessons on media creation start with the question: who is your audience? The answer to this question informs everything from aesthetic choices to the medium or venue through which you disseminate your message. In most cases, the Internet allows for a precise calibration of the relationship between content and audience, much more precise than the big-tent, shotgun approach more commonly used in old-school broadcast media. But in some cases, like this sorority video, content specifically tailored for a very small audience escapes into the wild. By now, there is a long list of media content, in particular YouTube videos, intended for a small, specific audience that, through no intention of its creators, found a much larger audience.

The prototypical example of this is Rebecca Black's Friday. Part of the pleasure of this kind of viral content, part of what makes it unique, is a result of the disjuncture between intended audience and actual audience. We're so used to seeing content that is either tailored to us or intended for a homogeneous audience that it is novel to see content that was so obviously not designed for us. Seeing this kind of content raises the question: "what were they (the creators, the target audience) thinking?" Like some kinds of reality TV, this type of content gives us a window into a culture and mindset that is foreign to us.

Also, like the Rebecca Black video, what makes the UA sorority recruitment video worth watching for so many people is that there are different ways to hate it or enjoy it. Some viewers seem to have taken unironic pleasure in the attractiveness of the video's stars, others laugh at its apparent earnestness, and others use it as evidence of an argument about the homogeneity of Greek organizations, and UA sororities in particular, or of how oblivious said sororities are of this fact, or of some aspect of a hegemonic culture that has inculcated the video's creators with this inability to see the underlying message that the video is sending, or that there is nothing wrong nor remarkable about the video and that the reaction to the video is indicative of political correctness run amok. The popularity of the video, the number of clicks and shares it gets, doesn't take into account which of these interpretations or reactions the user has. And, of course, the networked nature of social media and the way in which YouTube and similar sites highlight the number of clicks and shares facilitate the process: we watch it and talk about it because it is what everyone is watching and talking about.

I'm excited to find out what happens next, and to be a part of helping something positive come out of all this. It feels as though it could go either way. It could be yet another cultural object used to bludgeon people on the other side of the cultural divide, a prop in an escalating online shouting match. I imagine that such an experience would be thoroughly demoralizing to the content creators, prompting them to become deeply cynical about public discourse, causing them to "play it safe" by not sharing anything online or creating the most bland, benign content they can think of.

But I hope it doesn't turn out that way. I hope it leads to deeper reflection on what the video depicts, how it depicts its subjects, and how it is received by an audience with diverse, often diametrically opposed, viewpoints. If our students can get past the initial sting of intense scrutiny, I think they can learn a lot about the power of media. It certainly won't be hard to convince these students of the relevance of these lessons to their lives.

Memes: Not really an in-joke anymore

One of my favorite parts about teaching Media Literacy is hearing/reading about what media my students use, what content they enjoy, and how that compares to the experiences of me and my peers. As someone who is roughly twice their age, I don't really expect that we will engage in many of the same types of media experiences. Just as my teachers would make stilted references to M.C. Hammer in order to garner a laugh, I made a reference to Kendrick Lamar's Swimming Pools (... ... drank!) and got a hearty chuckle from the kids. We're in different age cohorts, different life cycles, and we're living in an increasingly fragmented media environment. What could we possibly have in common?

This makes it all the more surprising when I discover that many of them are encountering the same memes as I am. In some cases, we're on the same website, but in others, we're on different sites (or highly personalized versions of the same site, like Twitter and Facebook) that are increasingly comprised of viral jokes that often re-purpose amateur or professional media content in order to comment  on current events or a relatable situation (i.e., memes). Do we watch the same TV shows? No. In fact, I'm willing to bet more students in my classes have the media experience of seeing a Sweet Brown meme in common than will watch the Super Bowl, the Grammys, or the Oscars. Supposedly, these water-cooler TV events would remain a common cultural touchstone, and they likely will be the one thing (along with some big movies) that cut across age groups. But there is something going on with memes that is interesting. They're often originating from relatively tiny communities or obscure sources well outside of the mainstream, but they become the references that my students and I both have in common. If I include a reference to Mad Men in my slides, I'll get blank stares, but a picture of Grumpy Cat gets them laughing every time.

The first thing that occurs to me about this is that at least for certain populations (young people?), media users may not need TV and celebrities as a subject of common experience and conversation, at least to the extent that previous generations did. I think the use of memes is partially substituting for the use of TV and celebrities as a way to joke about norms, blow off steam, bond, etc. Based on my casual observations, I'd say that music and musicians as personalities are just as central to these young people as they were to me and my parents when they were that age. But TV and celebrities? I'm not so sure.

This isn't to say that TV and celebs are going away, but that they may not be as essential to leisure media use as they once were. Perhaps TV has already started to adapt to this, although the meteoric rise of memes to this stage in which they are something that my students and I have in common seems to have happened so suddenly that I doubt anybody has had time to adjust. Like the TV content that serves/served as our common cultural reference point, these memes, ultimately, only serve as a vehicle for advertisers and websites to build audiences to sell stuff to. But the professional content producers have been cut out of the equation. Just how much time is spent creating, consuming, and distributing memes? And if more time is spent re-purposing and creating amateur content, regardless of how solipsistic and retrograde its humor may be, isn't this something worth celebrating?

The Werther Effect 2.0: Psychogenesis in the Internet Age

One of my favorite films from the last few years starts and concludes with an idea that, aptly, took root in my brain and has been something I think about long after I saw the film for the first time. It is articulated by the main character Dom Cobb: "An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." Soon after seeing this film, I learned about the Werther effect. 

The idea of the Werther Effect is simple and unnerving. When people are informed through news reports or fictional stories of the fact that other people have committed suicide, they are more likely to commit suicide themselves. The message (e.g., a news report of suicide or suicide statistics or a story about someone committing suicide) likely makes the message receiver believe that the act in question is something that people, perhaps people similar to him or her, do. That isn’t to say that it makes the act socially acceptable or condones the act. By conveying that it has happened and that someone else did it, the message makes the act salient to the receiver, introduces it as a possible course of action, and may imply that it is common. Some theorists say that it may just be a simple suggestion-imitation model of behavior. In either case, it is more likely that the message receiver will commit suicide than if they had not heard the message at all (see Etzersdorfer, Voracek,& Sonneck, 2004; Gould, 2001; Hittner, 2005; Phillips 1978, 1979; 1982; Wasserman, 1984 for details, Thorson & Oberg 2003 for a contrary view).

In the top-down world of mass media production, news editors have been encouraged to downplay suicides, making them less likely to inspire readers to commit suicide. But if we assume that the same relation holds between exposure to the message and suicide in the age when exposure is "viral" (i.e., spread through online social networks) and/or search-based (i.e., determined by in-the-moment interests), then how do you curb imitative suicide? The story of someone’s suicide might spread through a group of people who are already preoccupied with the idea or seek out this kind of information. It may spread through people who are trying to offer support. 

This might be part of a more general problem in the age of the internet (where messages reach people through social networks or based on their consistency with people’s pre-existing pre-occupations/preferences). There might be other kinds of behaviors (anorexia, cutting one’s self, abusing drugs) and even other ways of thinking (depressive thought patterns) that are similar to suicide in that they are capable of being directly influenced by messages (i.e., not entirely physiological in origin), they are generally considered to be undesirable (i.e., painful for the individual and community), and are stigmatized (that is, not talked about). This particular kind of stigmatization makes these behaviors and thought patterns different from acts of aggression toward others, which, as a culture, we seem to have no problem discussing. This stigmatization leads, in certain communities, to an attempt to overcome the stigma through communication, through sharing experiences with the behavior or thought pattern and through support, to let people know that they are not alone. This reaction to the silence of the stigma is unquestionably well intentioned and it may have positive effects, but the evidence of suicide contagion makes me wonder if there are unanticipated effects. It may make message receivers who do not yet exhibit the undesirable behavior or thought pattern (or who do exhibit it but to a lesser extent than the extreme examples they hear about) more aware of the negative behavior or thought pattern, believe that it is more common or that what they are experiencing is more serious or more intense than they would have otherwise thought, and believe that it is something that people like them do or, worse yet, something that people are (as in: a permanent, defining characteristic, e.g., a depressed person, an alcoholic, etc.). 

Possible stimuli that may lead to a negative behavior or thought pattern becoming more common include advertisements for drugs or programs treating depression, anxiety, and other psychological conditions; online support groups; social media messages (Facebook and Twitter posts) related to the topic; news stories encountered via major news sites (e.g., NYTimes) or circulated virally via social media (e.g., Twitter). Make no mistake: there is plenty of evidence to suggest that these tools are useful in combating the spread and intensity of suffering and so they should not be discarded unless there is evidence that they do more harm than good. Its unrealistic to think that they ALL do more harm than good, but the evidence of suicide contagion via mass media suggests that it is worth examining whether some of thee messages, under certain circumstances for certain people, may, in fact, backfire. Establishing whether or not any messages designed to curb suffering that is not physiological or physical in origin backfire is the first step. Then, it is essential to understand why this happens, when this happens, and be able to modify the messages so that it doesn't happen anymore: all possible given the wealth of data on Internet use.