Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

VIRALITY 2.0

Robert Payne

To cite this article: Robert Payne (2013) VIRALITY 2.0, Cultural Studies, 27:4, 540-560, DOI:
10.1080/09502386.2012.707219

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.707219

Published online: 20 Jul 2012.

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Robert Payne

VIRALITY 2.0

Networked promiscuity and the sharing

subject

Media virality is a current fetish object in a number of overlapping contexts

including marketing, IT design and academia. The desirability of media ‘going
viral’ is confirmed by efforts now undertaken to categorize viral success through a
range of typologies and metrics, conceived in order to predict and achieve virality.
A recent online ad campaign, staged as a ‘how to make a viral video’, signals the
complexity of the concept of manufactured virality. This article takes as a point of
departure a moment of conceptual slippage in the commercial to argue that the
current discourse of media virality has paradoxically expelled its own progenitor,
the virus. Contrary to Henry Jenkins’s claim that the discourse of virality is ‘a
kind of smallpox-soaked blanket theory of media circulation’, I argue that as
transmission has been rebranded as ‘sharing’, questions of personal and moral
responsibility attendant to transmission and infection have been erased in favour of
a bland ideology of interactivity. The concept of ‘virality 2.0’ is proposed to
account for this double movement: that the discourse of digital virality has
relegated viruses to the past, while structurally exploiting their dynamic of
circulation. Moreover, virality 2.0 reinscribes viral subject positions with
normative values drawn from this same cultural past. The argument is supported
by three main claims. First, behaviour deemed risky and marginal within a
heteronormative discourse of promiscuity has been reappropriated as ‘sharing’ and
‘leadership’. Second, practices of digital media transmission may be as much about
systemic functionality as active and engaged participation. And third, post-viral
media virality works to stabilise and fetishise the active ‘sharing subject’ in
neoliberal and heteronormative terms, at the expense of other practices and
pleasures.

Keywords viral media; viruses; HIV/AIDS; heteronormativity; neo-

liberalism; promiscuity

If the first decade of the twenty-first century inaugurated an era of ‘mediality’,

when ‘virtually all textual, visual, and audio media are produced, circulated,

Cultural Studies, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 4, 540
560, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.707219
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 VIRALITY 2.0 541

and remediated via networked digital technologies’ (Grusin 2010, p. 6), then
the start of the second decade was when it became clear that mediality is
further characterized by virality
and by virality replicating itself virally. An
online advertising campaign from 2011 signals the shift to metavirality. The
commercial, for a brand of bottled water (drinksmartwater 2011), employs
actor Jennifer Aniston as part of a self-reflexive parody of its own strategic
attempt to manufacture virality. Staging a ‘how to make a viral video’ manual,
Aniston interacts with a variety of elements of already-proven viral campaigns,
including puppies, dancing babies and lip-synching YouTube phenomenon
Keenan Cahill. In addition to harnessing her Hollywood star power, the
video’s metatextuality relies upon an understanding of Aniston’s premium
online searchability, and the producers within the narrative eventually decide
to call the video ‘Jen Aniston Sex Tape’.
From one perspective, the commercial is another clever example of a
recent trend of counter-intuitive advertising where the brand or product is
ultimately secondary to textual strategy or gimmick, the Cadbury gorilla
commercial from 2007 being the epitome of this mode. From a different
perspective, it could be seen as an affirmation of post-feminist individualism
where Aniston chooses to capitalize on her status as sex object using tongue-in-
cheek gestures to pre-feminist pastness. Differently again, the commercial
could also be analysed to tell us something about regulated and deregulated
structures of celebrity and how they collapse and converge online. Most
relevant to this article, however, is a brief moment of discursive slippage that
speaks to changing structures of media distribution and how we talk about
them. Talking to camera, Aniston introduces herself as having to promote the
brand of water in a more complex way than simply stating its values:

Aniston: Hi, I’m Jen Aniston. And I’m here to talk to you about
Smartwater. But in this day and age, apparently I can’t just do that, can I?
(. . .) I have to make a video, apparently, that turns into a virus.

Producer (off-camera): Viral. We need the video to go viral.

Aniston: Right. Sorry, viral. Thank you. This is why I have these three
lovely Internet boys here to help me (drinksmartwater 2011).

Parodying her role of highly paid but poorly informed celebrity spokesperson,
Aniston performs misunderstanding of the strategic purpose of the video and
has to be corrected by the industry experts supervising production. Of course,
what the ‘Internet boys’ do want, in a sense, is for the video to turn into a
virus, in terms of rapid and unpredictable peer-to-peer transmission, but they
cannot use that language. The language of the virus transposes connotations of
danger, fear and poor hygiene on to the brand and the product itself, especially
problematic for a consumable.
542 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

In this article, I will argue that media virality, ‘in this day and age’, is in a
specific sense post-viral. Use of the trope of virality in and around a Web 2.0
context marks an observable shift away from an earlier discursive convention
centred on the virus as an agent of attack upon vulnerable points within an
uncontained network. While computer viruses of this sort still exist (including
spyware and malware), it is curious that virality currently seems to connote a
successful and desirable kind of media distribution rather than an intrusive and
destructive one. Digital media that ‘go viral’ are usually appraised positively in
this description, despite the arbitrariness of the phrase. Viral ad campaigns are
desired by marketing professionals and even purposely manufactured for their
expansive and catchy potential. So while the means of transmission of harmful
computer viruses and desirable viral media may be similar, and while both may
be the result of deliberate and strategic production, anxieties around the
danger or nuisance of the former do not seem to have transferred evenly into
the latter.
Even though the Smartwater commercial is a carefully produced
metatextual parody of the concept of manufactured virality, it is also a
commercial that wants to go viral. Beneath its tricksy humour, it takes
seriously the semantic distinction between ‘virus’ and ‘viral’ but it is also
through this humour that the commercial draws attention to its own anxiety
about that distinction. My purpose, then, is to ask how and why virality ceased
to be about viruses. The commercial’s ‘virus’ joke is a joke of periodicity: aside
from danger, fear and poor hygiene, media viruses connote cultural pastness

a past into which Aniston herself is implicated. This article investigates, then,
the new imperatives, cultural anxieties and instruments of ideological hygiene
that require viruses be symbolically relegated to the past but still structurally
exploited.
I name this double movement ‘virality 2.0’, identifying a discourse that is
motivated by twin logics. The first is that in the Web 2.0 context,
characterized by online social media that instrumentalize user participation
and interactivity, virality is put to work in the name of ‘communicative
capitalism’, Jodi Dean’s (2009) concept for how networked communications
technologies bring about ‘the strange merging’ of capitalism and an
unresponsive democracy (p. 22). Second, where communicative capitalism
constructs and captures neoliberal networked subjects, virality 2.0 reinscribes
those subject positions with normative values drawn from earlier discourses of
viral anxiety. Attaching this theory to the 2.0 brand
itself a viral object
is
an expedient move as much as a critical one. By making direct reference to the
term ‘Web 2.0’ first coined in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly, ‘2.0’ operates as a
convenient shorthand for the historical and technological changes claimed by
that term, and most importantly signals the ideological underpinnings of the
cultural shift implied within this claim (O’Reilly 2005). The term ‘virality 2.0’
self-consciously performs some of the same logics that I describe in this article
as a form of critique.
 VIRALITY 2.0 543

In elaborating on the logics of virality 2.0, my thinking is structured by

three main points of departure: first, that virality 2.0 rebrands ‘risky’
behaviour as ‘sharing’ and ‘participation’; second, that its modes of circulation
may be as much about systemic functionality as they are about transmission by
active users; and third, that the post-virus discourse of virality 2.0 fetishizes the
active user-subject at the expense of other positions and pleasures. These
claims also force a rethinking of how popularity is registered by the viral spread
of digital content, where it would be too simple to assume a transparent
confirmation of a media power shift towards an unregulated, horizontal and
democratic structure of consumer choice and agency, or a kind of pure
popularity. Digital content achieves virality in different ways
some through
the efforts of marketing strategies, some through an unplanned mode of
transmission that seems random or accidental. Moreover, virality is not always
desired by those involved or implicated in the content. Viral ad campaigns may
have a different relationship to popular media culture than entertainment or
amateur videos that go viral. What interests me is the overlap of these kinds of
content. As the Smartwater commercial demonstrates, ad campaigns are
circulated virally through social networks alongside music videos, laughing
baby videos and other less manufactured content, now making use of these
amateur codes. When marketing and advertising campaigns purposefully
appropriate and mimic the idiosyncrasies of more personalized amateur
content, and inversely when individual consumers work to manufacture their
content and its transmission in the style of marketing campaigns (Burgess
2008), then something interesting is taking place at the level of content
but
precisely where content may take a back seat to the mode of distribution that
brings attention to it. The specific content of a given item may account for its
viral success at the same time as having little or nothing to do with the successful
functioning of social networks as distributors of content.
This paradox at the heart of the relationship between content, structure
and participation vexes an easy understanding of popularity, and of subject
positions of cultural production and consumption. For this reason, the
complexities of virality 2.0 index problematics of capital, labour, subjectivity
and control
beyond the immediate environment of digital media
which
continue to motivate Cultural Studies scholarship, and so this article is also
motivated by the idea that virality spreads in and around media as a new
modular structure of cultural norms.

Sharing
The first principle of the new discourse of virality 2.0 is that risky behaviour is
rebranded using a language of sharing, conversation and participation.
Recently, the New York Times Research and Development unit published
544 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

details of Project Cascade
a new digital tool which provides an intricate

visual metric of the movement through social media networks of a single event
such as a tweet. They call this movement ‘sharing activity’. As explained in the
accompanying video:

This tool illustrates the connections between readers and publishers, helps
identify influential contributors to a conversation, and cleanly displays the
life-cycle of a new sharing conversation in an intuitive way (New York
Times nd.).

But furthermore, as Suzanne Labarre states in her article on the project, ‘both
the mining of the data and the artistic presentation could go a long way toward
solving the riddle of how a story goes viral’. Clearly, this riddle is one to be
solved in order that organizations and brands can more accurately make things
go viral. For the New York Times, the challenge of brand awareness and
influence lies in the following question: ‘How can The Times use this
information to expand its impact in the conversation, to maintain its position
as a news and information leader in this complex environment?’
Providing ‘leadership’ in a complex environment can be otherwise
understood as trying to maintain control over circulation of content in an
unpredictable and even uncontrollable mediascape. Given a wide field of
competitors for ‘impact’ and ‘leadership’, control stands very much at odds
with the complex plurality of ‘sharing’ that takes place in ‘the conversation’.
This language of sharing and conversation also works to render more intimate
and tangible the rapidly multiplying, uncontained and partly unknowable
networks that may ramify from any single twitter or Facebook user
what
danah boyd (2010) has called ‘networked publics’. Moreover, a language of
intimacy and generosity alleviates potential anxieties that may arise if one
imagines ‘the conversation’ not as a safe space but as an uncontained free-for-
all in which undesirable content may circulate unchecked; something like a
virus, for instance.
As a number of scholars have examined, anxieties around uncontained
transmission and unsafe contact were prevalent in public discourse relating to
computer viruses that emerged as a significant perceived threat in the 1990s.
Deborah Lupton (1994) elaborates on the ways in which the adoption and uses
of the viral metaphor in computing drew on a range of discourses not limited
to immunology, including ‘the seductiveness of the human/computer, Self/
Other relationship and the cultural crisis around issues of bodies, technologies
and sexualities at the fin de millénnium’ (p. 558). In addition to propelling a
discourse of sexual contamination responsive to social dynamics of the late
twentieth century, anxieties about computer viruses depended upon ‘images of
foreignness, illegality, and otherness’, and the securing of ‘compromised
networks’ likened to the ‘bodies’ of nation-states under military threat from
without and within’ (Helmreich 2000, p. 473). Lupton and Helmreich both
 VIRALITY 2.0 545

draw attention to the function of the virus as a cultural trope, invested with
multiple ideological meanings transferred from contemporary moral, legal and
ethical discourses. Two broad ideological frames deserve particular attention
here: first, the heteronormativity of HIV/AIDS panic, inseparable from other
viral discourse since its advent; and second, what Jussi Parikka (2004) calls
‘viral capitalism’.
In the case of manufactured panic around human viruses, notably HIV
which first emerged in the 1980s, a number of interlocking discursive patterns
emerge. Images of attack and hidden threat attempt to single out contaminat-
ing bodies and to mark them according to norms of individual and social
responsibility. Inter-corporeal practices assumed to be associated with these
kinds of marked bodies are branded risky and their erotic, social and cultural
meanings reduced to transmissive potential. Individuals and practices unrelated
to direct transmission risk are tainted by generalized symbolic association to
particular cases. To offer one resilient example, men who have or have had sex
with other men are still prohibited from donating blood in many countries,
including the USA and France; this effectively constructs as a blanket threat
to public health all gay men who are or have been sexually active in the last
30 years.
As authors such as Simon Watney (1987) and Douglas Crimp (1987)
started pointing out soon after the appearance of HIV/AIDS, and as is still
apparent in more recent evidence, a language of promiscuity has frequently
provided a moralistic and normalising explanatory framework for HIV
transmission since its first reported cases, working to equate HIV with gay
men and gay men with promiscuity. For Watney, such public discourse on
HIV/AIDS consolidated the ideological packing of kinship, home and sexual
identity in defensively heternormative terms:

the axiomatic identification of AIDS as a sign and symptom of homosexual

behavior reconfirms the passionately held view of ‘‘the family’’ as a
uniquely vulnerable institution. It also sanctions the strongest calls for
‘‘protectionist’’ measures, of an ever intensified censorship that will
obliterate the evidently unbearable cultural evidence of that sexual
diversity which stalks the terra incognita beyond the home (1987, p. 77).

Debates around promiscuity continue to this day, also beyond the standard
condemnation of gay men in the USA and Western Europe, and arguably
having accrued applicability to a more generalized population based on the
stereotyped homosexual blueprint. One of the key points that Watney is
making is that the discourse of promiscuity comes into being precisely because
of the ways in which the social and sexual behaviours that it claims to describe
fail to adhere to a model of intimacy centred on institutionalized heterosexual
monogamy. Queer theorists and activists have been motivated by such
normative logics, particularly since AIDS, to document the multiple alternative
546 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

social and sexual cultures of same-sex intimacy that are not reducible either to
the frame of the heteronormative dyad or its evil twin, promiscuity (see, for
instance, Berlant and Warner (1998)). Douglas Crimp (1987), writing in the
same journal issue as Watney, was quick to reclaim and resignify the word
promiscuity as a kind of community-building sharing of embodied knowledge
and practice that functioned to promote responsibility through the invention of
safe sex. Due to gay male sexual culture’s profileration of what counts as
sexual pleasure, he argues, ‘promiscuity should be seen instead as a positive
model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if
those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized
sexuality’ (Crimp 1987, p. 253).
It strikes me that what Crimp is describing here is something quite like a
loosely organized but highly effective pre-digital viral marketing campaign.
Consider the following frequently quoted definition of viral marketing from
industry specialist Ralph Wilson:

Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass

on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential
growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such
strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to
thousands, to millions (cited in Kirby 2006, p. 88).

Interestingly, this is one example of the discourse of media virality that does
acknowledge its virological parentage, even though in this case viruses are
explicitly recoded in positive terms as a means of taking strategic market
advantage. In fact, it would not be too much of a reach to suggest that Wilson is
celebrating the power of deliberate viral transmission by effectively advocating a
form of promiscuity. Inversely, for Crimp, promiscuity names the transmission
that is responsible community-building and networking
about sex, health and
many things besides, rather than being conflated with the spread of HIV itself.
What does it mean, then, for the current discourse of virality 2.0 to
implicitly recall social and cultural formations deemed risky and marginal
within its language of active, individualising, participatory, ‘sharing’ media
practices? A more compelling answer to this question emerges from a second
major viral discourse circulating through virality 2.0: ‘viral capitalism’. In his
cultural history of computer viruses, Jussi Parikka (2004) points out that the
virus is a central figure of post-industrial ‘information capitalism’, both because
viruses produce symptoms that can best be overcome through specific product
purchase and, more fundamentally, that their movement analogises capital’s
own expansive accumulation dynamics. Parikka (2004) writes:

The seemingly contradictory themes of the virus as the threat and the
essence of capitalism are, in fact, intertwined and operate in sync.
The ideas of risk control, safety measures and the construction of the
 VIRALITY 2.0 547

responsible user are thus to be read as integral elements of viral

capitalism: with these elements, or discourses, the fear of computer
viruses has been turned into a part of the flows of consumer capitalism,
products and practices that ‘‘buy off’’ anxiety.

To revisit the explanation of Project Cascade and its attempt to measure and
predict events of media virality, we observe that a transmission of marketing
terminology has led to the valorization of a multi-network space of promiscuity
as a ‘sharing conversation’, and its most impactful proponents singled out as
‘influential contributors’, even as ‘leaders’. As a device for tracking the
movement of viral objects, Project Cascade also resembles a range of
surveillance measures within the context of medical research, notably
epidemiological maps that aim to identify and isolate individual hubs of
transmissive activity. The hunt for the so-called ‘Patient Zero’ of HIV is
perhaps the most infamous example (Crimp 1987). But Project Cascade is also
manifestly motivated by re-channelling anxieties around lack of brand control
into the development of a map that allows the brand not just to follow or
predict circulation, but to ‘premediate’ it, that is to contain it within certain
possible futures (Grusin 2010) or projected ‘life-cycles’.
More ambiguously than the tracking of Patient Zero, Project Cascade
illustrates a tension within the circuits of virality between risk and security,
threat and control. Circulating in and around these spaces, the viral object is
not only a source of risk and threat but a necessary component. Because it has
been constructed to signify normatively as specific kinds of risk and threat, the
viral object becomes a functional medium of emergent, pre-mediating regimes
of security and control which claim to restore displaced norms
even in
advance. Examples range from community and governmental policing of safe
sex practices, to the development and marketing of anti-virus software, as
Parikka points out, to algorithms of digital content-sharing currently
standardized on social media platforms like Facebook. In the following
sections, I will unpack this paradox by which the virus is tracked as the object
of the virality 2.0 ‘conversation’ while being, in a sense, unspeakable. In turn,
the conversation develops a new syntax for capturing and putting to work the
viral object and its agents.

Interactivity
If viral objects are discursively constructed within their spaces of circulation for
certain cultural and ideological functions and futures, we must question what
factors enable and limit circulation. Also, if media virality is taken as a measure
of popularity and a result of promiscuous network participation, it is worth
questioning whether promiscuity and viruses are the same kind of popular.
548 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

I have claimed that a series of cultural shifts has led to a complex of discourses
of human and computer virality reproducing themselves within a new media
ecology. The rebranding of viral circulation as sharing has been of most
concern, and I turn my attention now to how sharing is structured.
In the cultural move from computer viruses to post-viral digital sharing,
one major point of tension exists around questions of voluntarity and agency.
No one really chooses to receive a computer virus, even though someone has
chosen to release it; this is the difference between the actions of a very small
number of virus-producers and the assumed inaction or negligence of
thousands of users. And while these same users may not always choose to
receive particular examples of viral media that appear on their social
networking applications, the virality of these objects depends upon two
interrelated modes of network participation. The first is that a maximum
number of receiving users retransmits the object throughout their own
networks. The second is that a maximum number of users who have created
more influential and far-reaching networks retransmit the material throughout
these wider and denser networks. Arguably the second is more efficient
because of its reliance on the activity of ‘promiscuous’ network hubs or
‘influential contributors to the conversation’. It may be, however, that virality
is as much about systemic functionality as it is about transmission by active
media users.
Partly in an attempt to shake off the negative implications of viruses,
Henry Jenkins offers the term ‘spreadable media’ in place of viral media,
arguing that the latter ‘mystifies how the process [of circulation] works’:

It is a kind of smallpox-soaked blanket theory of media circulation, in

which people become unknowing carriers of powerful and contagious
ideas which they bring back to their homes and work place, infecting their
friends and family (cited in Usher 2010).

In this formulation of unwilling and passive reception and retransmission of

viruses, Jenkins is concerned that the individual’s agency and activity in the
circulation process is exactly what is not recognized. As is now a familiar strain
from many years of his work on media audiences, Jenkins prefers to highlight
how the spreadability of media is not just circulation of the object, but the
cultural investment of that object with multiple meanings, modifications and
uses. In other words, elements of active participation in the object propel its
circulation. Without individually motivated uses of the object, it would not
circulate, and this is the basis of Jenkins’s current catchphrase, ‘if it doesn’t
spread, it’s dead’ (2011). Jenkins directly critiques the claim in Wired magazine
that media virality is based on a culture of ‘media snacks’, or easily obtainable
items that are bite-sized, tasty and addictive but not very nutritious. Rather, he
claims, viral media objects ‘travel through the web because they are
meaningful to the people who spread them’, and therefore they are not
 VIRALITY 2.0 549

‘nutritionally bereft, meaningless ‘snacks’’. It is precisely because of their

meaningfulness to each individual involved in circulation, who is more than
simply a ‘host’ of viral content, that objects spread. Spreadability is therefore
about use as much as movement:

Few of the ideas [of viral content] get transmitted in anything like their
original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in
response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs.
Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process
reveals little about the spread of these concepts (Jenkins 2011).

Jenkins’s celebration of individual motives and choices is, as always, laudable,

and I want to believe that each person that spreads any given media object does
so for a different reason from the next person. But the architecture that
produces media virality (or spreadability) may not allow us to discern fully
between individual motives and choices, circumstances and needs. It may be
the case that some of the most commonly used modes of circulation are
themselves responsible for ‘[s]tripping aside the human motives and choices’. If
so, the interactive basis of dynamics of ‘spreadability’ may be reduced, along
with claims to interactivity as a register of democratization.
I will take four simple examples here and offer observations. The first is
the ‘Like’ feature on Facebook, now so pervasive as to be present as a ‘sharing’
option on most other online applications, as well as having entered some
examples of everyday vernacular. The ‘Like’ button is a binary switch: you
click it and the object spreads; you don’t click it and nothing happens. But
clicking ‘Like’ may not only mean ‘I like this’ or ‘I enjoyed this item’ but a
whole host of possible responses, including ‘I think this is amazing’, ‘I think
this is reasonably interesting’, ‘I think this is stupid’, ‘I want to increase traffic
to this page’ and ‘my friend is pressuring me to Like her page and I don’t really
like it but I like her so what else can I do?’. In some circumstances, given the
lack of alternatives, ‘Like’ may even mean ‘Dislike’, and people on Facebook
are frequently posting comments lamenting the lack of a ‘Dislike’ button. This
alone suggests some desire to share without having to comment. By the same
token, not clicking ‘Like’ does not necessarily mean ‘dislike’, nor does it
necessarily register disengagement. The point is that all of these motivations
for clicking ‘Like’
and all of them are valuable
lead to the same result of
the item increasing in circulation and possibly going viral, but nothing of these
outcomes registers the multiplicity of user engagements. ‘Like’ flattens out this
multiplicity and becomes more about technical functionality, an unreflexive
bodily response, a way of interacting with the media object without having to
express individual motivation.
Unlike the ‘Like’ button, the ‘Share This Link’ feature now present on
many websites does allow users a more explicit opportunity to express
motivations for sharing, usually in the form of a text box where the user
550 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

can choose to write a short comment. This is a space where the range of
responses
from ‘I think this is amazing’ to ‘I feel obliged to share this’

can be elaborated. Each response aims to have some element of personal
interpretive influence on the contacts who receive the item, but in the key
cases of sharing to Facebook and Twitter the individual’s comment is limited
to a certain number of characters; moreover, at the level of reception, it is
not clear whether comments produce qualitative value or impact different
from each other or from no comment at all. Like the ‘Like’ feature, I would
argue that movement and circulation, that is ‘sharing’, are privileged over
motivations and modes of engagement which, while no less crucial to
individual experience, cannot adequately be transmitted along with the
object.
The ‘retweet’ function on Twitter demonstrates this most obviously.
Retweeting allows the user to copy a tweet they have received and to
forward it to their own network of followers, and for this reason it can be
crucial to rapid circulation and virality because of the possibility of exploiting
the network density of most influential or ‘followed’ users. These hub-
moments are exactly what Project Cascade aims to measure. And while
retweeting, like the Like button, may be thought to be a clear endorsement
of the copied content, it remains a flat endorsement at best and perhaps
nothing more than a mechanical gesture. Available research suggests, like
other sharing activity, that various motivations exist behind retweeting
behaviour. From their study of a sample of retweets, boyd, Golder and
Lotan offer a list of motivations, including, among others: ‘to amplify or
spread tweets to new audiences’; ‘to publicly agree with someone’; ‘as an
act of friendship, loyalty, or homage’; and ‘self-gain, either to gain followers
or reciprocity from more visible participants’ (2010, p. 6). Despite this
intriguing possibility that the user himself or herself might be a significant
component of what is circulated
over and above content
the researchers
conclude somewhat blandly:

Participants’ social and informational goals vary, and accordingly, so do

their retweeting practices. Regardless of why users embrace retweeting,
through broadcasting messages, they become part of a broader conversa-
tion (boyd et al. 2010, p. 10).

Again, like Project Cascade, the simple fact of ‘conversation’ through multiple
points of participation is affirmed without adequately examining how
participation functions
how it may be limited or enabled structurally by
architectural design and network dynamics, such as the particular densities of
connectivity that are exploited by users for self-promotional purposes.
Finally YouTube, the video-sharing site through which much of the above
activity also travels, also offers an architecture which promotes circulation in
ways that are not always about motivation or even content. Jenkins rightly
 VIRALITY 2.0 551

discusses how YouTube operates as a centre for participation around media

objects themselves and sometimes interactively with them. Making a similar
argument, Jean Burgess (2008) gives evidence of intricate intertextual and
metatextual engagements with popular videos
notably parody
that form
the basis for new kinds of community; the commercial for bottled water
discussed above is one such example. While dependent on the existing
notoriety of the original video, parodies posted on YouTube also divert traffic
back to the original, thereby increasing its circulation. But so do unrelated
videos that may have found themselves ‘tagged’ with similar search terms on
YouTube; moreover, YouTube automatically diverts traffic to those videos that
are already highly viewed, amplifying their circulation in what may be called an
artificial or mechanistic fashion. As Burgess and Jenkins both point out, the
value or success of a YouTube video
or indeed any viral media object
lies
in its breadth of circulation; on YouTube, this is measured by the index
labelled ‘number of views’. But given the feedback loops that account for at
least some of the intensity of circulation of videos with the highest number of
views, this index does not transparently reflect widespread peer-to-peer
transmission or reasons for it.
If these observations are correct (and further research is certainly required
to determine the dynamics of sharing activity) then the individualized and
motivated active user engagement of which Jenkins speaks is somewhat
fantasized, not because it does not exist (surely it has always existed) but
because moments of transmission or ‘sharing’ may be closer to performative or
citational gestures whose pre-inscribed discursive framework cannot fully
register the complexity of each engagement. From her study of a sample of
most highly viewed YouTube videos, Burgess (2008) writes:

it isn‘t evident on the basis of a textual reading why
or, more

importantly, in what ways
these videos were so popular during the
period in which the study was conducted. It is only by looking at the
creative activity that occurred around these videos that we can begin to
understand just how important participation is to popularity. (p. 3)

Anyone who’s ever questioned the value, purpose or interest of a viral video or
why it was forwarded to them will nod in agreement with Burgess here. Jodi
Dean may be one of them, although she takes quite a different line in claiming
that the very principles of value in communication change in the context of
‘communicative capitalism’, including Web 2.0 and the ‘fantasy of abundance’
which characterizes it. Dean (2009) writes:

The exchange value of messages overtakes their use value. So a message is

no longer primarily a message from a sender to a receiver. Uncoupled
from contexts of action and application . . . the message is simply part of a
circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is
552 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is

irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the
pool. (p. 26)

If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. Nonetheless, we might still conclude that all
kinds of content should circulate widely, as evidence of a robust and
unpredictable popular culture. But I would also apply a little pressure to
the ideas of popularity and participation here. Is it the same thing to say that a
video is ‘popular’ because it received several hundred thousand hits on
YouTube, or because it received more ‘Like’ thumbs up than most? Is a blog or
article ‘popular’ simply because it was posted on more Facebook profiles or
retweeted more than others? Burgess’s passing reference to the ‘quantitatively
popular’ (2009, p. 3) opens the door to these questions, and also takes us back
to Stuart Hall’s critique of ‘the ‘‘market’’ or commercial definition’ of
popularity (1998, p. 446). Another way to phrase these questions, adding a
new twist to this old Cultural Studies debate, would be: Is digital content
deemed popular because it has been ‘Liked’ by many? If these interactive
mechanisms have become a key measure of popularity, how successfully does
this measurement acknowledge what we might call ‘qualitative popularity’,
that is, something closer to Hall’s ‘descriptive’ or ‘anthropological’ definition
of popularity?
There used to be a brand of non-alcoholic whisky-flavoured beverage that
was advertised in Australia with the catchphrase ‘The drink you have when
you’re not having a drink’. The ‘sharing’ mechanisms discussed above are the
active, participatory user engagements you have when you are not really being
active, participatory or engaged. It is not that they are wholly about inactivity,
lack of participation or disengagement; rather, they are ways through the user
partly outsources their activity, participation and engagement to the medium
itself. Like non-alcoholic whisky (and perhaps bottled water) these built-in
features are counterparts to Slavoj Zizek’s (2004) concept of the ‘chocolate
laxative’. In this category, Zizek also includes decaffeinated coffee, fat-free
cream, ‘the redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration and
tolerant multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its
Otherness’. All are items, writes Paul A. Taylor (2009), ‘whereby the
qualitative feature . . . is extracted/reversed by the form in which it is
presented so that it now involves the agent of its own containment’ (p. 103).
To this list of chocolate laxatives, I add viral media: virality minus the virus.
In the case of interactive digital media, it is precisely the ideology of
interactive user participation that masks what Zizek calls interactivity’s
‘uncanny double’: interpassivity. As a number of people have argued following
Zizek, this is a mode in which interaction with the object
say, forwarding a
YouTube video or retweeting a link, compared to ‘just passively following the
show’
is replaced by the situation where ‘the object itself takes from me,
deprives me of, my own passivity, so that it is the object itself which enjoys the
 VIRALITY 2.0 553

show instead of me, relieving me of the duty to enjoy myself’ (Zizek 2009). In
Taylor’s explanation of the concept, interpassivity reframes interactivity in line
with an understanding of certain imaginative and interpretive uses of digital
media having already been ‘necessarily pre-inscribed with systemic qualities’, a
situation which ‘automatically circumscribes and undermines the extent to
which they can be substantively reappropriated for authentically transformative
purposes’ and thus represent some kind of democratic power shift (2009, p.
102). He continues:

In the context of the inter-passive subject of digitalized power and

governance, just as the very thing that constipates is used as a laxative, so
the inherently anti-participatory, (in a spatially grounded, traditional
conception of city-state democracy) immaterial tendency encapsulated in
the Internet is presented as the very vehicle and constitutive mode of new
forms of democratic interaction
digital citizenship etc. Similarly,
computer-mediated activity that is non-sensually circumscribed by pre-
encoded binary operations of computers is represented as the acme of
activity when, in fact, to repeat, interpassivity more accurately describes
the process (Taylor 2009, pp. 102
103).

Dean (2009) has made a similar claim, arguing that the interpassivity of digital
media communications constructs a ‘fantasy of participation’ in which
contributing to the circulation of content feels like ‘communicative action’;
through interpassive investment, the fetish object is active in our place. Users
‘believe they are active, making a difference by clicking on a button’ whereas
‘the frantic activity of the fetish works to prevent actual action, to prevent
something from really happening’ (Dean 2009, p. 31). The fantasy of ‘making
a difference’ contributes to Dean’s larger claim for communicative capitalism
as ‘democracy that talks without responding’ (2009, p. 22)
Following Taylor’s and Dean’s claims, I would argue that social protocols
of interactivity emerging from increasingly immersive, even inescapable
networked media use may even produce coercive dynamics of participation
whereby the only viable alternative or oppositional mode of engagement is
opting out altogether. In such a coercive context, it is also worth reconsidering
the relationship between popularity and promiscuity, where the ability to
persuasively perform the density and influence of one’s network participation
(or ‘leadership’) positions the networking subject himself or herself as the self-
created viral object
the convergence of qualitative and quantitative
popularity as the ultimate Web 2.0 success story. For Mark Coté and Jennifer
Pybus (2011), drawing on Judith Butler’s work, the viability of such a subject
position demands recognition within a space that is ‘intensely social and
performative’. For this reason, the ‘desire to signify amongst networks of
friends establishes modes of intelligibility’ within ‘an ontological space
grounded in the affective and constitutive relations of users’ (Coté and Pybus
554 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

2011, p. 12). The primacy of the subject, then, constituted in relation to

norms of intelligible sharing, allows us to complicate bland and depoliticised
notions of ‘conversation’.

The sharing subject

A major element of Web 2.0’s privileging of interactivity and participation
within various kinds of ‘sharing conversation’ including viral transmission is the
construction of what I call the ‘sharing subject’. Dean (2009) argues that
within the fantasy of participation that structures communicative capitalism,
individual networked media users are ‘accustomed to putting their thoughts
online’ but moreover that they believe ‘their thoughts and ideas are
registering’ (p. 31). We could say that by clicking ‘Like’ or retweeting a
link, we believe ourselves to be ‘contributing to the conversation’, to use the
language of Project Cascade. The result, Dean continues, is that contributing
has ‘a subjective registration effect’, which I read to mean both an effect of
having one’s impact or contribution registered and the effect of one’s subjectivity
registered (2009, p. 31). In this sense, the belief in impact or contribution
effected by circulating content inaugurates and ratifies the subject, and does so
within a space determined by norms of intelligibility. As Dean’s wider project
makes clear, current modes of intelligibility normalize the neoliberal subject
produced within the framework of communicative capitalism in which
‘[n]etworked communication and information technologies are exquisite media
for capturing and reformatting political energies’ as ‘contributions to the
circulation of content’ (2009, pp. 31
32).
Dean’s ideas are largely consistent with a number of other scholars who
have theorized the ‘putting to work’ of interactive consumers for purposes of
capital accumulation. Mark Andrejevic (2008), for instance, also employs the
concept of interpassivity to critique assumptions that interactive media,
including some aspects of television viewing and related online activities,
produce unequivocally favourable conditions for audience agency. Complicat-
ing this picture, he finds, is ways in which user interactivity is exploited as
marketing strategy by media producers. Possibilities for creative or subversive
activity are not entirely foreclosed but co-exist alongside production strategies
which both allow and are captured by them. In a slightly different context,
Melissa Gregg (2007) has identified the pervasion of neoliberal discourse in the
increasingly entrepreneurial leisure practices of social networking sites,
including the adding of ‘friends’ to one’s list of contacts as a kind of
purposeful labour. In both Andrejevic’s and Gregg’s work, strategic
manipulations of positionality and popularity emerge as complications to the
ordinary sociality and participation appearing to take place.
 VIRALITY 2.0 555

As I have briefly discussed above, the mutual influence of digital marketing

techniques and so-called ‘amateur’ or ‘ordinary user’ practices and aesthetics
shows further evidence of the penetration of neoliberal and capitalist logics
into everyday digital media practice and the appropriation of this practice in
and as new forms of circulating value. This trend is clearly exemplified by the
capture of the potential of unlikely YouTube phenomenon Keenan Cahill
in several corporate structures following the massive circulation of his
lip-synching videos. Cahill has now been folded into promotions for top-
selling performers 50 Cent and Katy Perry, as well as the brand of bottled
water with which this essay begins: all are examples of retrospective attempts
to capitalize on Cahill’s unmanufacturable virality, that is the extraordinary
qualities of an ordinary amateur YouTube user.
The recognition of virality as capitalist opportunity, however, found its
momentum prior to Web 2.0 marketing techniques, as Parikka’s (2004) work
on viral capitalism makes clear; indeed he maintains that construction of viral
threats is not merely consistent but ‘intertwined’ with capitalist structures.
Likewise, Helmreich (2000) writes that the emerging and unpredictable threat
of computer viruses from the late 1980s provoked a need to construct systems
characterized by ‘flexibility and adaptability
virtues connected to market
ideals of advanced capitalist production and also to contemporary descriptions
of the immune system’ (p. 473). In both theories, a framework of subjectivity
is constructed around the user’s encounter with the virus where viral attack
must be met by offensive rather than defensive manoeuvres. Helmreich is
describing a biopolitics of responsiveness to viral threats and projected viral
futures, where qualities drawn from the discursive construction of nationalist
and capitalist frames of citizenship
and these in turn from the racial, gender
and class inscription of normative bodies
converge in the construction of the
responsive and responsible subject.
The ‘sharing subject’ is one who, like viral content and the viruses
themselves that they mimic, can embody the neoliberal values of flexibility and
adaptability, even so as to rebrand cultural threat as market leadership or
popularity. This manipulation of the virus in current discourses of virality 2.0,
loaded as the figure of the virus has been with a range of sociocultural fears,
registers the more specific anxiety around the erasure or instability of the
agentic subject. As is apparent in Jenkins’s metaphor of the ‘smallpox-soaked
blanket’, the media consumer is thought to be positioned as powerless to the
agency of the virus itself. In the language of viral marketing, however, and
perhaps even in Jenkins’s theory of ‘spreadability’, this very agency is
celebrated under a different set of names and transferred to the user, and the
possibilities of nuisance incurred upon the involuntary host of the virus seem
more or less to be overlooked.
Tying these strands together, the interactive agency that characterizes the
sharing subject must be recognized as an instrumentality of the regimes of
capital to which virality is central. In other words, the individual sharing
556 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

activity that propels viral circulation is put to work. Adapting Lazzarato for the
Web 2.0 context, Coté and Pybus (2011) call this process ‘learning to
immaterial labour 2.0’, in that the ways users work at online social networks
demonstrate how they ‘enthusiastically respond in the affirmative to the call:
‘become subjects!’’ (p. 170) In so far as this subjective labour secures the
continuity and strength of network formations, and the ability of media
corporations and advertisers to capitalize upon them, it participates in what
Grusin (2010) refers to as the contemporary logic of ‘securitization’ that
occurs through everyday media networks and the detailed archiving of user
data:

The disciplinary regime of securitization not only depends upon but also
encourages the proliferation of transactions and other data so that its
algorithms can connect the dots. Premediation operates in the current
security regime to ensure that there will always be enough data (enough
dots) in any particular, potential, or imagined future to be able to know in
advance, before something happened, that it was about to happen’’ (p. 124).

Rather than securing against the risk of uncontained viral futures, virality 2.0
reinforces the conditions for their proliferation
precisely so as to capture
their potential. Sharing subjects participate in these futures by working at
‘pleasurable, embodied affective interactions’ with networking media devices
(Grusin 2010, p. 125), their labour given normative social value by a language
of agency, flexibility, sharing and, implicitly, democracy.
In addition, mere participation on any level in the networks of virality 2.0
risks being taken as consent to the hegemony of interactivity, mitigated by the
constant promise of potential for impact that will balance out necessary
moments of relative passivity to other users’ ‘sharing’. Far from the horizontal
redistribution of power and influence presumed in popular discussions of
online social networks, a new hierarchy emerges around degrees of sharing
success. More than a contest for popularity that sharing might initially indicate,
successful sharing is measured according to the persuasive enactment of
performative and citational codes constituting the field of intelligibility for the
sharing subject.

Conclusion: beyond activity

While the ability of the sharing subject to perform flexibility and adaptability
marks a significant component of their success, I will conclude by claiming that
the subject’s stability and instrumentality is also defined according to the
heteronormative logic in which the alternative intimacies of promiscuity be
rebranded as active sharing and market leadership. In her critique of 1990s
hypertext theory, Michelle Kendrick (2002) notes the inability of key male
 VIRALITY 2.0 557

thinkers such as George Landow to read transformations of textual practice

and power relations brought about by this technological moment outside of a
‘phallocentric’ and ‘Eurocentric’ literary theoretical tradition. Specifically, she
argues that their celebration of the overturning of ‘[l]inearity, hierarchy [and]
the submission of a passive reader to a controlling author’ manages to make ‘no
more than cursory mention’ of second-wave French feminists who identified
equivalent ruptures within the tradition of écriture féminine two decades earlier
(Kendrick 2002). Rather than using the opportunity of hypertext to destabilize
the ideological and specifically gendered construction of subject positions,
Kendrick maintains that ‘the hypertext boys’ instead reconstitute the subject
around the glorification of ‘masculine cognition’ in the figure of the reader,
now ‘granted supposed unlimited agency within controlled and selective
abundance’. Expressed in these terms, agency correlates with the ‘fantasy of
abundance’ identified by Jodi Dean within communicative capitalism.
While I am not necessarily advocating a return to 1970s feminism, at least
not without critiquing its own essentialist tendencies (as Kendrick herself
points out), I am calling for the need to re-examine instances of contemporary
media and cultural discourse that may too easily fall back on normative
impulses, particularly those that might otherwise have been erased by the
theoretical opportunities of the digital. A rethinking of pleasure is one such
opportunity, and in this context Kendrick reminds us of the French feminists’
claims on agency:

we see agency in their theories as, not necessarily, founded on notions of

control and power; certainly not about centering oneself and ‘‘penetrat-
ing’’ the text; rather agency was often for them pleasure. Bodily pleasure
that is specific, and localized and yet amorphous and multiple. Think for a
moment about the pleasure of orgasm; It is at once bodily in a absolutely
direct way, but it is also a cognitive act, culturally shaped and informed.

Subverting normative codes that determine the location of pleasure and acts
involved in producing pleasure works to resignify agency beyond a paradigm of
‘activity’ and its passive other. In the context of a Web 2.0 frenzy to turn
everyone into active (‘phallocentric’) user-subjects, one aspect of the experience
of viral media that remains overlooked is precisely the affordance of pleasure
beyond the hegemony of recognition and sharing success that over-emphasizes
the agency of ‘leadership’. One such pleasure may be that of relinquishing
control to the promiscuous, viral flows of content
in all of its
unmanufactured, immoderate, multiplying intensity.
Revisiting the theoretical provocations of second-wave French feminism
and queer critique emerging in the first years of HIV/AIDS draws attention to
what has not been achieved and what has been undone in the more recent turns
to neoliberal, post-feminist and homonormative discourses, including those
policing sexual, social and cultural pleasures and their corresponding imagined
558 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

risks. With this in mind, I return to Leo Bersani (1987) who, alongside the
interventions of Crimp and Watney quoted above, argued:

a gravely dysfunctional aspect of what is, after all, the healthy pleasure we
take in the operation of a coordinated and strong physical organism is the
temptation to deny the perhaps equally strong appeal of powerlessness, of
the loss of control. Phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial
of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere
and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in
both men and women. I don’t mean the value of gentleness, or
nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical
disintegration and humiliation of the self (pp. 216
217).

Such a reconfiguration of power relations
mutually constitutive of sexual

relations, as Bersani points out, through the gendered politics of positionality

seems to me the missed opportunity of virality. To understand viral media
circulation only within the emblematically heteronormative positions of
active/passive, and to come down on one side of this dyad as both Jenkins
and those he critiques seem to do, is to overly reify the coherent subjectivities
that sexual and digital networks could otherwise so pleasurably disperse.
Despite its appropriation of the modalities of uncontained circulation, virality
2.0 works to secure the agency, labour and affects of sharing against a range of
broadly conceived risks
that networks not expand, that applications not mine
user data, that ordinary users not continue to produce catchy content. Risk,
however, is a source of pleasure and not just a frame that contains it. The
ultimate paradox of virality 2.0 might just be that ultimately, implicitly, it calls
its subjects to exceed their own instrumentality.

Notes on contributor

Robert Payne is an Assistant Professor of Global Communications and English

at the American University of Paris. His overarching research interest is the
framing of gender and sexuality within spaces of everyday media and popular
culture, and he is currently working on a book project analysing the concepts
of ‘‘sharing’’ and ‘‘virality’’ within digital and other cultural spaces. With
Cristyn Davies, Robert is co-editor of the most recent special issue of the
journal Sexualities, entitled ‘‘Citizenship and Queer Critique’’.

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