Attempts to explain viral content circle back to behavioral psychology and game theory. What “goes viral” and what doesn’t depends on a combination of taste-making celebrities, powerful users on content distribution platforms like YouTube and Twitter, market dynamics, and luck, or so we are told. But it’s worth thinking about virality as a phenomenon that passes through corporate media systems. That is, decision-making about what goes viral often devolves to individual editors at digital media companies.
For example, a story on one of Columbia University’s campus news sites has been making the Internet rounds. Bwog published a pseudo-study of how many seniors at Columbia prefer cheese to oral sex. Amusing if ordinary stuff for Bwog, a site known for its irreverent humor and mild anti-institutional flavor. The article was by no means extraordinary or even unusual for Bwog, but Gothamist discovered it, perhaps by way of an alumni, and re-blogged it. Now, the Huffington Post, Complex, and MSN have aggregated the post. With hundreds of shares, the story continues to gain traction.
The regular migration of content from local channels to international media outlets demands a more complete accounting than game theoretical explanations. While individual editorial talents at those big media companies do rely on the crowd to source aggregate-able content, their decision-making processes are independent of pure democratic consensus. Indeed, as consumers, we expect editors to pluck interesting content we might not have encountered otherwise from the backwaters of the web. Yet we are also expected to participate in the “surfacing” of obscure content before it disappears into deep archives. Perhaps we should hold editorial teams more accountable for their contribution to virality.