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AFTER THE HEADLINE ‘Video of Fired-Up Footballers In Wild Win Celebration Goes Viral’ appeared today in British tabloid The Sun, the phrase ‘goes viral’ itself went viral. According to leading media-tracking data analytics company StatBuster, the term ‘goes viral’ had, as of this moment, been deployed 78 467 294 times in headlines and news reports on websites, blogs and social media platforms. However, in only a fraction of these instances could the claim that a piece of content posted on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Viber, Snapchat or WhatsApp had ‘gone viral’ be objectively authenticated.
In an interview with Buzzfeed News that has since gone viral, StatBuster CEO Ethan James, 15, attempted to explain exactly how one quantifies whether or not a snippet of media content which had captured the attention of a certain percentage of the online community for more than 3.4 seconds had indeed ‘gone viral’ or not. ‘The video of the footballers had been shared approximately 100 000 times as of 2.1 seconds ago,’ said James. ‘But since then another video, entitled “Crazed Commuter Slaps Train Conductor” had been shared over 180 000 times in less than half the time, so it’s difficult to establish the objective conditions whereby something has “gone viral” while something else has not,’ he concluded.
To further complicate matters, a video entitled ‘Parents Feed Toddler to Shark for Instagram Likes’ had been viewed just under 7 million times in the last minute, further complicating what the viral term ‘going viral’ really means.
According to guitarist of local post-rock band All That Is Revealed Is Banished Beyond the Desolate Emptiness of the Dying Void, the video of their song ‘Upon The Wings of Dark Hearts We Explode Into Abandoned Oceans’ had just racked up its 300th YouTube view. ‘Guys, we’ve gone viral,’ he excitedly informed his bandmates at last night’s practice. ‘I even got a fucking email from Google and everything.’ Upon receiving the news, the band immediately resolved to suspend practice in order to schedule photo shoots and craft press releases, album bios and letters to prominent record labels, amending their standard description of their band as ‘melancholy bards of the abyss’ to ‘viral sensation’.
Exploiting the absence of a solid metric to distinguish between ‘viral’ and ‘non-viral’ content, in an unprecedented moment of happenstance, all 550 000 advertising and marketing agencies around the globe simultaneously pitched a campaign to a client, a key component of which was the promise of a ‘viral video’. Popular YouTube channel ThinkMedia released a supercut of these presentations which rapidly gained over 2 million views prompting advertising blog AdWeek to release a story with the headline ‘Viral Video About Viral Videos Goes Viral’.
At the time of going to press, Covid-19, HIV, Ebola, Smallpox, Measles and The Common Cold had filed an urgent petition to the International Committe on Taxonomy of Viruses to be reclassified as ‘bacteria, microbes, pathogens, anything’ citing ‘the rampant abuse and subsequent degradation and denigration of the very concept of a virus’.
