Olumide Eseyin
Viral Media
Awareness and Commitment Online
Awareness spreads.Commitment doesn’t. This paper aims to look beyond tangible media objects like videos, sounds and images and examine what sometimes happens when simple ideas, information, rumors and emotions become viral in various social media channels. Is there an inverse relationship between levels of virulence and complexity of interaction (Shirky 60)? In certain scenarios, can scale have a limiting effect on the complexity and richness of conversation surrounding certain objects and ideas?
On August 8th, 2011, the popular viral and social content aggregator BuzzFeed published a short post on a meme called Horsemaning. Hot on the heels of the widely popular Planking and Owling memes, Horsemaning seemed poised to become the next big photo-based game on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites with heavy photo integration. According to the inaugural post on BuzzFeed, “Horsemaning, or fake beheading, was a popular way of taking pictures in the 1920s” (BuzzFeed). As illustrated by the pictures in the post, including a picture purported to be from one of the first horsemaning incidents in the 1920s, a successful beheading required only three friends and a camera – one friend to be the headless horseman, one friend to stand in as the decapitated head, and one friend to take the picture. The meme seemed to take off and in a matter of days had made its way to NBC’s TODAY Show where hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb joined in, contributing their own photo. Approximately a week after horsemaning first surfaced, word began to spread thanks to a few keen observers that the meme seemed forced, manufactured and tied to an origin story that couldn’t be verified beyond BuzzFeed’s post and accompanying photo. After a short backlash, BuzzFeed published a follow up post admitting reluctantly that horsemaning was indeed manufactured inside the BuzzFeed office and not, as originally reported, an antique meme “currently experiencing a revival” (BuzzFeed).
Following BuzzFeed’s confession, many commenters wondered what was so wrong with a meme created by an immensely popular website that documents memes anyway? As bloggers like Andrew Baron posted in response, the through line in almost all coverage of the horsemaning meme centered around the doctored photo that BuzzFeed presented as evidence of its origin in the 1920’s (Dembot). This remarkable, yet mostly unverified claim seems to have been the most responsible forpropelling the meme to such a scale as to make an appearance on TODAY. On the episode, Hoda Kotb described it as a “huge internet craze”, a phrase that is easy to take issue with considering how easy it is for anything to gather some momentum online. However, the issue isn’t with the advantage that horsemaning enjoyed and would’ve enjoyed even more if things went as planned for BuzzFeed, the issue is with how accepting the greater online community was of the origin story. Everyone from online users to casual bloggers to reputable news sites echoed BuzzFeed’s claim without stopping to dig deeper and verify its authenticity. There’s no evidence to suggest that news of the meme’s false beginning so much as registered on the set of TODAY but if it did not, then it is in keeping with the general “on to the next one” attitude online and in the traditional 24 hour news circle toward things that seem to gather momentum but ultimately fade outwithout leaving any significant impact on the populace. It happened with KONY 2012 and is currently happening with today’s hot button news items or unlikely viral phenomenon.The horsemaning kerfuffle hinted at how damaging this trend can be when the details being blindly hyped upcanland someone, if not an entire movement, in a very embarrassing position. Horsemaning also revealed something that traditional media, social media and the media consumer now have in common: the inability to escape the trappings of hyperbole in their relentless attempts to remain current.
Phoned in outrage from a political pundit, knee-jerk reactions to the latest marketing decision, exaggerated enthusiasm for pieces of popular culture;hyperbole is one of the most contagious and persistent elements in the media ecology. Dictionary.com defines hyperbole as “obvious and intentional exaggeration.” The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has it defined as “a way of speaking or writing that makes something sound better, more exciting, dangerous, etc than it really is.” Richard Dawkins would likely identify hyperbole as an important factor in the spread of certain memes and in their longevity. In his pioneering work on meme theory, he argued that time – not space – is the most crucial in determining which memes survive and which ones don’t. Here’s what he said about the relationship between the processing ability of the human brain and the chances of a meme’s survival: “The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ meme” (Dawkins 6). This is where I think hyperbole enters the equation as one of the most effective and widely used methods for equipping the average meme with fidelity, fecundity, and longevity (Jenkins).For the intents and purposes of this paper, I will further extend the definition of hyperbole to better contextualize it within our current media ecology.For the purpose of measuring the richness of interactions and emotional impulses in our social media enclaves, hyperbole is the polar opposite of complexity.Hyperbole online doesn’t always involve exaggeration in the classical sense but it involves the simplification and generalization of a complex thought in a way that makes it easy for others to consume and spread without sacrificing a lot of time, energy or brain function. It suggests to people that it is acceptable to hold a certain point-of-view without an underlying reason for it so long as that point-of-view is shared by many others.Before the emergence of the Internet and social media when there was a scarcity of information, people generally had time for complexity in producing, consuming and processing information. Today, we experience a surplus of information. People now rely, knowingly or unknowingly, on hyperbole to push through the clutter and get people interested in things they stumble upon and find interesting.
Hyperbole can be misleading as evidenced by the flood of KONY 2012 tweets and status updates that eroded the Internet. The sum total of genuine commitment to the cause that the video succeeded in procuring from people who saw it was greatly offset by the influx of people newly aware of the video and itching to spread that awareness but uncommitted to digging any deeper.In the sense that it is sometimes difficult to tell commitment from simple awareness online, hyperbole can also be seen as what happens online when casual awareness looks like something more. Sometimes it can’t be controlled and sometimes it is purposely employed for ironic detachment, trolling, entertainment, over-reaction or simply not wanting to feel left out. It is fitting that the KONY 2012 video itself is an exercise in hyperbole – a simplification of a complex issue in order to make it digestible for the attention-deficit consumers that make up the majority of our new media ecology.The collective emotional response it invoked was just as hyperbolic, carrying beneath it very little substance or complexity. In the end of its run, KONY 2012 was just another piece of information competing for our time and attention. It came and went and for a few weeks, millions of people got to prove to their circle of friends that they were aware of the goings on in their global surroundings. While tapping into the potential a social cause contains for enriching the public image of the aspirational self isn’ta new phenomenon nor is it without its benefits to the cause (the RED Campaign embraced this behavior in its donors), the arrival of KONY 2012 to Facebook signaled to me more than anything else before it just how superficial a movement can become when it relies heavily on hyperbole and over-simplification. Today, social awareness as wall dressing is made possible thanks to how acceptable simple awareness (slacktivism) has become online.When viewed in its collective whole, simple awareness on a mass scale can very easily be mistaken for something more but can never double as genuine collective commitment.
At a time when awareness isn’t only becoming exceedingly easier to transmit but also easy to mistake for commitment, what happens to the individual’s motivation to commit to anything? What happens to the group’s ability to conduct complex interactions? Revisiting Dawkins’ argument that ideas have to compete with other ideas for precious time and attention from the human brain, I would like to draw a connection between Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and revered American comedian Bill Cosby. As referenced in their individual works by media scholars Evgeny Morozov and Mark Poster, Kierkegaard – a pioneering existentialist and noted media critic during his time, lamented the emergence of information society because in his mind it flooded the individual with an abundance of contentbut very little time left to process it and give it a meaning that was true to his/her own experience (Morozov 184, Poster 143). While I don’t agree with Kierkegaard placing the blame on the press for what happens when an excess of surface awareness drowns out commitment, I do wonder what he would think of Twitter’s list of trending topics – a leaderboard and gateway to an abundance of content that is almost entirely decided on by regular users, save for a few high profile tastemakers.Instances of hyperbole at the ground level of the individual user is usually harmless but when it spreads rapidly in special cases like horsemaning and KONY 2012, it can have a numbing effect over time on the individual’s ability to show commitment to anything. For all the instances of protests like the ones in Iran and Egypt appearing on the trending topics list and validating its importance as a feature of the social network,the many trivial and sometimes offensive items they have to compete with for the top spot on the list easily undermine their connection to true, on-the-ground commitment.Bill Cosby is most notable for his TV shows, comedy work and speaking engagements but if a couple million tweets are to be taken into account, he’s also notable for passing away not once, but four different times as of August 2010 (D’Zurilla). The way rumors spread offline is different from the way rumors spread online. On the web, with very little effort one can literally see a rumor spread, quantify its impact and hold it up against other pieces of information in comparison but in order to actually tell it apart from accurate information, one has to pick up a shovel and dig. Twitter’s trending topics, which broke the news of Cosby’s death to many on all four different occasions, is a perfect example of what Dawkins refers to when he talks about ideas competing for time and attention.I wonder what Kierkegaard would’ve thought about Bill Cosby on one of the four occasions of his passing on twitter, sitting next to nine other items of information, amassing a staggering amount of “RIP” tweets from all kinds of people not invested enoughin the idea of Bill Cosby to take the time to process the information before spreading it.
Morozov inThe Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, also asks about the ability of the online community to maintain a healthy level of novelty to its individual members at a time when anything, whether authentic or ill conceived, can reach staggering levels of virulence and collective validation. Like the classic tale of the boy who cried wolf, Morozov’srecountingofthe activity ofa Facebook group created as an experiment by Danish psychologist Anders Colding-Jorgensen to prevent Copenhagen’s famous Stork Fountain monument from being demolished paints a grim picture of what the average person’s outlook can be reduced to after a series of false fire alarms. The stork fountain was never in danger of being demolished, yet in two weeks the Facebook group grew from a meager 125 members to 27,500 before Colding-Jorgensen shut it down (Morozov 179). For all 27,500 people who joined, there was likely a high volume of people who perhaps thought about joining but first decided to dig a little deeper, showing potential for commitment to the cause. Some would undoubtedly have found out the truth about the group. However, the press the group was getting would’ve easily misled others.Kierkegaard’s vision of individuals separated and insulated in their own cocoons of awareness coupled with inaction might’ve been an over-reaction in retrospect but I do think it is important that one take responsibility for the richness and complexity of one’s interactions online or else risk becoming part of a brain dead hive mind.
The zombie apocalypse is still years away but for now we can get a glimpse of what it would look like in works of entertainment like AMC’s The Walking Dead. However, for a more immediate experience of an ongoing display of zombie solidarity, one needs to look no further than BuzzFeed and its practice of encouraging hyperbolic reactions to everything from Lana Del Ray to pictures of the recent tornadoes in Texas. BuzzFeed’s posts are usually short on text and heavy on imagery. It has tags that users can allocate to each story that gets a feature. On the surface, these tags seem like a fun and easy way to participate in deciding collectively what news and events that go viral mean to the majority of users online. However, a closer look at the comment section below the average BuzzFeed post reveals a lack of meaning or complexity in the conversations being had. In spite of the ability to alsoleave comments with each tag, only a few actually leave comments and even fewer respond to other people’s comments. The prevalent activity of tagging is as easy as one click. While this isn’t particularly bad by itself (after all, the prevalent activity on Facebook is “liking” things), behind each click lies the conceit that one has actually thought about the content and given it meaning. In reality, this is as far away from the truth as taking a multiple choice test differs from a writing research paper in terms of the amount of brain activity required for each. The tags play their part by taking basic human emotions, reactions and adjectives and reducing them to simple acts of clicking once. In addition to that, below each tag sits a number – a tally of how many clicks they’ve amassed so far. These numbers turn the act of processing information into a game by influencing the user’s reaction in subliminal ways. By allowing one-word tags – short bursts of unelaborated, knee-jerk reactions – to operate as stand-ins for complex, intuitive reactions, users are giving in to the simplification of interactions that persists online and rids information of its meaning.
What social networking hubs like BuzzFeed also enable is the act of thinking out loud online. Offline, people generally try to avoid thinking out loud but when it happens, the effects are only on a relatively tiny scale. By making the cost of participation and interaction extremely low online, thinking out loud isn’t only encouraged, but inevitable. Thinking out loud online is as common as posting a fleeting thought to twitter. Thinking out loud online also occasionally looks and sounds like casual banter between friends – something initially meant for a few friends that often becomes content for many others. As one of the best examples today of passing thoughts and conversations between friends going viral, the act of taking screenshots of tweets, status updates and text messages and repurposing them as image posts on sites like Tumblr speaks to Matthew Fuller’swritings about the isolatable media object (Fuller 96). Facebook and Twitter are valued for the many ways they put users at ease to communicate freely with like-minded people. What happens however, when casual conversations between friends are plucked out of the media habitat they originated from and placed inside a channel that usually hosts content meant for wider public consumption? Suddenly a status update or interaction between friends on Facebook or Twitter has the potential to influence an infinitely larger volume of people than the average user’s friend count. The permanence of an object like a screenshot of a tweet or status update allows for two things: 1) The inability of the user to elaborate on the content to everyone who eventually gets to seeit and 2) blurring the line even further between eavesdropping and taking part in a conversation. The piece of communication spreads but the more exposure it gets, the less complexity it can afford. Like commitment, complexity asks that one be willing to dig a little deeper in their interactions. Because the content in this scenario is taken from a fairly private channel and made public, the interactions that result from it, however extensive, are rarely able to rise above hyperbole. Poster writes about this conflation of public and private spaces where a simple Facebook conversation isn’t just a conversation anymore: “In this discussion it is important to keep in mind the question of the private and the public, for what seems to arouse the ethical concern about the Internet is often the ease of access and global availability of what is posted there, just the features that the design promotes (Poster 147). The Internet has built itself up to be a place where conversations between friends, often choke full of instances of hyperbole and thinking out loud,are frequently mistaken as content for public consumption (Shirky 56).