Virality: Going, Going, Gone
By Katie Lotz
From where I sat on the carpet of my elementary school classroom during one of the many internet safety presentations that my generation has endured, going viral on the internet appeared to be one of the scariest things that could happen to a person. I remember countless teachers and guidance counselors reminding myself and my peers throughout my adolescence of the various unique dangers that existed within the dark void of the internet. “People are not always who they claim to be”; “any personal information that you reveal will be on the internet forever”. Even though, like most people my age, I made an Instagram account at the age of twelve and a Twitter account by thirteen; I tried to adhere to these warnings as best as I could by keeping my social media accounts set to private and only interacting with people I knew.
Simply put, in the early 2000s, the internet still felt like uncharted territory to adults; it was a dangerous place, because anything you said or did could be viewed and shared by an endless amount of people. Back in those days, a viral video would be talked about for weeks, if not months; remember the absolute chokehold that the “double rainbow all the way!” or “Charlie bit my finger” videos had on us? However, as the generation that was raised on the internet has grown into adulthood, and the generation that has never existed in a pre-social media world has grown old enough to create posts themselves, the concept of “going viral” has quickly turned from a fear to a desire, and social media platforms have scrambled to meet the demands of a user base that is eager to perform. TikTok especially has answered this call by creating an algorithm that makes it especially likely for casual users to have a “viral” video, without having a large follower base or frequent engagement. However, in a setting where nearly everyone has a piece of content with upwards of thousands of views, does virality even exist anymore?
Dani Rooney, a 21-year-old college student, had a brush with internet notoriety in May of 2020, when she posted a TikTok video about the morning that she found out one of her one of her grandparents had passed away … on the same day that Zayn Malik infamously left One Direction. Rooney’s video was clearly lighthearted; she captioned it, “it was a two birds, one stone kinda day,” and — in true “TikTok” format — created her video using a trending sound. To her surprise, this video gained over 500 thousand views, and 44 thousand likes. About her reaction to this burst of interest in one of her TikToks, Rooney said, “I was actually a little more excited than I care to admit. Being in isolation because of the pandemic really heightened the importance of my social connection gained through technology … During a time where I was more alone than I had ever been, going viral was actually a strangely emotional experience.”
Still, despite the shock of having nearly half a million people view a video she had made during quarantine, Rooney had no dreams of becoming a “full-time content creator,” but rather, views this experience as merely an occasional talking point; “Sometimes if the subject comes up in conversation I can chime in and say
I, too, had a TikTok that blew up,’ but so many young people have at least one viral video, that it’s not surprising anymore.”
Essentially, the novelty of going viral has culturally worn off, if not entirely lost its meaning. A little over a decade ago, going viral was interesting because it wasn't something that was supposed to happen. Social media was marketed as a way to connect and share your life with people that you know, so when somewhat authentic moments that were shared online began to garner widespread attention, it more often than not was an accident. In addition to this, there was just less online for the average person to look at, meaning that viral videos had a much longer shelf life than they do today. In 2006 (the year that Charlie the Unicorn was posted to Youtube, iykyk), the primary social media platforms available to the American public were Myspace, Youtube, and Reddit; Youtube led these three platforms with a groundbreaking 54.7 million monthly active users (MAUs). A mere decade later, in 2016, there were ten notable social media networks, which were led in popularity by Facebook, which had a MAU base of 1.75 billion. Now, compare that to today, where 3.78 billion people worldwide use some form of social media, and it becomes quite clear that the scope of internet content is far, far broader than it once was.
So what does this mean for viral videos? One might think that with so many more people on the internet, there is an infinitely higher chance that something a person posts will be seen by an astronomically higher number of people. To a degree, this is true, but this fact is almost cancelled out by the reminder that there is a ridiculously higher number of people posting on social media platforms, and posting far more regularly than before. Due to this, a post or video might fleetingly receive a widespread amount of attention, only to be lost in the whirlwind of the next “viral” post.
Likes and views are no longer translatable to internet notoriety in the ways that they once were. Virality is rarely an unexpected accident, and the days of becoming a popularly recognized figure off of a widely circulated post are behind us. For Dani Rooney, her main takeaway of having a TikTok blow up was “... how much work goes into being famous online. Sure, sometimes people are shot to stardom overnight due to the the magic of the internet, but there are so many people on platforms like TikTok who are actually trying to become famous creators, that the odds of regular people achieving celebrity status are low unless they are constantly producing new, specialized, and relevant content, and the stars align just right.”
In a way, this is somewhat freeing; a strange sense of anonymity has been returned to the general public as a result of this explosion of internet content. Virality may be dead, but what has taken its place is a newfound form of connection. Videos that do well on the internet nowadays no longer have the slapstick cadence of an early 2010’s video, which often felt awfully reminiscent of an America’s Funniest Home Videos bit, but rather, popular videos nowadays appeal to a niche audience, and often have something to say or a universal experience to share. In the wake of an online culture that was excited to consume any form of widespread content, we have become pickier audience members, who have shorter attention spans, but more nuanced taste. ◆