How Do You Get Something to Spread?

For reasons that will be later explained in the class, I don't like using the term viral.

Viral implies, as Henry Jenkins argues, the idea that we are not active participants in the sharing and distribution of media content; that there was no preexisting structure to share this content; and that there was no way that our own emotions, tags, etc. influenced how this meme, etc. got shared.

So I saw an amazing video yesterday about Travyon Martin.



When I first saw it on a friend's FB, it only had a few hits. Then I pushed it out over twitter, and got a couple of RTs.

Henry and I were talking about how to spread it, and he pushed it out over his Twitter.

I found this video so compelling because it was a remixing and appropriation of Howard students looking at the Travyon Martin situation and responding in a powerful way. I want this video to spread. What is my power to do this? I guess the only thing I can do is share it through my social networks.

So the question becomes: How do you get something to spread? What takes off and what doesn't? How can we get substantive content to be shared?

IRL

So, admittedly, I love baby animals. Well, to make that more clear, I love fuzzy and furry animals.

You probably guessed it would come to this, but I joined a small listserv put together by a friend, and friends of friends, about animals. So throughout the day, I get a steady stream of animal news. It's awesome.

For example, I learned about this fuzzy creature:



Seriously, a snowboarding possum...

This week is the first episode of what promises to be the greatest show ever: Frozen Planet, narrated by Alec Baldwin.



In fact, it's so awesome that TWO penguins were flown to New York to see it



HOW DO PENGUINS FLY??? ON A PLANE! HAHAHAHAHAHA

So, natch, Animalist is getting together IRL as Howard Rheingold put it, to see the screening of Frozen Planet at my house. I don't know if I've messed up by inviting one or two other people to Frozen Planet - if it will mess up the vibe - but I'm pretty stoked about Frozen Planet. It will be, in a word, awesome.

But it will also be one of those great examples that is so rare now where I've heard people's names, don't know them on facebook, and only know most of them from their good humored postings on animalist. So this is online community circa 1993.

Twitter in the Newsroom

It's getting to that point where I will, indeed, try to publish all my data from The Times that I used in my dissertation as a book. One of the things I looked at was how journalists were using social media.

At a conference, NYT editor Lauren Heron said:

"I think my job will probably not exist in five years."

Why?

Presumably, everybody will be on social media platforms.

But as I was writing up my research yesterday, I discovered what my colleague Dr. Hindman would call something like a Power Law effect with social media users at The Times. (It's funny, once you start to look, you see power laws operating everywhere).

It goes a little like this.
@nytimes: 4.5 million followers
@nickkristoff: 1.4 million followers
@pogue: 1.2 million followers
I think I'm missing some more people with millions of followers but it drops sharply to those who have about 300,000 followers like
@carr2n (David Carr)
@brianstelter
And then to people who have just about 10,000 +/- 5,000 followers, like, ironically, @jillabramson, the Times' executive editor.

This tells us relatively little about how these journalists are using Twitter, but I encourage you to take a look at their feeds. The @nytimes bot tweets out links to headlines - there's no engagement with audiences. It's a robot. @nickkristof does an awesome job answering audience questions. @pogue uses audiences when he happens to have a question, but rarely do we see any signs of audience engagement otherwise. David Carr and Brian Stelter are generally carrying on conversations among elites.

On another note, I embarrassed myself with Evgeny Morozov on Twitter today:

Evgeny Morozov ‏ @evgenymorozov Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
@nikkiusher there's nothing to translate there - these are real Web cam captures from the Russian polling stations
Evgeny Morozov ‏ @evgenymorozov Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
@nikkiusher dunno, seems like a regular Russian plebiscite ;-)

Apologies for not being more visual and linky like I preach. Not sure how to use this mac, to be honest!