Virality
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Virality
In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates. Sampson argues that a biological knowledge of contagion has been universally distributed by way of the rhetoric of fear used in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This awareness is also detectable in concerns over too much connectivity, such as problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson's "virality" is as established as that of the biological meme and microbe but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson interprets contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde's microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze's ontological worldview. According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking--including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers--allows language to overcategorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological.
Virality Vitality
Author: Jonathan Basile
language: en
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Release Date: 2025-04-01
Virality Vitality explores the history and present of the life sciences and virology, focusing on moments of disruption that reveal the instability of the most basic concepts guiding scientific knowledge and their practical or political consequences. From their "discovery" to present-day experiments in synthetic virology, viruses have given rise to upheavals in our models of life because of the difficulty of rigorously distinguishing life from virus, self from other. The virus has been compared to a gene, to an agent of life's heredity and immunity, and we humans depend on the fossils of ancient viral infections in our genome in order to bear children. Can a parasite give birth to its host? To interpret the nonoppositional relationship of virality and vitality, this book draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and the growing field of biodeconstruction that has emerged from his posthumously published work on genetics. In turn, Virality Vitality suggests a novel approach to questions of the agency of "matter" or the "nonhuman," often raised in Anthropocene studies, the material turn, and ecocriticism. Nothing is more natural than the artificiality of the borders drawn, maintained, and displaced by the living and their viruses, by virality-vitality. The inscription of these borders remains to be read, and thus deconstructive textuality is anything but opposed to the sciences and what they call life.
Online Virality
Author: Valérie Schafer
language: en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date: 2024-08-19
The book Online Virality, edited by Valérie Schafer and Fred Pailler (C2DH, University of Luxembourg), aims to provide a comprehensive examination of online virality. It explores the many ways we can think about this modern phenomenon and analyse the circulation, reception, and evolution of viral born-digital content. Virality and content sharing always intertwine material, infrastructural, visual and discursive elements. This involves various platforms, stakeholders, intermediaries, social groups and communities that are constantly (re)defining themselves. Regulation, curation and content moderation politics, as well as affects and emotions (fears, humour, empathy, hatred...), are also at the core of online virality. The publication offers an interdisciplinary overview on online virality by including different types of scientific inputs, such as precise case studies, various methodological approaches (including close and distant reading, visual studies, discourse analysis, etc.), as well as historical and socio-technical analyses. The book is organised around three main topics: Expressions and Genres; Mobilisations and Engagements; Circulation and Infrastructures. The first part explores the semiotics of virality, the diverse and creative forms of expression, specific genres, the relation to other media, and the affective side of virality, such as using humour or provocation. The second part focuses on the political dimension of memes and viral content and their use in the context of controversy or political and ideological opposition. Finally, the third part delves into the often understudied but essential side of virality, by examining the role of platforms and their curation, in short, the infrastructural dimension of virality. These three parts allow us to question such fundamental notions linked to virality as, among others, circulation, reception, economy of attention, instrumentalisation and affect. This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, including semiotics, history, information and communication sciences, computer science, digital humanities, media studies. In addition, the contributors approach the question via case studies that allow for a perspective that is not exclusively US and European-centred. Some chapters explore virality in Brazil, Chile, while the book also examines a wide variety of platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, video game platforms, etc.).