CS 371-Social Media
and Social Life
Blog Post Assignment
#3
Over the past few classes, we
have exploring the concept of a “media mode of production”. A media mode of production is assemblage of media forms and communicative
practices which creates and specific media ecology or environment. In class, we discussed how media modes of
production are constituted (for our analytical purposes) by two distinctive conceptual
articulations.
The first articulation entails
looking at how media modes of productions are simultaneously a mode of communication (social practices
of creating symbolic meaning), modes of
affect (social practices of emotion and embodiment that attached to meaning)
and a mode of accumulation (social
practices of accumulating capital and power).
The second articulation concerns
how media artifacts and messages are brought into being and spread through a
culture, community, or society, and is manifested in the spatio-temporal
dynamics of relations of creativity and
production, relations of distribution
and circulation, and relations of consumption
and reception.
Your task in this blog post is to
reflect on how these articulations are manifested in two very different
examples of social media “going viral”: Thomas Paines’s pamphlet “common Sense”
that helped spark the American Revolution in the early 1770s (discussed on
pages 139-146 in Standage, Writing on the
Wall) and the legendary Ermahgerd meme (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ermahgerd). You may also choose any other recent or contemporary
social media viral meme (i.e. “Double Rainbow”, Rebecca Black’s Friday", Drakes’ Hotline Bling” as long as the meme has been confirmed on the Know Your
Meme data base (http://knowyourmeme.com/)
In your post, your main point should
be illuminate how the virality of social media of the 18th century differs
from the virality of social media in the 21st. In making your point, be sure
to explicitly make reference to the articulations of the social media mode of
production and their conceptual elements. You may also the definitions of “going viral”
by Kevin Alloca as well as Nahon and Helmsley helpful to your discussion (although
it is not a requirement that you use them).
These definitions are:
In order for “media content” to
go “viral” and become a cultural moment, three things happen: 1) the content is
introduced into the mediascape by a “taste maker” (i.e. Jimmy Kimmel and the
‘Double Rainbow” video); 2) community participation that creatively transforms
original content (i.e. remixes of NyanCat); 3) the content must be “unexpected”
or novel.
II.
Karine Nahon and Jeff Helmsley, Going Viral (Polity Press, 2013)
Virality is a
social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a
specific information item, over a short period of time, within their social
networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own [social] networks to
different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the
number of people who are exposed to the message.
Therefore,
identifying and measuring virality is made of the basis of 1) the human and
social characteristics of information sharing from one to another; 2) the speed
of the spread; 3) the reach in terms of the number of people exposed to the
content; and 4) the reach in terms of the distance the information travels by
bridging multiple networks.
The due dates for this assignment
are Monday, November 9, 6 PM for your original posts and Friday, November 13 ,
6 PM for your responses.
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