The Advancement of Virality from the 18th to the 21st Century

Virality illustrates the power of technology by sending a message to a mass audience. Using unique qualities, a message is enabled to stand out to the public eye and be continuously transmitted throughout culture. As Kevin Alloca noted, the content of the message must be out of the ordinary in order to catch people’s interest. For instance, Drake’s Hotline Bling music video can illustrate virality through memes since it gained instant popularity and became recreated into a variety of themes and actions using visual texts, images and audio. This exemplifies how the community is actively participating in creatively distributing the content for entertainment purposes on an open medium such as social networks and the internet.

In the 18th century, Thomas Paine popularized the use of mediums such as newspapers and pamphlets to communicate a message with a large audience. He innovated ways to communicate a message without publicly speaking to a selected audience. Instead, he effectively used simple tools such as print to easily distribute and communicate a message to gain attention from society. He made use of both modes of affect and accumulation by using important information that could strengthen America through his ideologies by disseminating a meaningful message to impact social practices. In the 18th century, Paine’s message was limited to paper that was passed between friends, family, businesses meaning the reach was substantially smaller than memes for example.

Both Paine and Drake distinguish the relationship of power between a medium and a message that causes content to go viral within culture. Similarly, Drake’s music video illustrates how distributing an original message in the 21st century has the ability to impact culture. The internet is more effective because of the speed and reach of the message can be transmitted on a global scale. Memes connect various amounts of networks and mediums that enable a message to be spread more quickly. For instance, Drake’s memes were posted on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, additional internet websites which continuously attracted new audiences. This illustrates the use of the second articulation since various mediums are connected to further circulate the content without the restrictions of space and time. Numerous applications, programs, technology sources allow people to reconstruct a way a message is portrayed, for instance Drake’s meme’s. Although they stayed genuine to the original content (his dancing and usually song), people began to alter the settings, circumstances and purpose of the meme to make it entertaining which essentially furthered the vitality of the content.

These messages in the 21st century are primarily digital although they have the ability to be printed similarly to Thomas Paine’s mode of communication. The 21st century illustrates how messages have more flexibility since they can be received instantly on phones, computers, iPads, iPods, etc at the same time to numerous sources. Digital technology does not rely on personal relationships to circulate information since we can connect with anonymous users and public spaces to share content. Evidently, the 21st century illustrates how advanced modes of communication are through accessibility and unlimited reach as opposed to 18th century virality.