Contagious Media

Description

By AN XIAO MINA:

"In 2005, an artist named Jonah Peretti (now CEO and Founder of Buzzfeed) coined the concept of “contagious media,” which we might recognize today as viral media or meme culture, like dancing babies and cat videos. According to an exhibition at the New Museum, he noted that contagious media practitioners aim to “make something that people want to share with their friends. If you do that successfully, you can reach a large audience through word of mouth. This creates new opportunities for art distribution and activism.” One of his most famous contagious media projects was the Nike Project, where he tried to order a shoe online, customized with the word “Sweatshop” on it. The deadpan email exchanges he had with Nike garnered some 2 million views.

In 2005, it was Peretti’s emails and media about the shoe that took off on the internet. Had he done the project today, perhaps the shoe itself would be the object of virality, a contagious object, so to speak. Think about the endless signs during the Women’s March, the incredible art, the clever turns of phrase. So many protest signs, with witty words and catchy art work and collages, are not just objects for the streets. The novelty of each sign was not just an act of creativity but also a viral strategy. Indeed, as often as people carried signs, they also carried smartphones, and they quickly snapped pictures of signs they enjoyed and uploaded those to social media. The most popular signs were shared and reshared countless times, like digital viral content." (https://civichall.org/civicist/how-pink-pussyhats-and-red-maga-caps-went-viral/)