T E X T

The word ‘viral’ has lost its meaning

    The nature of virality has shifted radically over the past decade as the internet has fractured into uncounted disparate algorithms, platforms, and niche communities. The volume of content being churned out every day has skyrocketed, the life cycle of each piece of media has grown shorter and social media platforms continue to inflate public metrics, devaluing previously impressive online stats.

    All of these factors have rendered the term “viral” nearly meaningless, say experts, and have led to a condition we’ll call “viralflation.” The term speaks to the diminished meaning of virality. If everything is labeled viral, then is nothing viral?

    “Back in the day, 1 million views was the thing,” said Marcus Stringer, a partner manager at Social Blade, a social media analytics platform. “That meant you’d gone viral, and you’d get picked up by news agencies around the world. Now, tens of millions of views is the norm for top YouTube channels. Soon, 20 million views will eventually become the norm.”

    “Because the concept of virality has been so watered down, truly viral pieces of content must reach hundreds of millions of people at a scale that’s increasingly unattainable for anyone but MrBeast,” said Lara Cohen, vice president of partners and business development at Linktree, a platform that allows creators to aggregate links to their social media profiles on one page. MrBeast is the internet name of Jimmy Donaldson, YouTube’s most watched creator.

    A decade and a half ago, there was a clear delineation between viral content and the vast majority of media that users would encounter every day. The internet was smaller, and most sharing was manual (people emailing and messaging links to each other) or via early internet aggregators such as sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

     Viral content emerged slowly, so the life span of a viral video was long. Some content remained viral for up to a year, worming its way through the internet as it gained traction. When social media platforms began to switch to algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in the mid 2010s, the viral content cycle accelerated, experts said. Brands began recognizing the power of virality and started to attempt to manufacture it. Content creators joined engagement groups where they’d reshare each other’s content in attempts to force virality.

    Platforms themselves also began to realize the power of virality and sought to generate it, or at least generate the appearance of it. This was the beginning of the era of viralflation. Facebook helped lower the industry-wide threshold for what counted as a video view, and began inflating view counts on various Facebook videos in an effort to make them appear more viral than they were.

    Then TikTok broke into the mainstream in 2020, lowering the bar even further for what counted as a “view.” While a view on Facebook counts after three seconds of watch time, a view on TikTok is simply an impression, meaning the video was served to a user for at least a fraction of a second on screen. According to the company, TikTok also counts each loop of the video as a view, allowing videos to rake in massive view counts.

    “The speed at which we cycle through trends and sort of moments of virality on the internet is faster now largely because of TikTok,” Cohen said. This has created an arms race among tech platforms to see which could inflate metrics the most. There’s been an incentive to have these numbers look bigger because they look better to advertisers, so there’s a financial incentive to cause this viral inflation.

    A new class of content creators also has raised the bar for what’s considered viral. “When MrBeast started to explode, things really started to change in the landscape,” Stringer said. “People didn’t consider [earlier metrics of virality] viral anymore, because he’s getting multi millions of views per video.”

    Coco Mocoe, a trend forecaster in Los Angeles, said that along with these shifts, users are also consuming a higher total amount of content online per day, especially members of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and 2012. They are more likely to consume all forms of media through the internet and social platforms, rather than via newspapers or TV. And, much of that content is short form and less than 60 seconds long. “The main reason there are bigger numbers now is because people are consuming so much more content in a given sitting,” she added.

    This has made virality more ephemeral. “There’s not that same… permanence,” Mocoe said. “If you’re watching 50 videos with 1 million views, you’re less likely to remember one as opposed to a decade ago, when you might only watch five videos a day, and just one would have 1 million views.” For the average consumer, viralflation has made it increasingly difficult to tell what is and isn’t actually viral. Because we no longer have any shared sense of virality, it makes it easier for people who don’t understand the mechanics of the internet to fall for fake viral trends.

Adapted from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ 2024/03/09/

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    Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with The Beatles, a rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. He has collaborated with countless artists over his 60-year career, from Rihanna to Michael Jackson. Now, the former Beatle has teamed up with artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent interview, the 80-year-old revealed that AI has made it possible to release one “last Beatles record.”

    McCartney said that during the creation of the docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”, produced in 2021 by Peter Jackson, they found an old demo tape that John Lennon had recorded. Through the use of artificial intelligence, they were able to start the process of taking the decades-old recording and turning it into something usable.

    “Peter Jackson was able to extricate John’s voice from an old cassette tape,” McCartney said. “He could tell the machine ‘That’s the voice. This is the guitar. Lose the guitar.’ We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney continued. “Then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

    Though McCartney called recent uses of AI in music “kind of scary” — in April, a rap song featuring AI-generated voices mimicking Drake and The Weeknd was yanked from streaming services — the “Let It Be” singer admitted that the technology is “exciting, because it’s the future. There’s a good side to it, and then a scary side. And we’ll just have to see where that leads,” he said.

(Nicolas Vega. www.cnbc.com, 14.06.2023. Adaptado.)

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    Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with The Beatles, a rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. He has collaborated with countless artists over his 60-year career, from Rihanna to Michael Jackson. Now, the former Beatle has teamed up with artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent interview, the 80-year-old revealed that AI has made it possible to release one “last Beatles record.”

    McCartney said that during the creation of the docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”, produced in 2021 by Peter Jackson, they found an old demo tape that John Lennon had recorded. Through the use of artificial intelligence, they were able to start the process of taking the decades-old recording and turning it into something usable.

    “Peter Jackson was able to extricate John’s voice from an old cassette tape,” McCartney said. “He could tell the machine ‘That’s the voice. This is the guitar. Lose the guitar.’ We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney continued. “Then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

    Though McCartney called recent uses of AI in music “kind of scary” — in April, a rap song featuring AI-generated voices mimicking Drake and The Weeknd was yanked from streaming services — the “Let It Be” singer admitted that the technology is “exciting, because it’s the future. There’s a good side to it, and then a scary side. And we’ll just have to see where that leads,” he said.

(Nicolas Vega. www.cnbc.com, 14.06.2023. Adaptado.)

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    The spread of fake news can have both personal and academic consequences. In a perfect world everything reported would be based only on facts and you would be able to trust that the media you consume is reliable. But unfortunately that’s not the case. You should learn to spot false information because fake news can:

    1. Call into question the credibility of your sources. As a student you are expected to find, evaluate, and reference trustworthy information sources in a variety of formats. If you include fake news as evidence for your arguments or as part of your research it may raise doubts about the integrity of the sources you use as a whole and your ability to identify quality information. Maintain the respect of your professors, peers, friends, and family by citing only true, credible news and information sources.

    2. Provide you with false, confusing, or dishonest information used to make a decision or take action. It can be dangerous to do something without having all the facts, but it can be just as detrimental to do so based on inaccurate information. Whether it’s political, medical, academic, or personal, you need to be able to recognize when the information you are taking in can be trusted to help you make an intelligent, fact-based choice.

(https://libguides.uvic.ca, 26.05.2023. Adaptado.)