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/

Texto

    realmadrid ✓ - Real Madrid C. F. condemns all types of racist and xenophobic language and behaviour in football, sport and life in general, such as the regrettable and unfortunate comments made against our player O ViniJr in the last few hours. Real Madrid would like to express its affection and support for Vinicius Junior, a player who regards football as an attitude towards life through joy, respect and sportsmanship. Football is the most global sport there is and should be a model of values and coexistence. The club has directed its legal services to take legal action against anyone who makes racist remarks towards our players.

From: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiILbBFIN6V. Accessed on 01/12/2023

READ THE TEXT BELOW, THEN ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION.

QAnon: What is it and where did it come from?

    QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded con- spiracy theory that says that President Trump is conducting a secret war against elite Satan- worshipping pedophiles in government, busi- ness and the media. In an interview, Mr. Trump told that he didn't know much about the move- ment, but added that he'd heard that “these were people who love our country.” QAnon believers have speculated that this fight will lead to a day of reckoning where prominent people such as former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will be arrested and executed. The movement has faced restrictions from Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram who have taken action against thousands of accounts and web addresses link- ing to videos and websites spreading QAnon's bizarre ideas.

    Thousands of Americans believe it. The amount of online traffic to mainstream social networking sites has burst since 2017, and indications are the numbers have gone up further during the coronavirus pandemic. QAnon supporters coordinate abuse of perceived enemies, politicians, celebrities and journalists who they believe are covering up for pedophiles. It's not just threatening messages online. Twitter says it took action against QAnon because of
the potential for “offline harm”.

    Dozens of QAnon supporters are running for Congress in November. It's quite likely that a QAnon supporter - or someone sympathetic to the conspiracy theory - will sit in the next US Congress.

(Excerpt taken from: https://www.bbc.com/news/53498434)

Glossary

    Spread: divulgar

    Worship: adorar

    Reckoning: acerto de contas

    Arrest: prender

    Run for: concorrer

The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution

    The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution The human brain is a social brain. Our ability to gauge the moods and intentions of others, to detect the truth or falsehood of their communications, to discern friend from foe, and to form alliances are amongst its most complex and important tasks. These skills are of premier importance to fulfill our biological imperatives of staying alive (through the protection of the group) and reproducing. From this perspective, it is no wonder that so much of our brains is dedicated to social cognition. In fact, across primate species, the single best predictor of the size of the neocortex is the size of that species’ social group. Combining data from 38 primate species, Dunbar estimated that based on neocortex size the number of meaningful social relationships (i.e., where everyone knows everyone) for humans should be between 100 and 230. The value of 150 has been popularized as “Dunbar’s number” as converging evidence from diverse fields seem to coincide with the prediction. For instance, 150 is the approximate size of military units from Roman antiquity to the present, religious communities (e.g., Amish, Hutterite), Aboriginal groups, villages in England before the Industrial Revolution, and the number of people on holiday card lists. 

    The central hub of circuitry related to social skills is the late maturing highly plastic prefrontal cortex. Like any complex skills, mastery requires lots of practice. Much of the discernment relies on exquisitely subtle detection of non verbal cues such as slight changes in eye gaze, millisecond differences in speech timing, synchrony of response to shared environmental stimuli, breathing patterns, body posture, touch, odors, etc. Might the increasing reliance on digital social interactions hinder exposure to the “real-world” experiences necessary to master these most important skills?

    The average number of “friends” per adolescent Facebook user is 834 - far outpacing Dunbar’s number. The discrepancy may arise from different definitions of “friendship” or “relationship” – perhaps adolescents are not maintaining meaningful interactions with all 800+ of their contacts. This appears to be the case, as graph theory analysis of social network interactions indicates that the number of relationships maintained by regular exchange of information falls back to the 100–200 range. Although digital interactions are not the same as face to face relationships, they are social, they are meaningful to the adolescents, and they are associated with other measures of well-being.

    The playing out of social life in a transparent global digital domain has raised the specter of cyberbullying. The National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) defines cyber bullying as “when the Internet, cell phones or other devices are used to send or post texts or images intended to hurt or embarrass another person”. Statistics regarding its prevalence vary enormously depending on what threshold is used for abuse. One aspect that is different from traditional bullying is that the acts are distributed to a much wider audience and once on the Internet they are potentially permanent. This has implications both for the bullied and the bullies.

    A positive social aspect is that the technologies enable adolescents to connect with a much wider portion of the world and broaden their exposure to ideas, customs, and ways of life. Appreciating the commonalities among other young people throughout the world may help (i) __________________.

Disponível em: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3432415/. Acesso em: 9 fev. 2019.

Considere os quadrinhos a seguir para responder a questão

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

Words that define the present

  At a time when the world is changing more quickly than ever before, we need a new vocabulary to help us grasp what’s happening.

  Catfishing. This word would make more sense if it referred to fishing for cats, but in fact, it refers to people who construct false identities online. Whether out of boredom, loneliness or malice, they lure other people into continued messaging correspondence, thereby building false relationships with them (the apparent source of the term “catfish” is a 2010 documentary called Catfish, whose verity, ironically enough, has been questioned).

  There are two ways of looking at this: 1) The internet/ cyberspace is wonderful, because it gives people the freedom to augment or totally change their identities, and this is a marvellous new dawn for human expression, a new step in human evolution. 2) Nah, it’s a false dawn, because the internet is essentially a libertarian arena, and, as such, an amoral one (lots of “freedoms” but with no attendant social obligations); it is a new jungle where we must watch our backs and struggle for survival, surely a backward step in evolution. I lean toward the latter.

(Cameron Laux. www.bbc.com, 08.08.2018. Adaptado.)