Robert Payne

VIRALITY 2.0

Media virality is a current fetish object in a number of overlapping contexts including marketing, IT design and academia. The desirability of media ‘going viral’ is confirmed by efforts now undertaken to categorize viral success through a range of typologies and metrics, conceived in order to predict and achieve virality. A recent online ad campaign, staged as a ‘how to make a viral video’, signals the complexity of the concept of manufactured virality. This article takes as a point of departure a moment of conceptual slippage in the commercial to argue that the current discourse of media virality has paradoxically expelled its own progenitor, the virus. Contrary to Henry Jenkinss claim that the discourse of virality is ‘a kind of smallpox-soaked blanket theory of media circulation’, I argue that as transmission has been rebranded as ‘sharing’, questions of personal and moral responsibility attendant to transmission and infection have been erased in favour of a bland ideology of interactivity. The concept of ‘virality 2.0’ is proposed to account for this double movement: that the discourse of digital virality has relegated viruses to the past, while structurally exploiting their dynamic of circulation. Moreover, virality 2.0 reinscribes viral subject positions with normative values drawn from this same cultural past. The argument is supported by three main claims. First, behaviour deemed risky and marginal within a heteronormative discourse of promiscuity has been reappropriated as ‘sharing’ and ‘leadership’. Second, practices of digital media transmission may be as much about systemic functionality as active and engaged participation. And third, post-viral media virality works to stabilise and fetishise the active ‘sharing subject’ in neoliberal and heteronormative terms, at the expense of other practices and pleasures.

Dancing with the ordinary: Masculine celebrity performance on Australian TV

This article interrogates the mutual dynamics of grounding and floating evident in the mediated performance of Australian masculinity embodied by two male television personalities, Tom Williams and Jake Wall. I argue that both mens flirtation with feminizing spectacle – centred on acts of bodily, affective and media exposure – did not jeopardize but reinforced their association with heteronormative masculinity. The widespread popularity of both mens staged performances can be attributed in part to their ‘natural’ performance of self in which familiar and conventional narratives of nationality and class, gender and sexuality converged. While the construction of celebrity itself involves overlapping and mutually reinforcing performances of ordinary and extraordinary, the celebrity texts of Williams and Wall were built on a purposeful downplaying of the extraordinary and over-performance of a recuperative ordinariness: the panicked construction of a stable ground of masculinity as a point of origin and necessary return.

‘Je suis Charlie’: Viral circulation and the ambivalence of affective citizenship

This article examines the online circulation of the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’ which went viral on social media after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015. Building first on recent literature on digital virality, it approaches the slogan’s circulation in terms of the transfer of affective intensities among network connections and with consideration to the function of social media algorithms in bringing about network encounters. Two samples of tweets using the slogan are analysed to highlight the emergence of subjective relations to Charlie from within networked circuits of affect. The declaration ‘Je suis Charlie’ is argued to be a performance of affective citizenship in the name of social cohesion while also constructing ‘affect aliens’.