The Promiscuity of Network Culture

Robert Payne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317597179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Liking, sharing, friending, going viral: what would it mean to recognize these current modes of media interaction as promiscuous? In a contemporary network culture characterized by a proliferation of new forms of intimate mediated sociality, this book argues that promiscuity is a new standard of user engagement. Intimate relations among media users and between users and their media are increasingly structured by an entrepreneurial logic and put to work for the economic interests of media corporations. But these multiple intimacies can also be understood as technologies of promiscuous desire serving both to liberalize mediated social connection and to contain it within normative frames of value. Payne brings crucial questions of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and attention back into conversation with recent thinking on network culture and social media, identifying the queer undercurrents of these current media dynamics.

1 Virality Minus the Virus

DOI: 10.4324/9781315746050-2

Media theorist Richard Grusin has recently argued that the first decade of the twenty-first century inaugurated an era of “mediality”, when “virtually all textual, visual, and audio media are produced, circulated, and remediated via networked digital technologies”.¹ This book will further claim that the start of the second decade of this century was when it became clear that mediality is characterized by virality—and by virality replicating itself virally. An online advertising campaign from 2011 signals the shift to metavirality. The commercial, for a brand of bottled water, employs actor Jennifer Aniston as part of a self-reflexive parody of its own strategic attempt to manufacture virality. Staging a “how to make a viral video” manual, Aniston interacts with a variety of elements of already-proven viral campaigns, including puppies, dancing babies, and lip-synching YouTube phenomenon Keenan Cahill. In addition to harnessing Aniston’s Hollywood star power, the video’s metatextuality relies upon an understanding of the actor’s premium online searchability. The producers within the narrative eventually decide to call the video “Jen Aniston Sex Tape”.²

From one perspective, the commercial is another clever example of a recent trend of counter-intuitive advertising where the brand or product is ultimately secondary to textual strategy or gimmick. The commercial for Cadbury chocolate from 2007 is the epitome of this mode, featuring a gorilla playing drums to a Phil Collins song and no direct reference to the product. From a different perspective, the Smartwater commercial could be seen as an affirmation of post-feminist individualism where Aniston chooses to capitalize on her status as sex object using tongue-in-cheek gestures to pre-feminist pastness. Differently again, the commercial could be analyzed to tell us something about regulated and deregulated structures of celebrity and how they collapse and converge online. All of these themes will emerge in later chapters of this book in reference to other recent examples of promiscuous network circulation. Most relevant to this chapter, however, is a brief moment of discursive slippage that speaks to changing structures of media distribution and how we talk about them. Talking to camera, Aniston introduces herself as having to promote the brand of water in a more complex way than simply stating its values:

ANISTON: Hi, I’m Jen Aniston. And I’m here to talk to you about Smartwater. But in this day and age, apparently I can’t just do that, can I? (. . .) I have to make a video, apparently, that turns into a virus.

PRODUCER Viral. We need the video to go viral.

(OFF-CAMERA): ANISTON: Right. Sorry, viral. Thank you. This is why I have these three lovely Internet boys here to help me.³

Parodying her role of highly paid but poorly informed celebrity spokesperson, Aniston performs misunderstanding of the strategic purpose of the video, and she has to be corrected by the industry experts supervising production. Of course, what the “Internet boys” do want, in a sense, is for the video to turn into a virus, in terms of rapid and unpredictable peer-to-peer transmission, but they cannot use that language. The language of the virus transposes connotations of danger, fear, and poor hygiene on to the brand and the product itself, which is especially problematic for a consumable.

In this chapter I will outline the first of this book’s core arguments: that the virality of networked media, “in this day and age”, is in a specific sense post-viral. Use of the trope of virality in and around a Web 2.0 context marks an observable shift away from an earlier discursive convention that was centered on the figure of the virus as an agent of attack upon vulnerable points within uncontained networks. Computer viruses of this sort still exist, including spyware and malware, but it is curious that what is now called “virality” seems to connote a successful and desirable kind of media circulation rather than an intrusive and destructive one. Digital media that “go viral” are usually appraised positively in this description, despite the arbitrariness of the phrase. Viral ad campaigns are coveted by marketing professionals and even purposely manufactured for their expansive and catchy potential. So while the means of transmission of harmful computer viruses and desirable viral media may be similar, and while both may be the result of deliberate and strategic production, anxieties around the danger or nuisance of the former do not seem to have transferred evenly into the latter.

The Smartwater commercial is a carefully produced metatextual parody of the concept of manufactured virality. It is also, however, another commercial that wants to go viral. Beneath its tricksy humor, it takes seriously the semantic distinction between “virus” and “viral”. It is also through this humor that the commercial draws attention to its own anxiety about that very distinction. My purpose, then, is to ask how and why virality ceased to be about viruses. The commercial’s virus joke is a joke of periodicity: aside from danger, fear, and poor hygiene, media viruses connote cultural pastness— a past in which Aniston herself is implicated. This chapter investigates the new imperatives, cultural anxieties, and instruments of ideological hygiene that require viruses be symbolically relegated to the past but still structurally exploited. I will argue that the discourse of post-viral virality is motivated by twin logics. The first is that in a context characterized by online social media that instrumentalize user participation and interactivity, virality is put to work in the name of “communicative capitalism”. Here I refer to Jodi Dean’s concept for how networked communications technologies are the site of “the strange merging” of capitalism and an unresponsive democracy.⁴ The second logic is that according to the means through which communicative capitalism constructs and captures neoliberal networked subjects, post-viral virality reinscribes those subject positions with normative values drawn from earlier discourses of viral anxiety.

In elaborating on the logics of post-viral virality, my thinking is structured by three main points of departure. First, virality now rebrands “risky” behavior as “sharing” and “participation”. Second, its modes of circulation may be as much about systemic functionality as they are about transmission by active users. And third, the post-virus discourse of digital virality fetishizes the active user-subject at the expense of other positions and pleasures. These claims also force a rethinking of how popularity is registered by the viral spread of digital content, because it is too simple to assume that virality is a transparent confirmation of a media power shift towards an unregulated, horizontal, and democratic structure of consumer choice and agency, or a kind of pure popularity. Different instances of digital content achieve virality in different ways—some through the efforts of marketing strategies, some through an unplanned mode of transmission that seems random or accidental. Moreover, virality is not always desired by those involved or implicated in the content. Viral ad campaigns may have a different relationship to circuits of distribution than entertainment or amateur videos that go viral. What interests me is the overlap of these kinds of content. As the Smartwater commercial demonstrates, ad campaigns are circulated virally through online social networks alongside music videos, laughing baby videos, and other less manufactured content, now making use of these amateur codes. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have shown in relation to YouTube, “amateur and professional media content, identities and motivations are not so easily separated”.⁵ When marketing and advertising campaigns purposefully appropriate and mimic the idiosyncrasies of more personalized amateur content, and inversely when individual consumers work to manufacture their content and its transmission in the style of marketing campaigns, then something interesting is taking place at the level of content. But something interesting is also happening at the level of political economy whereby content may be taking a back seat to the mode of distribution that brings attention to it, despite continued belief in the common media industry catch-cry “content is king”. In other words, the specific content of a given item may account for its viral success at the same time as having little or nothing to do with the successful functioning of social networks as distributors of content.

This paradox at the heart of the relationship between content, structure, and participation vexes an easy understanding of popularity, and of subject positions of cultural producer and consumer. For this reason, the complexities of post-viral virality index problematics of capital, labor, subjectivity, and control—beyond the immediate environment of digital media—which continue to motivate cultural studies scholarship, and so this book is also motivated by the idea that virality spreads in and around media as a new modular structure of cultural norms. Such concerns lead me to consider the ways in which these norms are inherently gendered and sexualized, particularly through analysis of assumptions around intimacy and sociality.

Sharing Activity

The first principle of the new discourse of post-viral virality is that risky behavior is rebranded using a language of sharing, conversation, and participation. Consumers, businesses, and even politicians “share” material with each other. Sharing contributes to something called “the conversation”. In 2011, the New York Times Research and Development unit published details of Project Cascade—a digital tool which provides an intricate visual metric of the movement through social media networks of a single communicational event such as a tweet. It refers to this movement as “sharing activity”. As explained in the accompanying video:

This tool illustrates the connections between readers and publishers, helps identify influential contributors to a conversation, and cleanly displays the life-cycle of a new sharing conversation in an intuitive way.⁶

Furthermore, as Suzanne Labarre states in her article on the project, “both the mining of the data and the artistic presentation could go a long way toward solving the riddle of how a story goes viral”.⁷

Clearly, this riddle is one to be solved in order that organizations and brands can more accurately make things go viral. For the New York Times, the challenge of brand awareness and influence lies in the following question: “How can The Times use this information to expand its impact in the conversation, to maintain its position as a news and information leader in this complex environment?”⁸ Providing “leadership” in a complex environment can be otherwise understood as trying to maintain control over circulation of content in an unpredictable and even uncontrollable mediascape. Given a wide field of competitors for “impact” and “leadership”, control stands very much at odds with the complex plurality of “sharing” that takes place in “the conversation”. This language of sharing and conversation also works to render more intimate and tangible the rapidly multiplying, uncontained, and partly unknowable network edges that may ramify from the node that is any single Twitter or Facebook user. These complexities are central to how danah boyd has developed the concept of “networked publics”. For boyd, affordances such as persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability define network architectures but equally may render communications with network publics somewhat unstable.⁹

Moreover, Project Cascade’s language of intimacy and generosity alleviates potential anxieties that may arise if one imagines “the conversation” not as a safe space for sharing—perhaps some idealized version of digital public sphere—but as an uncontained free-for-all in which undesirable content may circulate unchecked. The benign intimacy of sharing content may well be stymied by something like a virus, for instance. Note how the tool offers to display network circulation “cleanly.” As a number of scholars have examined, anxieties around uncontained transmission and unsafe contact were prevalent in public discourse relating to computer viruses that emerged as a significant perceived threat in the 1990s. Deborah Lupton elaborates on the widespread viral metaphor pertaining to computing at this time. She discusses the ways in which the adoption and uses of the metaphor drew on a range of discourses not limited to immunology, but also those more generally shaping how humans and technology relate to one another. Common discursive frames include “the seductiveness of the human/ computer, Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin de millénnium”.¹⁰ Similarly, Stefan Helmreich demonstrates that anxieties about computer viruses propelled a discourse of sexual contamination which is flexibly responsive to key social dynamics of the late twentieth century. Anxieties depend upon “images of foreignness, illegality, and otherness”, and the securing of “compromised networks” is likened to the “ ‘bodies’ of nation-states under military threat from without and within”.¹¹ Lupton and Helmreich both draw attention to the function of the virus as a cultural trope, invested with multiple ideological meanings transferred from contemporary moral, legal, and ethical discourses.

Two broad ideological frames deserve particular attention here and are central to the claims this book is making about the promiscuity of network culture. First, images of viruses and virality in a range of contexts have been inseparable from the weighty cultural presence of HIV/AIDS since its detection in the early 1980s. Jussi Parikka writes that AIDS “sparked the use of viral concepts” in computer discourse and elsewhere, not through simple cause and effect but as a kind of “feedback system where causalities are multidirectional”.¹² The pervasive homophobia and heteronormativity that characterized many public and institutional responses to HIV, and which led to full-blown AIDS panic in many contexts through the 1980s and 1990s, deeply color how other viruses and forms of viral circulation are represented. A second broad discursive formation is what Parikka calls “viral...