Do Media Follow A Virus Model Or A Manipulable Spreadable One?

 

Nowadays, the amount of people using the Internet and sharing information has never been as prominent and does not stop growing. It permits videos, pictures, information, and every other kind of data to be shared instantly by millions of people around the world. In 1994, Rushkoff comes with the idea that a media can be compared to a biological virus and spread in the same way. In 2008, Jenkins et al contest to this idea as, according to them, it leaves little room to public’s autonomy and decision making. Rushkoff thinks of media as a passive infection, and Jenkins et al prefer to take in account the power of the public and its capacity to spread the media or not. Therefore, they coin the term spreadable media. In this article, I will briefly describe both approaches to then present an example of media that went viral on the Internet.

As already mentioned, today’s society is highly using media but is also very much dependent of it. Rushkoff (1994) in his book already argues this fact as well as the fact that this expanding media field creates a new territory, the datasphere which he defines as “human interaction, economic expansion, and especially social and political machination” (p. 4). He compares the datasphere to the planetary ecosystem. Within these ones, viruses, whether biological ones for the ecosystem or media events for the datasphere, can have social changes. Rushkoff (1994) does not see a “media virus” as metaphor but actually sees it as a virus which can spread “through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community” (pp. 9-10). Both biological and media viruses fight for power. If they win, they can change the manner of functioning of its target, of its “host”. Rushkoff compares the mechanism of media virus to a protein shell and its gene. A “protein shell”, comparable to the content which entertains the audience, contains a hidden message, which Rushkoff calls “meme” and compares it to a gene. Once the media wins the attention of a public, the meme, the ideological code put within the shell, starts to spread as a virus changing our view of reality and our actions.

Jenkins et al (2008) argue that this process leaves little room to human autonomy and power. To think of media as virus ignores the social and cultural contexts in which ideas are distributed. The authors propose instead the idea of spreadable media “[Emphasizing] the activity of consumers […] in shaping the circulation of media content, often expanding potential meanings and opening up brands to unanticipated new markets” (Jenkins et al, 2008, p. 3). This model is the opposition of the stickiness one, an older model. The latter control the consummer’s attention and lock down the content of the media as it centralizes “control over distribution and attempts to maintain purity of message” (Jenkins et al, 2008, p. 3). Where the sticky model aims at attracting a homogenous audience to consume a certain product, the spreadable media aim at being easily shared by different communities that partake in ideas that speak to them. Jenkins et al see several advantages in the spreadable model such as the fact that it can help a brand to be easily and quickly visible by a large number of people while remaining a low cost budget of advertisement as it is the public itself that is in charge of spreading the media, or the fact that spreadability may expand existing media content by creating new ways of interacting with it and it may even rebuild or reshape the market for a dormant brand. (Jenkins et al, 2008, p.9).

The example I decided to present to illustrate a spreadable media are the commercials from Arab Dairy. Those commercials represent daily life’s scenes where people are being proposed to take cheese from the brand “Panda”, they refuse, and a life-size panda appears and gets mad at the person who refused the brand for which he is the mascot. These videos were put online on YouTube after being shown on Egyptian television. The brand did not place the video on YouTube themselves, even though three years after the successful compilation went out, they created their own YouTube channel. I personally think that no brand can really anticipate if its product placement will go viral or not. The fact that the brand created a YouTube channel three years after the compilation shows that they decided to profit of the viral situation and attempted to do the same. However, their videos reach a thousand views, sometimes less, while the compilation video reaches more than 5 700 000 views and more than 2 200 comments.

The creative agencies that produced this add are Advantage Marketing & Advertising and Elephant Cairo. They won several awards for those commercials. They based the spirit of the commercials on dark and subtle humor which would illustrate the already original and humorous slogan of the products “Never Say No to Panda” and therefore were aiming from the beginning to stand out from other commercials and attract people attention. As Rushkoff (1994) explained it, once the brand has captured the public’s attention, the media can spread its core message, which is here to buy panda’s product or he will kick your ass. Many parodies where made, or videos showing people reactions such as the following ones.

The commercials even have their own Wikipedia page called “Never Say No to Panda” and the brand has now created a Facebook page for the panda where we can see different posts and more advertising from the brand. This is an intended strategy from Arab Dairy to be spread among all as many Facebook users as possible and Some journals even wrote short articles on the subject such as The Atlantic which induces in the article “Creepy Egyptian Cheese Ads Explain Geopolitics” that the video has cultural significance, such as for the Egyptian blogger who sees “A menacing Chinese Panda forcing consumption, a metaphor for the way the US likes to force things down Arab throats, etc.” (Fisher, 2010).

In conclusion, this brand is an example of media that went viral. The initial aim of the brand to go viral was probably there, even though they took the measures to extend their fame in creating an official YouTube channel after panda virus spread.

 


Sources:

 

Fisher, M. (2010). Creepy Egyptian Cheese Ads Explain Geopolitics. [Blog] The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/09/creepy-egyptian-cheese-ads-explain-geopolitics/340002/ [Accessed 4 Jun. 2017].

Jenkins, H., Li, X., & Domb, A. (2008). If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace. Retrieved from: http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2010/04/conver gence_culture_consortium.php

Rushkoff, D. (1994). Introduction. In: Media virus! Hidden agendas in popular culture (1st ed.). New York: Ballantine Books.

En.wikipedia.org. (2017). Never Say No to Panda. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Say_No_to_Panda [Accessed 4 Jun. 2017].

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *