Viral phenomenon

Viral phenomena are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. They get their name from the way that viruses propagate. This has become a common way to describe how thoughts, information, and trends move into and through a human population. "Viral media" is a common term whose popularity has been fueled by the rapid rise of social network sites alongside declining advertising rates and an extremely fragmented audience for broadcast media. Different from the "spreadable media", "viral media" uses viral metaphors of "infection" and "contamination", which means that audiences play as passive carriers rather than an active role to "spread" contents.Memes are possibly the best-known example of informational viral patterns.

Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. As conceived by Dawkins, a meme is a unit of cultural meaning, such as an idea or a value, that is passed from one generation to another. A meme is the cultural counterpart to the unit of physical heredity, the gene. Dawkins states that the major religions are memes, as they are passed from one generation to another. An Internet meme is a cultural phenomenon that spreads from one person to another through the use of the Internet. Through the spread of memes online, it shows the dispersion of cultural movements, especially when seemingly innocuous or trivial trends spread and die in rapid fashion. Lauren Ancel Meyers, a biology professor at the University of Texas, said that "memes spread through online social networks similarly to the way diseases do through offline populations."

Douglas Rushkoff coined the term "media virus" or "viral media" and defined it as a type of Trojan horse: "People are duped into passing a hidden agenda while circulating compelling content." In Jean Baudrillard's 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, the philosopher describes An American Family, arguably the first "reality" television series, as a marker of a new age in which the medium of television has a "viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence."

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