When I worked in digital marketing for a book publisher I once received an email from an author with a letter that she had written to a newspaper attached. “Make it go viral,” she directed me. I gently explained to her that social media tends not to work like that. There is no magic button that you can press in order to make something capture the imagination and enthusiasm of the Internet-enabled public.
There are many different examples of virality. This week I had the opportunity to intimately witness something ‘go viral’ on a relatively small scale.
I posted a tweet containing an attached image of a group of pigeons posing remarkably like members of a ‘90s rap metal band.
It resonated with around 1,000 twitter users. The tweet was posted just before midday on Saturday, and by Thursday it had been retweeted by 1042 accounts, including the very popular @sweden.
It’s no Kanye rushing home to Kim, but for a tweet not influenced by the power of celebrity the small-scale pigeon epidemic is remarkable.
The ‘90s pigeon rap metal band poster tweet encapsulates three qualities of virality. First, discovery transference between social media platforms; secondly, it condenses a shared aesthetic experience of the 1990s. And thirdly, the accidental quality of virality (as I attempted to explain to my letter-writing author).
I initially encountered the image on the blogging platform of Tumblr, and transferred this discovery to microblogging platform Twitter, modifying the delivery only by attaching the image rather than linking to the original post on Tumblr. Complete with a ‘hat tip’ to the original post to the Tumblr’s owner on Twitter (as per social media conventions), adaptating the content to the particulars of Twitter allowed ease of viewing and obviously encouraged sharing.
More interesting perhaps is the way elements from previous fashion and culture cycles resurface. The aesthetic of the rap metal poster – the mystified belligerent tilt of the head, the fish-eye in-your-face camera lens, and high contrast severity of the darkening sky – is familiar for all those who experienced the 1990s. Rap metal was a fusion genre that combined the aggression of metal with the aggression of rap to satisfy the pinched hatred of suburban teenage boys who were coming of age with the impending realisation of their own social impotence.
And pigeons.
The cultural elements of the image and associated caption encourage viewing and sharing. The logistics of the tweet capture a moment in time that incites those who experienced the particular cultural event to signal their collective belonging. Some added value to the original tweet by replying to me, with 90s rap metal lyrics modified for pigeons, information regarding the origins of the image, and even a pigeon rap video.
Share
