When the Internet Goes Viral on Things Troumbley, Rex Lansing (1); Duarte, Marisa Elena (2); Larsson, Stefan (3); Brennan, Kathleen P.J. (4) 1: Rice University, USA; 2: Arizona State University, USA; 3: Lund University; 4: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Since the public debut of the World Wide Web 25 years ago, the uncoordinated and spontaneous spread of “viral” content online has captured the attention of popular Internet commentators and scholars. Writing on virality in 2006, Jurgen Habermas declared that computer-mediated communications plays little more than a “parasitical” role in the fragmented sphere of contemporary public discourse communities, but the use of digital communications a few years later during the “Arab Spring” excited public debates over the Internet’s role in social movements. In 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “viral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day” and announced that the U.S. would be developing tools for disrupting Internet censorship technologies, but by her 2016 presidential campaign Clinton was calling on “the great disrupters” of American Internet technology companies to join the global war on terror and develop methods for “disrupting ISIS.” Excitement over the speed and reach of viral messaging has been replaced by a rising moral panic over the Internet’s use as a tool of mass surveillance or organized violence. Instead of praising the Internet as an anti-authoritarian network spreading viral messages of peace and democracy, public figures like U.S. Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul now panic that on the Internet “Terrorism has gone viral.” This panel escapes the binary framing of Internet virality either as a political tool or a political problem by standing the question of how things go viral on the Internet on its head to instead explore how the Internet goes viral on things. Specifically, the panel draws attention to the ways in which digital discourse networks reproduce established relations of power and make possible new circulations of indigenous knowledge, metaphorical concepts, psychological disorders, and financial instruments. The paper on "The Contagion or the Cure?" gives a postcolonial critique of Western European Enlightenment values of knowledge and sharing using case studies of indigenous knowledge digitization projects. The paper argues that these cases show how subaltern communities resist appropriation or loss of control over traditional knowledge by designing and building digital systems suited to indigenous knowledge practices. "The Image is Openness, The Practice is Data" similarly critiques Enlightenment values, but instead provides a sociological perspective on data practices of self-disclosure centered on metaphors popularized and normalized by Internet culture. The paper contributes to recent arguments against theorizing dataveillance along the familiar lines of Foucault’s Panopticon, and instead finds that metaphors like “openness” and “open data” mark the site of struggle between users and a new kind of governmentality using data for or against political subjects. "How to Catch Tourette Syndrome from Facebook and YouTube" deploys genealogical methods to explain a sudden contraction of the medical disorder by teenage users of Facebook and YouTube unfortunate enough to have viewed viral videos of people exhibiting the ticking behavior of Tourette syndrome. Rather than reaffirm the popular explanatory theory of human disorders jumping between users and machines, the study finds that what has gone viral is the “symptom repertoire” of the disorder, or the description of bodily functions as medical illnesses, which continue to justify the authority of physicians over patients and expansion of pharmaceutical interventions into new markets. "High Speed Trading Algorithms and Human Manipulations" also addresses political economy, but brings an ecological perspective to the question of virality in contemporary global networks of capitalism by contrasting cases of human-driven market manipulations with the 2010 Flash Crash made by high-speed trading algorithms. The paper argues that in digital networks, accountability is an evolving property of complex assemblages and agency distributed between human and nonhuman agents. By focusing on how the Internet goes viral on things, this panel provides a better understanding of the ways in which digital discourse networks are not just a technology humans and things use, but mediums through which power is exercised and new circulations of humans and things emerge.
