Viral Marketing and Agency

Over at the Online Fandom blog, Nancy Baym discusses a recent article in Science News that reframes the terms of an ongoing public debate about how "social influence" works. She quotes this portion of the article:

More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals. In some networks, it was far easier to get an idea established this way than in others. The entire structure of the network mattered, not just the few influential people. Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent. “If it had been raining,” Dodds says, “that same match wouldn’t have had an effect.” Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature.

The upshot of the study, Dodds says, is that “in the end, you don’t have control over how people spread your message.” The best way to increase the odds of person-to-person transmission of an idea is to make it a good idea and to give it “social worth,” he says. “Some things are just fun to talk about."

I've done some work on viral marketing in the past, and this article simply confirms some of the theories I've had about it for some time. Many naysayers, even normally incredibly astute social commentators such as Steven Shaviro, for instance, focus on the ways in which viral marketing and other similar gambits which use a model of social influence allow corporations to turn you "into their shill."  This is probably because most of the people who actually theorize the ways in which ideas move across networks of different kinds of populations are generally advertising experts who are using this precisely to sell products.  This question of the "social worth" of the idea being spread adds an entirely new dimension to this equation, though, one which people like Malcolm Gladwell have been on top of for a while now.  And while even the more socially responsible theories of social influence are a bit reductive, this should still open up a space for us to discuss agency and power in vastly different terms than we have been.  If we continue to use the forest fire metaphor, where then does the agency lie: with the trees or with the fire?  The metaphor is a bit unwieldy because it implies a natural and even necessary chemical reaction to take place here (if there is kindling and oxygen, after all, the fire will spread), but it is instructive to ask ourselves whether agency and power in this new kind of social dynamic (the dynamic of networks) exists somewhere outside of people and institutions themselves, somewhere in the affect which catalyzes the spread of the idea through a population.  This certainly requires a very counter-intuitive kind of politics, but it is definitely one that we must adapt to on some level, at least in certain cases.