The Importance of Going Viral

After doing the reading this week about what factors make things go viral, I began to think about the things that I see shared on social media all the time.  I usually ignore or scroll past the plague of Buzzfeed and Upworthy articles, but they are always being shared on social media as both pages have a good grasp on how to get shares.  I found it especially interesting when it was stated that, “The irony, of course, is that the more data we mine, and the closer we come to determining a precise calculus of sharing, the less likely it will be for what we know to remain true.”

Even though some pages seem to have a pretty solid grasp, the article says that the more we look into what leads to sharing, the less likely it will continue to be true.  This got me thinking about situations when people, groups, or companies try to use a previous technique to try to make their post or article go viral.  This satirical article from Clickhole perfectly illustrates this idea.  In this article it talks about how cancer researchers are trying to find a new way to go viral after how the success of the ice bucket challenge.  The thing is, any of the groups mentioned above would love to have something spread as much as the ice bucket challenge be it for financial gain, to spread awareness, or to just get shares and become popular.  The more we think about it, the more realize how big having a social media presence is for so many groups these days.  It is at the point where nearly every big company has a large social media presence in order to stay connected with people and become more popular.  There are people employed solely to run the social media of a company because it is that important to companies in the digital age.  Here is an article that discusses how different social media websites can be used for a businesses.

This image illustrates the insane popularity of the ice bucket challenge.

It is crazy to think about how going viral and being on social are so important to businesses, charity groups, and normal people these days, and this trend only looks to be continuing.

Social Media Personality

One of the articles we read in class this week talked about how social media “is about presenting the ideal version of yourself.”  While this may be the case for some people, I think many people cannot relate to this way of using social media.  Social media is such a diverse place that offers people a many different ways to express themselves, where presenting the ideal version of yourself is just one.  After all, Facebook has other more important uses nowadays.

I myself do not post often on social media and do not really try to create my ideal self online.  I find that my social media use very much reflects my real life personality.  For example I have a good sense of humor which is reflected by all the meme pages and funny pages I follow on Facebook, which often involves me tagging people to share the jokes.  Overall, this is the only reason I use Facebook as I have not done a status update for years.  I also use it as a way to keep up with my friends from another country and from other schools since it is the best way to see what they are up to and talk to them.  This article from the Independent examines a study that claimed there were four main types of Facebook users, however I feel that many people are a combination of all of them with a dominant type or two.  I think everyone may feel like they relate to one of the types mentioned and everyone definitely knows people who fall into all of the types.  I just think there is so much more to social media for a lot of people than constants updates of themselves to create an ideal version for everyone else to see and ‘like’.

Overall, I believe that a person’s personality on social media is almost as complex as their actual personality, and that there is so much more to social media than just getting likes and showing off.  After all, no one will ever be able to get more likes and shares than the image in this article which was shared by both LeBron James and the Dalia Lama.

Soccer and Twitter

The reading this week about live tweeting in a classroom setting got me thinking more about how I use twitter.  In particular the idea that, “live-tweeting draws a diversity of perspectives.”  I used to think of twitter as just a social media website, but now I realize that my use of twitter is more related to getting sports news and discussing stuff about sports or reading discussions about sports.

This article about twitter as the 21st century news source discusses how twitter is a crowd-sourced news source that offers a different perspective than other news sources.  Firstly, the way I use twitter as a news source is to see news about Manchester United or any players from the team as they are more reliable than newspapers, especially with all the fake transfer news going around, and they usually tweet stuff as it happens.  This allows me to keep up to date on accurate transfer news and and injury updates or announcements from players, as well as one player who does a weekly blog post.  This represents one of the perspectives that we don’t usually get from newspapers, hearing from players directly is something that did not really happen before twitter.  I find it really cool to be able to have this connection to professional athletes that I watch every weekend.

Example of player making an announcement on twitter.  This was made in reference to him re-signing for the club for an additional year after his contract running out.

In addition to the team and players, I follow many sports accounts, ran mostly by normal people (i.e. not sports journalists).  They tweet about soccer games as they go and are interesting as they give different views on players and teams as the season goes on.  It is always interesting to hear what other people think about certain players, clubs, or coaches.  Overall, twitter is much more than social media, and gives people a way to get news and discuss things with people who share similar interests.  In what other ways is twitter different from other social media sites?

Soccer is Fake News!

Fake news is something that has been very prominent during the most recent presidential election, however I have been exposed to it for almost as long as I can remember.  Soccer transfer rumors are the best example of fake news I can think of.  Their goal is to get people to click on the article, and there are many that are so unbelievable that people get pulled into the stories.  The “Pizza, politics and pure fiction” article we read earlier this week mentioned that one of the goals of fake news is ” hoping to maximise clicks on their link or site to secure advertising dollars.”  Soccer transfer rumors do this every winter and summer when the transfer window is open.  This means teams are allowed to buy players from other teams, and it means endless stories of player being linked to another team, no matter how ridiculous they may seem.

Example of a player responding to a false transfer rumor on Twitter.

An article from the New York Times titled, “The Original Fake News: Soccer Transfers”, talks about how soccer transfers have always generated fake news.  It even mentions that “Long before the ascension of President Trump made the phrase unavoidable, soccer provided the most fertile ground imaginable for what we have come to call “fake news.”  Fake transfer rumors are just as much a feature of soccer than any other aspect of the sport these days.  Before social media was a huge thing, many newspapers and sports news sites would have headlines of a big name player linked with a team to sell papers.  Nowadays, especially through Twitter, there are accounts and websites that have many so called ‘inside sources’ that supply them with rumors.  Twitter also makes it easy for stories to spread as people will see a rumor and retweet it causing more and more people to see it.  Some of the rumors are so outrageous that it’s hard to believe people would fall for them.  A video by Dream Team parodies the creation of transfer rumors, the scary thing is that almost every ridiculous rumor in the video was made by a real news source.

The problem is, with social media becoming a main news source for many people, fake news will only continue to spread.  Is there any way to prevent or slow down the epidemic of fake news?