Uso adecuado de la madera Apeiba tibourbou Aubl

Jørgen Riber Christensen

The news video “SEE the first glimpse of Prince William and Kate Middleton” peaked, for one day only, in a Top-20 viral video chart, “Unruly Viral Video Chart”, with the most popular viral videos of the day. It was May the fifth 2015. Four days before, a video, which was quite different, but similarly one about family relationships, peaked, also for one day only. This was “Mother beats son for par- ticipating in Baltimore riots”. These two videos point to new ten- dencies both within viral communication, and within social media in general. These tendencies are: viral videos appear and disap- pear with a short-lived rhythm, viral videos have become part of the news circuit, and their content and narrative mode have an inclination towards the pathetic. Pathos is here used in its rhe- torical sense as a means of persuasion, as opposed to ethos and logos. Aristotle describes pathos: “persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgements when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile” (Aristotle C. 367-322 BC Book 1, chapter 2). This article seeks to describe and explain these recent develop- ments within viral communication. By recent is here meant 2015, as the sampling of the viral videos that provide the empirical ma- terial for the analysis took place in May 2015, and this material is compared to conclusions reached in a more extensive, but similar analysis carried out in 2010 (Christensen & Hansen 2012).

To get under way with the examination of these recent develop- ments two interconnected research questions are asked: The first question is: What is the frequency of changes in the most shared and popular viral videos? This is a question about the rhythm of variations in the content of a top-20 chart. And the second is: How does the answer to this first question connect to content, especially to the genres of these popular videos? The answers to these two initial and basic questions are then put into a wider perspective by two further questions: What does this indicate about the use of social media, especially the performance of viral videos there? And the question will be considered whether this is an indication of general trends in communication and media history?

A final question is how this recent development, which is also of a sociological character, connects to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm (Lefebvre 1992/2007) and to his understanding of urban and abstract space (Lefebvre 1991, 229) and also to his political and ideological views. Already here, it can be stated that Lefebvre’s concept of “the reign of the commodity” (Lefebvre 1992/2007, 7) has become central in viral communication.

METHOD

The method of the article is a combination of quantitative and qual- itative content analysis (Christensen 2015), which merges an exter- nal survey with internal analyses of the samples included in the survey. The challenge of this method is to reach results that are rep- resentative and of such a general nature that it can present valid and verified trends within the media field that is being examined. The ideal, which in the context of viral communication is impractical if not impossible, is to register the whole population of the media texts in question within a given time span, and therefore the result- ing trends will be subject to some statistical uncertainty, though this does not preclude valid results. The statistical validity of a survey is checked through the formula of the confidence interval on the mean, which has the ideal of stating the representative value of the samples of the survey in relation to the whole population of viral videos with a certainty of 95% (Sepstrup 2002, 130-131):

Another problem is the selection of the sample to be examined and analysed. What criteria can be employed to select the sample? Graak- jær & Jessen (2015, 33-34) have suggested seven criteria, of which three will be used in the survey of the article. The seven criteria are the criterion of randomness, the criterion of variation, the criterion of theory, the criterion of popularity, the criterion of topicality, the crite- ria of peculiarity, and the criterion of review. The criteria for this sur- vey are of theory, popularity and topicality. Theory is found relevant because the context of this anthology is rhythm, and this concept has given rise to a new focus on the tempo of the comings and goings of viral videos. As such, the understanding of rhythm in the article is the rhythmical component of duration, where as in musical theory, dura- tion is defined as the amount of time a particular element lasts. Put in another way, for how long or brief a period a viral video can survive as widely shared in the social media. This question of rhythm also points to theoretical explanations of why a video is short- or long- lived. The criterion of popularity is unavoidable as it is built into the research question, which is about the popularity of certain videos. If a video is not popular it will not be considered; but by popularity is not only meant what kinds of videos are popular, but certainly also why they are so. The criterion of topicality is seemingly uncompli- cated, and it is connected to the other two criteria: How long does a video stay topical, and the videos sampled are only sampled because they are part of a top-20 chart, which is updated on a daily basis; but this criterion is also more general as it deals with indications of new trends in social media.

The practical method of the sampling may be called parasitical (Christensen 2015, 147) as the survey of a top-20 chart has already been carried out by an external agent, and this survey is of a sta- tistical standardised nature and it complies with the confidence interval of the mean. The survey is described by the marketing firm behind it, Unruly Media, like this

World’s largest video sharing database

We built and launched the Unruly Viral Video Chart™ in 2006. Ranking videos by number of shares rather than views, the chart quickly established itself as the defin- itive source for video sharing data around the globe. Will.I.Am described the Unruly Viral Video Chart as “the billboard hot 100 of the Internet generation” .

The Unruly Viral Video Chart is the largest historical data set of sharing behavior on the social web, with 1.3 tril- lion views tracked to date and 116 million video shares tracked every 24 hours. (Unruly 2015)

This huge material is filtered in the survey carried out for this arti- cle for one whole week from April the 30th _{2015 to May the 6}th _2015. Every day during this week the 20 most shared videos in the chart were registered and downloaded. Their presence in the chart was entered into an Excel sheet day-by-day, and this also meant that their absence could be noted. This quantitative approach was then supplemented with a qualitative one, when each video was ana- lysed with the view of establishing its genre and content. Based on the outcome of this analysis, the quantitative approach was re- sumed in order to weigh the presence and absence in the chart of the videos according to their content and genres. This procedure was a replica of the same carried out in 2010 with the difference that in that year the period was three months. Before the results of the survey carried out in 2015 are presented, then in summary the results of the survey in 2010.

The research question of the article from 2012 “Viral marketing videos: Transgression, marketing and social media” (Christensen & Hansen 2012) was what qualifies a marketing video to go viral? The approaches used to answer this question was anthropological gift giving theory (Hyde 2007; Mauss 2000/1959), Bourdieu’s soci- ological theory of habitus (Bourdieu 1984/1979), a narratological analysis of transgressions, and then a quantitative survey of 89

different videos. The answer suggested by the article was that the design of a video with the ambition that it could be shared virally was that it had to be transgressive in the sense that its themes should transgress societal norms e.g. gender politics or grotesque humour, its narrative mode or storytelling should also be trans- gressive, e.g. metafictional, and the reception of the video should include hesitation in the identification of the sender of the video. It was also a recommendation of the article that videos with music, perhaps directly music videos, had a strong viral potential, and finally, somewhat surprisingly, that videos with the character of being media events in the tradition of Dayan and Katz (1994), no matter their other content, could go viral. It is of interest to the present article that the representative distribution across genres of viral videos from the Viral Video Chart in 2010 was this: Music videos 52.8%, commercials 8.8%, unusual events 7.7%, children 6.6%, political content 5.5%, personal self-improvement or ther- apy 5.5%, animals 4.4%, mashups 4.4%, celebrations 3.3%, media content 1.1%. By far the large majority of these videos was distrib- uted in YouTube.

This article will now go on to consider more recent trends with- in the social media, especially with regard to viral communica- tion. To be able to detect and describe these trends, the empirical material collected in 2015 will be analysed.