viral media : what, why, how, and can it work in edu

Accroding to Thomas Frank, in his brilliant analysis of the rise of the ad industry, the true legacy the 60's counterculture has been the rise of a new rebellious corporate style, to replace conformist consumerism (the classic example of which is the 1984 Apple computer ad in which IBM is figured as Big Brother recently lampooned by Obama supporters). For Frank the genius of co-optation is that it allows citizens to symbolically resolve the contradiction between their role as consumers and their role as producers. Yet while on the level of cultural criticism, Henri Jenkins proposes that media and communications studies we need a new approach to analysing this phenomenon:

"the old rhetoric of opposition and cooptation assumed a world where consumers had little direct power to shape media content and where there were enormous barriers to entry into the marketplace whereas the new digital environment expands their power to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media products." Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age, p 151

Rather than the figure of the culture jammer celebrated throughout the '90 by Adbusters which he sees as being purely reactionary, Jenkins offers us the poacher. Derived from his work in fan culture, particularly Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Studies in Culture and Communication) poachers appropriate original content and circulate it within broad participatory networks. He offers bloggers as the prime example of the new empowered consumer.

Social-networking technologies from email to MySpace have given consumers the power to transform brands. Eager to channel this participation while being weary of brand detractors, marketers are increasingly attempting to add value to brands by creating a variety of smaller-scale, fan-driven experiences, adapted to a wide variety of media. Viral marketing assumes consumers, not firms, have the most influence in the creation of brands. Using social networks to "spread the word", viral media grew as a epiphenomenon of email forwarding, which according to Dan Brooks (who became famous for his spoof Volkswagen-suicide bomber advertisement), as quoted by Holly Willis echoes the age-old practice of telling jokes: "If you repeat the joke, you own it."