CONTENT CULTURE: GENRES OF VIRALITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Content Culture provides the first, overarching cultural history of viral media’s major genres: genres that have been particularly pervasive, not only across platforms (Facebook, reddit) and formats (text, video), but also throughout the duration of the fully corporatized social-networking era (c. post 2010). First, the project compiles multiple large, originally collected datasets of especially highly engaged—or “viral”—English language content, across multiple dominant, mostly U.S.-based platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok) and spanning over a decade (2010-2023). Next, it identifies major genres which, despite their ubiquity, have often yet to be named or made subjects of academic inquiry. One is a genre that the project calls the “uplifting anecdote”: a short, true story about everyday heroism. Another is the “mesmeric process video,” a filmic depiction of a material process, like baking a cake, painting a fence, or exploding soda bottles, in hypnotic fashion (human hands may or may not be present). Finally, across its five chapters, the project treats five of these major genres individually, to unpack the origins and significance of their new ubiquity. The book traces these genres’ long prehistories and considers their new socio-technical conditions. It addresses, too, many challenges that they raise for critical analysis. Though each genre compels a different interpretation, the project notes commonalities. These genres carry forward long traditions of cultural expression foregrounding questions about truth, ethics, and identity, while transforming them to suit the new platform-based context. To pursue this analysis, Content Culture develops a hybrid humanistic and computational approach to content, drawing together classically “formalist” methods of cultural criticism—focusing on aesthetic features like genre, style, or tone—with the more data-scientific digital humanities. The project shows what this hybrid approach can contribute to our comprehension of platform-based content while laying the foundations for its future applications.