What makes articles go viral? Is it the content? The title? This is an interesting question that I hadn't thought about before reading this chapter. Berger goes in-depth with the studies he conducted as a grad student at Stanford. He and a couple of colleagues created an online database that was able to record both the Journal's weekly top emailed list, and the articles published in The New York Times. What they were able to find from this data is quite interesting. Berger states that, "Two reasons people might share things are that they are interesting and that they are useful." This appears to be an extremely obvious observation. Actually studying the articles published in The New York Times for these criteria proved to confirm these observations. Berger's research concluded that articles that are interesting are 25 percent more likely to be shared, while articles that are interesting are 30 percent more likely to be shared.
That all makes sense, but what about those articles that are just odd and not useful? The weird science articles that go viral without much relevance to daily life. Berger concludes that those articles pickup a lot of attention due to the awe factor associated with them. Berger says that, “According to psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, awe is the sense of wonder and amazement that occurs when someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, sublimity, or might. It’s the experience of confronting something greater than yourself.” A science article that addresses the spreading of a virus through photographs grasps this concept of awe. Everyone knows that this is how viruses spread, but actually seeing it through a photograph draws out a certain amount of awe. Berger and his colleagues tested this theory of awe. They concluded that science articles that have a certain amount of awe associated with them are 30 percent more likely to be shared.
I enjoyed reading this chapter this week because it addressed the question of the awe factor. I have to admit, I love reading articles online that address theories or notions that straight-up surprise me. Humans enjoy learning and understanding this that are "greater than yourself." Things go viral to address this phenomenon.
Sometimes I worry that we're becoming a world that demands this awe for everything. We only read articles that will grip us, so we miss what's going on in the world on a regular basis. If it's not highlighted somewhere, will we see it? Does old fashioned news have a place any more?
ReplyDeletePerhaps the real question is, how do we make the important stuff go viral and not just the cat videos?