Working Papers
2011
Virality: Developing a Rigorous and Useful Definition of an Information Diffusion Process
This paper notes that while marketing has defined and written deeply about “viral marketing”, the process of virality has not been defined. And while Marketing scholarship is interested in creating, managing, modeling and predicting viral word-of-mouth (WOM), other fields may be more interested in studying naturally occurring viral diffusion events. I explore some of the questions that fields like Communications, Political Science and Information Science might be interested in asking about viral information events, and then, after discussing definitions of viral found in various bodies of literature, I argue for a definition of virality as a WOM diffusion process wherein a message is actively forwarded from person to person, within and between multiple weakly linked personal networks, and is marked by a period of exponential growth in the number of people who are exposed to the message. I further suggest that one result of a viral event is the creation of a temporally bound, self-organized, interest network where membership is based on an interest in the information content or an interest in being included in the interest network of others. In the discussion section I present areas of potential research related to viral processes and interest networks. – Jeff Hemsley
2010
Democracy.com: A Tale of Political Blogs and Content
The debate about the role of political blogs in politics generally and its effect on democracy and participation in particular has deepened since the 2008 U.S. presidential election. While some studies warn that the Internet may undermine deliberation, and replicate patterns of homophily and polarization among blogs with the same political inclination, other studies emphasize the potential of the Internet to strengthen cross-ideological discourse and participation. This paper suggests, using a hybrid theoretical framework which acknowledges homophily and the power law distribution among political blogs, and at the same time exhibits the use of the Internet also as a cross-participation platform and as strengthening participation. For that purpose, this paper looks at 83 videos that went viral during the 2008 election and examines patterns of behavior of the top 50 political blogs (conservative and liberal) in respect these videos over a period of two years.
Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Place of Blogs in the Life Cycle of Viral Political Information
This study addresses dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere, and is interested in empirically understanding how blogs play a role in the virality process. More specifically, we develop a new methodology that creates a map of the ‘life cycle’ of blogs posting links to viral information. Our dataset focuses on the linking practices of blogs to the most significant viral videos of the 2008 US presidential election. To do so, we gathered data on all blogs (n=9,765) and their posts (n=13,173) linking to 65 of the top US presidential election videos that became viral on the Internet during the period between March 2007 and June 2009. Among other things, our findings illuminate the importance of different types of blogs: elite, top-political, top-general and tail blogs. We also found that while elite and top-general blogs create political information, they drive and sustain the viral process, whereas top-political and tail blogs act as followers in the process.
