The inanity of ‘viral’
MANY years ago, when YouTube was still something new and I was even more disoriented than now, I was having a very lazy Sunday as we’ve all had lazy Sundays. I started, as usual, watching short documentaries; then, I passed on to music videos; and then, some funny videos about stupid cats or babies doing unexpected things. I allowed YouTube to broadcast whatever it wanted, and the website interpreted — very rightly — that my brain did not want to think too much. I ended up watching a video of a guy squeezing his own pimple. It was absolutely disgusting, and I wondered how I could have ended up watching such a tasteless thing.
Well, I deserved it that day, but I felt really bad. I thought I had sunk very low. But it was, at the same time, an awakening moment that led me to think a couple of things.
First, I thought I should not do that again. Our lives are short. Many people die without achieving their life goals. We regret that many people we love have passed away without our having spent as much time with them. As we have heard many times, we do not regret so much the things we do, but the things we did not do. I hear many friends telling me they did not have time to do something while at the same time keep talking about the four fascinating series they are watching on Netflix. There is no moral condemnation here though. Go ahead and spend your life in the way you prefer, but the idea of looking back at my life once I am old only to attest that I wasted it watching streaming shows or stupid videos on YouTube really scares me. That’s not, in my opinion, a life worth living.
Second, the abovementioned video was cataloged as “viral,” a very interesting term. Viral is the adjective for the Latin word “virus,” which originally meant “poison.” Virus is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “any of a large group of submicroscopic infectious agents that are usually regarded as nonliving, extremely complex molecules, which typically contain a protein coat surrounding an RNA or DNA core of genetic material but no semipermeable membrane, that are capable of growth and multiplication only in living cells and that cause various notable diseases in humans, animals and plants.” There is also a second, more modern meaning: “a computer program, which is usually disguised as an innocuous program or file, that often produces copies of itself, inserts them into other programs, and when run, usually performs a malicious action (such as destroying data or damaging software).”
The adjective “viral” then was originally strongly negative. It was applied to something infectious and potentially destructive. However, in the modern use of the term, related to social media, this negative connotation has completely disappeared. The term is rather neutral or even positive. Viral means, according to the same dictionary, “quickly and widely spread or popularized especially by means of social media.” A viral video then would have somehow popular approval or would reflect a massive interest of the people in it.
As I said at the beginning, we all have fallen into the temptation of watching viral videos since they are addictive and call our attention for being extremely funny, sweet, weird, shameless or violent. But what I felt that lazy Sunday led me to think, in a very pessimistic way, about our human condition. There was, for me, a strong sense of emptiness first, and then even guilt, for having spent the morning watching those viral videos. It was completely useless entertainment. Many of my friends, however, find it relaxing to keep watching them, rationalizing that they were very stressed during the week.
The idea of having achieved a high level of comfort and safety in our lives, at least for the lucky ones belonging to the middle class, just to spend it watching viral things or even extremely popular TV series makes me think that, for most people, laziness is the natural state. In Europe, many people think of the implementation of a universal income as the key to making everyone happy. I beg to differ. If we provide universal income to millions of people, many would get immediately bored and would spend their lives lying down on the sofa and ordering food (assuming, of course, that anyone would still want to have such a job, delivering food, if universal income was available).
I do not watch TV. I do not watch Netflix. And I do not miss these. When someone tells me to watch something because it was “viral,” I apply to that word the original meaning: an infectious and harmful video and then, avoid it like the plague. Then I remember the exaggerations of my grandmother, when I was a child and teased her, “Abuela, you are becoming blind,” and she answered proudly, “I don’t care. There are less and less good things to see!”