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Several calls to action urge scientists and science communicators to engage more with online communities. While these calls have been answered by a high percentage of scientists and science communicators online, it often remains unclear what are the best models for effective communication. Best practices and methods for online science communication can benefit from experimental and quantitative research addressing how and when users engage with online content. This study addresses with quantitative and predictive models a key question for the popular, but often-ignored in science communication, social media platform Facebook. Specifically, this study examines the impact of imagery through quantification of likes, comments, and shares on Facebook posts. Here, I show that a basic quantitative model can be useful in predicting response to marine organism imagery on Facebook. The results of this online experiment suggest image type, novelty, and aesthetics impact the number of likes, shares, and comments on a post. In addition, the likes, shares, and comments on images did not follow traditional definitions of “charismatic megafauna”, with cephalopods and bony fishes receiving more interactions than cartilaginous fishes and marine mammals. Length and quality of caption did not significantly impact likes, comments, or shares. This study provides one of the first quantitative analysis of virality of scientific images via social media. The results challenge previously held conceptions of social media scientific outreach including increasing emphasis on imagery selection and curation, notions of which taxa the public connect with, and role of captions for imagery.

This article adopts a socio-visual constructivist approach to explain how the Kony 2012 video became a site of intense symbolic struggle regarding how to represent humanity in the digital age and, in the process, one of the most viral and intensely contested cultural artifacts of the last few years. The first section demonstrates that the video employs the visual conventions of personification and rescue, which form part of an iconographic repertoire coding certain events as humanitarian crises recognizable as such by Euro-American audiences. Conversely, the author examines how these tropes drew upon a neocolonial framing of humanitarianism, one that Ugandan and Western critics questioned and against which they offered an alternative vision of the post-civil war realities of northern Uganda. However, to avoid pictorial reification, the article's second section retraces the institutional and actor-based networks through which still and moving images from Kony 2012 and its associated campaign circulated. The concept of pictorial exponentiality is introduced to explain how these images multiplied in digital public spaces through the accelerating digital cycles. This section also examines the concept of digital feedback loops to make sense of the non-linear and institutionally 'flattened' social relations binding pictorial actors debating the video's representational content and responding to each other via social media- and web-based exchanges. Kony 2012 was a key marker of an era during which the visual politics and ethics of portrayal of the human unfold digitally, through social media and online video platforms as much as conventional institutions of image production and dissemination. By treating the video as a cultural artifact whose viral rise and fall are attributable to the pictorial conventions upon which it drew and the structure of the networks through which it circulated, the article reveals how understandings of humanity are visually constituted, contested, and undone in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present moment out of the oppressive vice of classical historiography. While fascism retrenches on "art for art's sake" in defense of principles of origin, authenticity, and mastery, we envision a politicization of the art of the meme not simply through content but through practice. This paper attempts to engage in this practice through creative invention. We work across two cases, one "real" (Richard Spencer gets punched) and one of our own creation: the viral life and death of Quodlibet, an anachronistic DJ. Our wager is that the blast of now-time that the meme unleashes can be used to lay bare the myth of mastery and open a space for new subjects, forms, and practices. At the same time, we show how the meme is prone to boomerang effects and reterritorializations that can reverse back into fascist aestheticism, the catastrophic status quo, and the dominance of the market. Playfully and without self-seriousness, our goal in this paper is to open the image sphere: to slip into the Internet's dream house and rummage its drawers for a revolutionary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making and sharing maps is easier than ever, and social media platforms make it possible for maps to rapidly attain widespread visibility and engagement. Such maps can be considered examples of viral cartography - maps that reach rapid popularity via social media dissemination. In this research we propose a framework for evaluating the design and social dissemination characteristics of viral maps. We apply this framework in two case studies using maps that reached wide audiences on Twitter. We then analyze collections of maps derived from and inspired by viral maps using image analysis and machine learning to characterize their design elements. Based on our initial work to conceptualize and analyze virality in cartography, we propose a set of new research challenges to better understand viral mapmaking and leverage its social affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work describes the trajectory of Internet memes, their main characteristics, and their relationship with the fields of virality literature and cultural production research. We explore the historical trajectory of internet memes and identify their constitutional features (vernacularism, virality, and intertextuality). We also propose that memes are objects that act as provocateurs; this is because they are carriers of meaning that reflect the repertoires of closed communities. However, they acquire new reflected repertoires in the process of being transmitted intertextually among consumers. As such, this work both clarifies the intertemporal and logical interdependencies between online cultural production and virality, as well as unveil the linking power of vernacular backgrounds and shared expressive practices (in our context, elaboration of common memes) for online consumer collectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several calls to action urge scientists and science communicators to engage more with online communities. While these calls have been answered by a high percentage of scientists and science communicators online, it often remains unclear what are the best models for effective communication. Best practices and methods for online science communication can benefit from experimental and quantitative research addressing how and when users engage with online content. This study addresses with quantitative and predictive models a key question for the popular, but often-ignored in science communication, social media platform Facebook. Specifically, this study examines the impact of imagery through quantification of likes, comments, and shares on Facebook posts. Here, I show that a basic quantitative model can be useful in predicting response to marine organism imagery on Facebook. The results of this online experiment suggest image type, novelty, and aesthetics impact the number of likes, shares, and comments on a post. In addition, the likes, shares, and comments on images did not follow traditional definitions of "charismatic megafauna'', with cephalopods and bony fishes receiving more interactions than cartilaginous fishes and marine mammals. Length and quality of caption did not significantly impact likes, comments, or shares. This study provides one of the first quantitative analysis of virality of scientific images via social media. The results challenge previously held conceptions of social media scientific outreach including increasing emphasis on imagery selection and curation, notions of which taxa the public connect with, and role of captions for imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has identified a strong consumer demand for sensationalized and conflict-oriented news coverage. With the rise of social network services as central spaces for encountering news, there is a need to move beyond the notion of consumer demand (measured by attention to news stories) to a broader conception of user engagement (encompassing attention as well as social interactions online). This article seeks to remedy this by analyzing which parts of election coverage tend to become popular and go viral. It develops a concept of user agendas that include popularity (news stories that receive most clicks on news Web sites) and virality (stories that users share most intensively on social network sites). The article then applies the concepts in a case study of online news coverage during the 2015 Danish parliamentary election. Through an analysis of frames, sentiments, and actors, it is shown that game-strategic and personalized coverage tend to attract large-scale attention on news Web sites, whereas issue-oriented coverage fares better on social network sites. This suggests that what users demand depend on where they encounter news. Users tend to engage with one kind of news in private settings and another in the public settings on the social Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the recent phenomenon of the vehicle-ramming attack (VRA): i.e. the act of purposely driving a vehicle into pedestrians and populated vehicles. It documents the recent (2015–2017) rise in the prevalence of ramming attacks and how these incidents challenge some of the assumptions we have about terrorism and its causes. Typically, criminologists and terrorist scholars tend to focus on either the 'psychology' of individual terrorists or wider structural or ethno-political issues, such as religion, ideological doctrine or the role of terrorist organizations in converting and recruiting people to violence. This paper will adopt a different position, one which focusses less on structure and individual psychology, and more on the act itself, as something that is not merely an expression of an individual or an ideology, but something that has a lure and force all of its own, as something that travels through our contemporary mediascape, to be internalized and imitated by an increasingly varied set of subjects with varying motivations, psychologies, ideologies and circumstantial backgrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study examines how politically themed computer games function as digital campaigning tools during elections. To make sense of this understudied phenomenon, the concept of political campaigning games (PCGs) is introduced and defined as advergames that promote a partisan political position in an electoral context. The study bridges theoretical literatures from game studies, media studies, and political communication to mount the argument that PCGs convey a persuasive political message through the rhetorical devices deployed in political cartoons as well as computer games. Methodologically, I develop a framework for rhetorical game analysis and apply it to 4 games from European national elections. The analysis expounds the games' strategic political messages as well as how they are rhetorically argued through game mechanics. The findings reveal that PCGs exemplify changing dynamics in digital campaigning, reify the enduring effectiveness of conflict framing, and codify how games can be designed to enact political rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current discussion on virality derives from early molecular biology and information theory of the 20th century, butgained actual metaphoric influence and virulence onlyin the 1960s and is becoming very popular in Postmodernity with the dramatic appearance of AIDS and the discovery of HIV as a retroviral phenomenon. It is suggested that the virus as a medium for change be regarded in relation to the technological conditions of preserving and transforming cultural information. Especially in the context of Dada and Fluxus, artistic demands of modernity such as opening up, permeability, interaction and participation are interpreted and analysed with the help of “infectious agents" as visions of biologically inspired intermediality. It seems that viral models of interaction and transmission have contributed to the current digital participation culture and to the supposed convergence of life and art of today and eventually shaped it in the course of cultural evolution. Thus a larger picture is evolving of the virus as a cognitive figure representing interaction, transmission, interdisciplinarity, connectivity and the interdependency of art and science in the 20th and 21st centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discovers potential human interactions with growing amount of internet of things (IoT) via proposed concept of Social Web of Services (classical social web with smart things - daily life objects connected to the internet). To investigate the impact of IoT on user behaviour patterns we modelled human-thing interactions using agent-based simulation (ABM). We have proved that under certain conditions SmartThings, connected to the IoT, are able to change patterns of Human behaviour. Results of this work predict our way of living in the era of caused by viral effects of IoT application (HCI and M2M connections), and could be used to foster business process management in the IoT era.

As social creatures, humans are highly involved in storytelling. With the continued advancement of communication systems, the mechanisms for telling the narrative of human events also have evolved. Social media and the memetic properties of hashtags’ going viral are the apex of modern, digitally mediated, storytelling tools. This critical essay discussed two hashtags, i.e., narratives, of the Charlie Hebdo Paris shooting to illustrate how hashtag virality can be a mechanism for the spread and enforcement of Western perspectives. It then explored precedents under which international law could potentially warrant regulation of such behavior. Concerned with the protection of human diversity and cultural pluralism, this essay advanced a normative course of action to facilitate social change as conceived by an interdisciplinary framework.

The problem of assessing the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of virality of social network posts is of great value for many activities, such as advertising and viral marketing, influencing and promoting, early monitoring and emergency response. Among the several social networks, Twitter.com is one of the most effective in propagating information in real time, and the propagation effectiveness of a post (i.e., tweet) is related to the number of times the tweet has been retweeted. Different models have been proposed in the literature to understand the retweet proneness of a tweet (tendency or inclination of a tweet to be retweeted). In this paper, a further step is presented, thus several features extracted from Twitter data have been analyzed to create predictive models, with the aim of predicting the degree of retweeting of tweets (i.e., the number of retweets a given tweet may get). The main goal is to obtain indications about the probable number of retweets a tweet may obtain from the social network. In the paper, the usage of the classification trees with recursive partitioning procedure for prediction has been proposed and the obtained results have been compared, in terms of accuracy and processing time, with respect to other methods. The Twitter data employed for the proposed study have been collected by using the Twitter Vigilance study and research platform of DISIT Lab in the last 18 months. The work has been developed in the context of smart city projects of the European Commission RESOLUTE H2020, in which the capacity of communicating information is fundamental for advertising, promoting alerts of civil protection, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how candidates’ Facebook performance, measured by the number of average shares, likes, and comments per post, affects the personal vote they gained during the Hungarian general election campaign of 2014. The database contains three of the most voted-for candidates owning Facebook pages from all single-member districts. The results show that the average number of shares on candidates’ Facebook pages is positively associated with electoral outcome after controlling for, inter alia, the vote share of their respective party on list in the districts, whereas the numbers of likes and comments are not significantly related to the dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We look to mythic resources to help us narrativise and conceptualise instances of 'affective contagion' within social movements. We first review 'Crowd Theory', from Gustave Le Bon to Freud, and then the mimetics of Richard Dawkins and his followers. We find both theories lacking when it comes to accounting for collective agency. Next we turn to the work of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, drawing on their conception of capitalist sorcery and their suggestion of crafting techniques to protect oneself against capitalism's spells, to 'denaturalise' capitalism and thus to repotentialise the world. While Pignarre and Stengers draw inspiration from neo-pagan witches, we instead look to the annals of pop history, where we discover the 1960s' band The Troggs struggling to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. We take their 'sprinkling of fairy dust' notion and apply it to anti-capitalist struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the online circulation of the slogan 'Je suis Charlie' which went viral on social media after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015. Building first on recent literature on digital virality, it approaches the slogan's circulation in terms of the transfer of affective intensities among network connections and with consideration to the function of social media algorithms in bringing about network encounters. Two samples of tweets using the slogan are analysed to highlight the emergence of subjective relations to Charlie from within networked circuits of affect. The declaration 'Je suis Charlie' is argued to be a performance of affective citizenship in the name of social cohesion while also constructing 'affect aliens'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores Israeli radio stations’ activity on Facebook and analyses the most popular content in terms of various engagement indexes. It finds that the format of a post, its language and content, all affect the level and nature of user engagement with the post. Moreover, it appears that both stations and users turn to Facebook primarily for promotional and PR purposes and less so for promoting mutual interaction and dialogue between stations and their audiences, thus complementing the traditional medium without utilising the full range of opportunities this new platform has to offer radio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operations involving the capture, processing, and transmission of terrorist events, campaigns, or images produce effects well beyond the representational/informational functions of media. This article examines several unspoken effects involved in the mediation of terrorism. We analyze the extent to which several mechanisms and operations of western media may be complicit in, if not fundamental to, the global production and administration of terror, particularly at the level of its image and what we call virality. We theorize the ways in which media not only “mediate” terror, but also function to regulate and/or administer it and, in particular, to exacerbate, amplify, and proliferate images and activities of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) across global networks of digital exchange. We argue that key to understanding the strategies and circulating effects of ISIS’s media involvement is the tendency of viral media operations to overproduce, overextend, and oversaturate. The condition of oversaturation denotes a hyperactive global media circuitry that is collapsing under its own weight. This condition reflects a strategic tendency of terror, which underlies all mediatic processing of images deployed by ISIS. It also reveals a vulnerability for terrorist strategy to exacerbate and exhaust the hyperactivity of media, and thus to accelerate the implosive collapse of the globally networked system. We theorize how implicit and unintended effects or outputs of the mediatic processing of terrorist meanings, images, and discourses may work to overstimulate the global system to the point of its reversal, exhaustion, or implosion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Introducción: El movimiento yihadista global modifica su mecánica de difusión ideológica al amplificar su mensaje gracias a la expansión viral en las redes sociales y al papel de los usuarios individuales. Metodología: Este estudio analiza un total de 234 vídeos extraídos de las búsquedas con más visualizaciones empleando cuatro definiciones adoptadas por la ONU de la organización yihadista Jabhat al Nusrah, que cambió su nombre en Julio de 2016 a Jabhat Fateh Al Sham. Resultados y conclusiones: Comprobamos que las organizaciones yihadistas no disponen de capacidad para controlar plenamente su discurso en YouTube por la enorme dispersión y por el papel de usuarios individuales en la generación de contenidos nuevos que sortean con facilidad las restricciones de la plataforma. Además, concluimos que los vídeos accesibles son de tipo amateur, violento, con estética yihadista, sin apenas posproducción y con escasa presencia de medios de comunicación tradicionales actuando como amplificadores del discurso violento. Introduction: The jihadist global movement changes its mechanics of ideological diffusion when amplifying its message thanks to the viral expansion on social networks and the role of individual users. Methodology: This study analyses a total of 234 videos collected from the searches with more visualizations using four definitions considered by the UN about the jihadist organization Jabhat al Nusrah, which changed its name on July 2016 to Jabhat Fateh Al Sham. Results and conclusions: We confirm that jihadist organizations do not have the capacity to fully control their discourse on YouTube due to the huge spreading and to the role of individual users in the generation of new contents that easily avoid the platform's restrictions. Besides, we conclude that the accessible videos are of amateur, violent type, with jihadist aesthetic, without barely any postproduction process and with scarce presence of traditional media acting as amplifiers for the violent discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of social media in Indonesia, along with the rise of political Islam, is changing the ways in which people engage with religious matters in the country. In this article, we deploy post-Bourdieuan field theory to explore Indonesia's religious domain as a 'hybrid media space' – a social space mediated by old and new media agents interacting to produce viralized forms of public communication. We undertake this exploration through three viral controversies, or 'social dramas', triggered by a perceived breach of the religious space's order. All three dramas involved political Islamists in contention with various political actors, namely the Muslim senator Fahira Fahmi, the West Sumatran atheist Alexander Aan, and the then governor of Jakarta, 'Ahok'. These examples shed light on the current state of Indonesia's religious space and its multiple mediations, as well as taking field theory into new communicative and religious terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the internet hype surrounding the Eurovision Song Contest victory of Austrian drag artist Tom Neuwirth/Conchita Wurst in Copenhagen, 2014. In particular, it looks at the resonating affective intensities that have shaped the circulation of Conchita's body image on YouTube and Tumblr. Drawing from the interactive dynamics of these platforms, the (hyper-)mediated eventfulness of Conchita's Eurovision will be examined as (1) derived from the anomalous entanglements of everyday media use, (2) transformed and transforming in its spread through a variety of viral memetic practices, and (3) characterized by both dominant and deviant articulations of visual social engagement. The complexly modulated queer workings of these entanglements will be argued to perform through networked and seriated dynamics of digital affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widely circulated food photos online have become an important part of our visual culture. Combining human ratings of food characteristics and computational analysis of visual aesthetics, we examined what contributed to the aesthetic appeal of a diversity of food photographs (N = 300) and likes and comments they received in an artificial newsfeed from participants (N = 399). The results revealed that people tended to like and share images containing tasty foods. Both healthy and unhealthy foods were able to gain likes. Aesthetic appeal and specific visual features, such as the use of arousing colors and different components of visual complexity, also influenced the popularity of food images. This work demonstrates the potential of applying computer vision methods in visual analysis, offers insights into image virality, and provides practical guidelines for communicating healthy eating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the impact of offline television advertising on multiple metrics of online chatter or user-generated content. The context is a quasi experiment in which a focal brand undertakes a massive advertising campaign for a short period of time. The authors estimate multiple dimensions of chatter (popularity, negativity, visibility, and virality) from numerous raw metrics using the content and the hyperlink structure of consumer reviews and blogs. The authors use the method of synthetic control to construct a counterfactual (synthetic) brand as a convex combination of the rivals during the preadvertising period. The gap in the dimensions of chatter between the focal brand and the synthetic brand in the test versus advertising periods assesses the influence of advertising. Offline television advertising causes a short but significant positive effect on online chatter. This effect is stronger on information-spread dimensions (visibility and virality) than on content-based dimensions (popularity and negativity). Importantly, advertising has a small short-term effect in decreasing negativity in online chatter. Data and the online appendix are available at [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]