The word virus is unashamedly unpleasant in its etymology. Arriving in English in the late fourteenth century, it came directly from the Latin term virus for a poison or unpleasant, slimy liquid. As a modern medical term, virus was coined in the 1890s by the Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck, who used it to describe an infectious agent far smaller than bacteria whose presence he had detected.
Beijerinck believed that viruses were, like their Latin namesake, some kind of contagious liquid. By the 1930s, however, it had become clear that they were in fact largely made out of protein, and subsequently that they consisted of genetic information inside a protein coating. It’s also debatable whether viruses do or don’t constitute life as such: able to reproduce only when inside the cells of other living organisms, they infect all known living organisms, yet can have no existence of their own outside of other life.
It was this analogy of parasitic infection that led to the label “virus” being applied to the notion of malicious, self-replicating computer programs—first by science fiction author David Gerrold in his 1972 novel When Harlie Was One,98 and then to describe the similar programs that began to infect personal computer systems in the early 1980s. Like its biological counterpart, a malicious program is technically only classified as a virus if it needs human actions to act as “hosts” to continue its spread—unlike computer “worms,” which can spread themselves automatically.
Today, however, it’s the notion of “viral spread” via the internet that’s the most important digital use of the term: a phenomenon that dates back to the early 1990s, and the recognition that words, ideas and images could all exhibit virus-like behavior under certain conditions, thanks to the entirely conscious and willing actions of their human audience.
“Virality” is one of the stranger properties a digital creation can be said to possess. It’s not so much about what something is, inherently, as about how people react to it. Something “goes viral” online when a sufficient number of people link to it and spread the word—a process that can look very much like the fast-forwarded spread of a virulent infection across the global population. Yet this spread is inherently impossible to predict, or engineer.
As I explored in the earlier entry on memes, famous viral phenomena range in their ridiculousness: from videos of a toddler biting someone’s finger to captioned photos of cute cats, political protest videos against African warlords, and misleadingly titled links to Rick Astley music videos.
Since the late 1990s, this has led to such increasingly lucrative and widespread practices as “viral marketing,” where firms use any and all of the digital resources at their disposal to try to ensure the viral spread of brand and product awareness. Such campaigns often co-opt the strange, subversive and crowd-friendly tendencies of “authentic” viral phenomena in order to seduce and delight their audiences—and to persuade them to engage in the all-important acts of digital sharing upon which every would-be-viral message ultimately relies.
As with much else online, every viral act—no matter how vast the statistics involved—ultimately relies upon a conscious, individual human choice; a willing decision to play host to part of the torrents of information tearing across the world.