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This weekend, Adam Penenberg wrote a post at Techcrunch Let’s Kill “Viral”: It’s Time For a New Word in which, after being ridiculed by radio hosts over the title of his book 'The Viral Loop' he says:

The problem, I think, is the word “viral,” which comes from biology and was retrofitted to cover the phenomenon of word-of-mouth—or on the Web, so-called “word-of-mouse”—dissemination of ideas. I propose we kill it and replace it with something better.

Now this is a topic I've spoken and written about before, but I think Adam is missing the point again.

As I said then, if you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system. I don't think changing the name is enough - we need to change practice too. Viruses are exploitative - they hijack normal reproduction to propagate their genes at the expense of the host. This is an accurate metaphor for the kinds of scammy social applications that Mike Arrington described in his Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell post this weekend, aimed at the same app developers I was talking to originally in 2008.

When I read Adam's interview with Caterina Fake it was obvious that Caterina's expert Tummling was key to Flickr's growth, and it didn't fit Adam's 'Viral' framing. Caterina says:

But a game built for adults, where communication could come more freely, would mean the social interactions would be much more fruitful.

They also have this exchange:

Penenberg: There's both a good and bad side to virality. Products with viral hooks that are so strong they coerce people to sign up--in order to achieve a huge initial viral rush--are obviously bad. Not only do they alienate users, they don't lead to a sustainable business. On the good side, you have organic growth, which comes as a natural byproduct of something that spreads simply because people like it--eBay, Hot or Not, and Flickr. I can't think of an antonym for it.
Fake: How about brute force growth?
Penenberg: That's good. Maybe we should trademark the term.

Things on the internet grow fungally, not virally. The metaphor is completely wrong.

I was a former member of the SF Mycological Society. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of mycelia, underground...

Which fits perfectly with my organic reproduction metaphors.

So lets keep the term 'viral' for explotatative applications that violate trust to reproduce against the interests of their hosts, and we can use organic terms like 'fruitful', or if we insist on alliterative euphony, 'virile videos', 'fertile films' and maybe even 'philoprogenitive photographs'.

With the prominent celebrity deaths this week flooding our many publics, friends are pushing back. Doc writes:

obsessing about celebrity is unhealthy for the single reason that it is also unproductive. Celebrity is to mentality as smoking is to food. (I originally wrote “chewing gum” there, but I think smoking is the better analogy.) It is an unhealthy waste of time.

Mary responds:

Michael Jackson and other celebs are the replacement for that sort of seriously time consuming difficult religion, because media and post-modernism make it easy [...] If nothing is more important than the individual, but he/she needs to follow something bigger than the self [...] you have the perfect primordial soup to grow the MJ, etc worship replacing organized religion we see now.

I think there are two other components to this - celebrities function both as Jyri's Social Objects the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our publics, as I have said:

The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

This week, research was published confirming this:

"The very experts who could kind of inform everyone else don't. They actually keep feeding them the information they already know because that helps establish a connection," Nathanael Fast says.

If this whole argument seems circular, that's the point. Prominent people stay popular for longer than they ought to because they serve as conversational fodder, which in turn drives more media coverage.

"Take Paris Hilton, somehow or another she became well known and now people are more likely to talk about her," Fast says.

This supports Duncan Watts's experimental work on self-feeding fame.

But there is another component to this as well - that we perceive celebrities as part of our social group - they take up one of the slots we have available for modelling and keeping track of other people. My first experience of this was when I worked at BBC Elstree, and said hi to some oldish chap I recognised in the corridor, later realising that he didn't know me at all - he was Arthur from EastEnders. (Now I've done a bit of public speaking this happens to me in reverse now and then - people who've seen me speak somewhere later on come and say hello, remembering it as a conversation). danah's classic Fakesters discussion touches on this too, with Friendster's symmetric Dunbar assumptions confounded by users wanting to connect through the famous; whereas MySpace and especially Twitter have embraced the fundamental asymmetry of who pays attention to whom in this way.

My take is that while Doc is right about the time-sink of celebrity for it's own sake, which may be an example of losing a useful person-slot to a synthetic creation. Mary's implication that there is a God-slot there is perhaps supported by Robert Wright's argument that the God as human-like role model can have good influences on us.

Certainly, being aware of our own choices of 'fake friends' to act as role models is likely to be better than having to choose them from a limited 20th century media model.

Graphing Social Patterns East is on tomorrow, and I'm sorry not to be there, though m'colleague Patrick Chanezon will be. However, reading the schedule I notice the word 'viral' is still much in evidence.

If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system

r-Strategy - scatter lots of seeds

Break free
Originally uploaded by aussiegall

K-Strategy - nurture your young

Proud mama
Originally uploaded by debschultz

Fruiting - delicious with a seed in

help yourself
Originally uploaded by *madalena-pestana*

Rhizomatic - grow from the roots up

Sweetness / Dolcezza
Originally uploaded by WTL photos

Being dumb gets low CPMs

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Social networks aren't like TV - everyone sees something different in them. If you want to gather engaged, inspired, interested and indeed valued users, write an application that speaks to their refined and aesthetic and noble interests, and see how they will spread it through their social networks to find the others who share their interests.

It was interesting to see Slide redirecting away from virality today. GSP West was on at the same time and place as eTech, and I heard some eTechies refer to it as 'Grasping Social Parasites'; I hope that the growing realisation that a disease is not a good model to base your business on means that tomorrows conference will spread a better reputation for GSP East.

One way of thinking about social networks is through "social objects" - the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our Dunbar-constrained networks to broader communities. We all do this - use some shared object as a point of conversational reference. Here in the US it tends to be sports teams activities; in the UK there's always the weather to fall back on. (This fails in California because it's too predictable - when I came here in 1998 it took me a while to realise that saying "beautiful day again" was like saying "I see gravity's still working" to Californians).

Talking about social objects is nothing new - Jyri discussed them at length back in 2005, and danah dissected Friendster's suicide in 2006 when they killed off the Fakesters (user profiles that represented social objects like "Jack Daniels" and "Burning Man").

Where I find the 'Dunbar number' idea falls down is that social network connections, like so many other human-made things, are power-law distributed. The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

Different social network services can be distinguished through the different kinds of object that lead to their success. Friendster's expulsion of Fakesters, and later attempts to use TV characters is one example; MySpace's embrace of independent bands and FaceBook's initial use of Universities as touchstones help explain their divergence. LinkedIn has Companies as their touchstone, Orkut has it's communities, which are often used as badges for the users to express their identity. Suicide Girls is a blog network focused around models-as-objects, last.fm uses songs and bands, Flickr uses photos, Dopplr uses places.

Looked at in this way, James Hong's attempt to change the core objects of HotOrNot from pictures of strangers to pictoral self-tags he calls "Stylepix" seems an interesting experiment.

Making sense of the different object graphs and how they interact with the social graphs in these overlapping sites will keep lots more researchers busy, I'm sure.