Page 4 - Edge: Issue 6 March/April 2019

Thinking back to when people would dump ice cold buckets of water on themselves for the ALS association
(amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) or eating a spoonful of cinnamon on the internet.People will do challenges such as these to become famous or go viral. Going viral has to do with an image or video that is circulating rapidly and widely across the internet from one user to another. As the rise of social media viral trends are becoming more popular.
Over the past decade there have been hundreds of trends surfing around the internet. Starting as early as posing in front of various places back in 2011 to the Ice Bucket challenge in 2015, and the Bird Box challenge in late 2018 to early 2019 that later led up to The YouTube company banning challenges and pranks from being posted on their platform because of the dangers that come with these challenges. Going viral is all about the popularity and the amount of times someone has shared, talked about, or viewed it.
Is it someone’s plan to go viral or does it just happen randomly? Trends such as the World Record Egg on Instagram were planned to go viral the initiative was to beat Kylie Jenner’s record and the user running the account succeeded. However that isn’t always the case, trends such as
“The Dress” in 2015 where people argued about this dress being either gold and white or black and blue wasn’t supposed to go viral but blew up overnight. This dress was supposed to just be a new product from the company Roman and become a huge argument over the internet.
Going viral whether it is meant to happen or not it is a big part of things that happen in today’s world and how people, pictures, videos, and information become famous
Gone
Viral
Story by Molly Clark
Within recent decades people, pictures, and information have gone viral around the world.
Photo by Anthony Quintano
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