When dealing with crime and violence, it helps to understand how people are linked together. The same is true of outbreaks; we’ve seen how real-life contacts can drive contagion ranging from smoking and yawning to infectious diseases and innovation. But the strength of influence online won’t necessarily be the same as face-to-face encounters. ‘If you think about contagion of views about acceptability of violence,’ said Watts, ‘the reach may be much larger, but the number of people who act might be smaller.’
It’s a problem that a lot of industries are interested in. However, they generally aren’t so interested in controlling contagion. When it comes to online outbreaks, people tend to care about transmission for the opposite reason. They want to make things spread.
5
Going viral
‘Your nike id order was cancelled,’ read the e-mail. It was January 2001, and Jonah Peretti was trying to get some personalised trainers. The problem was the name he’d requested; as a challenge to the company, he’d asked for his trainers to be printed with the word ‘sweatshop’.[1]
Peretti, then a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab, ended up exchanging a series of e-mails with Nike. The company reiterated that it wouldn’t place the order because of ‘inappropriate slang’. Unable to talk them round, Peretti decided to forward the e-mail thread to a few friends. Many of them forwarded it to their friends, who forwarded it on, and on, and on. Within days, the message had spread to thousands of people. Soon the media picked up on the story too. By the end of February, the e-mail chain had gained coverage in The Guardian and Wall Street Journal, while NBC invited Peretti on to the Today Show to debate the issue with a Nike spokesperson. In March, the story went international, eventually reaching several European newspapers. All from that single e-mail. ‘Although the press has presented my battle with Nike as a David versus Goliath parable,’ Peretti later wrote, ‘the real story is the battle between a company like Nike, with access to the mass media, and a network of citizens on the Internet who have only micromedia at their disposal.’[2]
The e-mail had spread remarkably far, but perhaps it had all been just a fluke? Peretti’s friend and fellow PhD student Cameron Marlow seemed to think so. Marlow – who would later become head of data science at Facebook – didn’t believe a person could deliberately make something take off like that. But Peretti reckoned that he could do it again. Soon after the Nike e-mail, he got a job offer from a multimedia non-profit called Eyebeam in New York. Peretti would end up leading a ‘contagious media lab’ at Eyebeam, experimenting with online content. He wanted to see what made things contagious and what kept them spreading.
Over the next few years, he would start to piece together features that were important for online popularity. Like how jumping on emerging news stories could drive traffic to websites. And how polarising topics got more exposure, while ever-changing content kept users coming back. His team even pioneered a ‘reblog’ feature that allowed people to share others’ posts, a concept that would later become fundamental to how things spread on social media (just imagine how different Twitter would be without a retweet option, or Facebook without a ‘share’ button). Peretti would eventually move into news, helping to develop the Huffington Post, but those early contagion experiments stuck in his mind. Eventually, he suggested to his old boss at Eyebeam that they create a new kind of media company. One that specialised in contagion, taking their insights about popularity and applying them on a massive scale. The idea was to compile a rolling stream of viral content. They called it BuzzFeed.
Not long after duncan watts published his work on small-world networks, he joined the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. During this period he became increasingly interested in online content, eventually becoming an early advisor to BuzzFeed. Although Watts had started off studying links in networks like film casts and worm brains, the world wide web contained a wealth of new data. In the early 2000s, Watts and his colleagues began to explore these online connections. In the process, they would overturn some long-held beliefs about how information spreads.
At the time, marketers were getting excited about the notion of ‘influencers’: everyday people who could spark social epidemics. Nowadays, the word ‘influencer’ has evolved to refer to everything from influential everyday people to celebrities and media personalities. But the original concept involved little-known individuals who can spark word-of-mouth outbreaks. The idea was that by targeting a few unexpectedly well-connected people, companies could get ideas to spread much further for much less cost. Rather than relying on a celebrity like Oprah Winfrey to promote their product, they could instead build enthusiasm from the ground up. ‘The whole thing that made it interesting to people in the marketing world was that they could get Oprah-like impact from small budgets,’ said Watts, who is now based at the University of Pennsylvania.[3]
The idea of such influencers was inspired by psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous ‘small-world’ experiment. In 1967, Milgram set three hundred people the task of getting a message to a specific stockbroker who lived in the town of Sharon, near Boston.[4] In the end, sixty-four of the messages would find their target. Of these, a quarter flowed through the same one person, who was a local clothing merchant. Milgram said it came as a shock to the stockbroker to find out that this merchant was apparently his biggest link to the wider world. If an innocuous merchant could be this important for the spread of a message, perhaps there were other, similarly influential people out there too?
Watts has pointed out that there are actually multiple versions of the influencer hypothesis. ‘There’s an interesting but not true version,’ he said, ‘and then there’s a true but not interesting version.’ The interesting version is that there are specific people – like Milgram’s clothing merchant – who
