To Be Viral Or Not To Be?

Could Shakespeare's introspective hero Hamlet be "viral" today?

Shakespeare as a meme. Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez here.

I was recently watching a music video which was created to “go viral”. The lead singer and the actor discuss the idea of it before they start shooting and the singer says something to the effect of — you haven’t arrived until you explode on social media with everyone making reels using your content. It was a decently produced song, as catchy as any generic pop-song aimed at teenagers. Here is the song, which stars a Korean young man who speaks flawless Hindi in a Bihari accent as one of the actors.

Because his videos often go viral on Instagram, the producers likely thought casting him in the song would yield similar results. Yet, in a concluding part of the video, he mentions that the song hasn’t done as well as they hoped it would. In other words, it did not “go viral”. While there can be any number of reasons why something goes viral, I thought the emphasis on virality was interesting nevertheless.

For one, why does everyone want to go viral today? What is it about those literal 15 seconds of fame that has changed so much of our intrinsic behaviour and how we conduct the different aspects of life? Music, for instance, is meant to be divine for it puts us in touch with our emotions, our subconscious, and helps us connect with fellow beings through melodies and rhythmically strung sentences. Of course, there is nothing new to commercialisation of anything but it seems to me that we are rapidly losing all pretence towards preserving the essence of anything in our desire for instant gratification.

After all, there must be a reason why certain things “go viral”. Who would ever expect a Korean man to have grown up in Patna, Bihar, because his parents worked there and as a result, to have learnt the local language and dialect? Not only that, for that man to have held on to that bit from his childhood and be able to share it in an engaging way with the world as an adult because of social media? A story like this is intriguing because it is so unexpected and warm, especially in a country where K-pop, Korean face masks, and Korean noodles carry a certain aspiration for the foreign. Virality, then, cannot be created. It is paradoxically too human and imperfect to be manufactured by algorithms.

While modern virality is all about social media, the concept itself is nothing but resonance in disguise. It is something that all of us have experienced through belief, arts, and ideas throughout the history of humanity and will continue to for as long in future. The only difference is that modern resonance is too short-lived whereas the kind of resonance created by someone like Shakespeare, for instance, continues to be meaningful even today. It is precisely because the famous playwright tapped into the nature of human character and life so adeptly that we continue to read, watch, and meme-fiy Shakespeare.

Even though he wrote about life in 16th-17th century England and Western Europe, his writing deals with many existential questions that resonate with us irrespective of the culture and age in which we live. So when he wrote about Hamlet’s dilemma about to be or not to be, it was not just the dilemma of a young prince who had lost his father and witnessed his mother’s affair with another man as their kingdom was falling apart, it was also the eternal human confusion of whether to go on with life despite its ceaseless suffering or not. When he wrote about the “fault in our stars” in Julius Caesar, it was to admonish that we often blame our personal failings on our fate, again an all too-universal a human trait. In reading such works, we understand more about ourselves and our lives than we do about strange lands, their customs, and ideas.

But can that be said of the resonance brought on by Instagram reels and tweets? Absolutely not. At the same time, however, what it lacks in depth, it makes up in the breadth by connecting us across remote islands and most populous countries, which is its own kind of awesome. Yet for that reason, it can only connect us on surface, literally and metaphorically. There are immense merits to that but there are profound demerits too, especially as virality becomes the de-facto aspiration around the world. It disconnects us not just from our personal depth but also that of our surroundings. It seeks to create a global collective where our individual languages, cuisines, textiles, traditions, and insights, can be traded for what is human— to laugh, to cry, to eat, to sleep, and so on. While it may be prudent to reserve our judgement about whether that is good or not, it cannot be denied that there is much to introspect here as our worlds begin to converge in the 0s and 1s of algorithms.

Because after all, we are more than our basic realities as human beings. Our lives are a journey through a variety of experiences, ranging from the best to the worst, and we require ways of not just making sense of them but also embracing those experiences through community, values, and meaningful self-awareness. We require connections that go beyond a screen and its likes and comments— the sort of connections that are just as physically manifest as they are emotionally felt. Virality is cute but a comprehensive resonance is what we need in order to bring out the best in us. That resonance can only come when we log out.