“Viral: Metaphor, Narrative, Music” with Paula Harper

What does it mean to “go viral”?
Before the pandemic, “virality” was already shaping how we experience media online—exploding, remixing, and circulating at lightning speed. But what if virality isn’t just a social phenomenon, but a musical one?

Join us for a lecture from Paula Harper exploring how viral internet culture operates like a form of musical practice—where watching, sharing, and remixing becomes a kind of collective performance. We’ll also dive into how digital platforms use this viral energy to capture attention, fuel profit, and reshape everyday life online.

Paula Harper:

“Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, “going viral” had nonetheless become commonplace— the epidemiological metaphor characterizing an increasingly-familiar trajectory of explosive circulation, remix, and reportage expanding from individual nodes of audiovisual content online. This presentation briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept, before suggesting how “virality”—as aesthetic repertoire, as popular narrative, as social logic made concrescent in platform architectures—might also be understood as a form of musicality. I argue that participation in the production, watching, listening to, circulating, or sharing of “viral” digital internet objects has constituted a significant site of 21st-century musical practice. And across the 21st century, digital platforms have adapted to facilitate this viral musicality, using music’s positive capacities—aesthetic pleasure, communal participation, social connectivity—to enable corporate profit-making, corral attention, and incentivize acceptance of increasing technocapital enclosure of the internet and everyday life.”

This lecture is FREE and open to the public.