Blog post #3-- Justin Couto

 For the last blog post, I have chosen to do articulation number three which concerns how media messages are brought into being and spread throughout a culture, community, or society and how it is manifested in the dynamic of creativity and production, distribution and circulation, consumption, and reception. In order for any message to be spread throughout a community, the message must be shared by numerous other people. The two examples that will be discussed here are Martin Luther’s 95 Theses and the famous “Women yelling at a cat” meme that is the must notable case of something going viral in our digital age. In most cases, the videos or posts that go viral now, are ones that were not intended to go viral in the first place. This is very similar to Martin Luther’s Theses as he first wrote these to refute the indulgences that the church was selling to people, telling them that if they buy it, it absolves them from future sins. They could also purchase these indulgences for dead relatives as a way of freeing them from purgatory (Standage, p. 52). The virality of the theses occurred when Luther posted his list of theses on the door of church. Copies then began to circulate on manuscripts, pamphlets, and broadsheets. They were later translated and republished in German. It was stated that it took a mere 4 weeks before almost all of Christendom was familiar with the theses (Standage, p. 52-53). Here, we see the way that what started out as a refute to the church’s actions, turned into what could be called one of the first cases of virality. His message quickly spread throughout not only his Latin speaking community, but also expanded into the German speaking community as well. Luther had unknowingly revealed the power of messages that become amplified when shared, recommended, and copied. The distribution of Luther’s ideas in the form of pamphlets became extremely popular amongst all people. It was seen as a way of showing support for his ideologies, and pamphlets were even bought by those who were illiterate just because they wanted to show support for the messages (Standage, p. 54). This is similar to the society we live in now where the sharing of another person’s message on social media to our followers, further amplifies the messages effective range and also publicizes our support for the message and ideas that are being portrayed in the post we share. A message is first brought into being with an idea that the author believes is worth sharing with others, and the more people agree with the idea, the more it is able to circulate a society/community and allow the message to become more powerful. The popular meme of the women yelling at a cat that dominated the internet a few years ago and still occasionally pops up on my feed. It is very different from the Luther’s virality, but they share common traits such as how recognizable it is, how fast its popularity grew, and the many variations that were made of it. The women yelling at a cat meme variations required creativity that would make people laugh and make them want to further share it. With this meme we see the power of the internet in our digital age and how fast something is able to spread. On knowyourmeme.com, they say that one variation of the meme gained over 78,000 retweets and 276,000 likes in only two months. Whereas, Luther’s theses were spread by word of mouth and the distribution of pamphlets that can only attract a limited amount of people, the internet connects millions of people simultaneously making it extremely easy to attract large groups to a single post that has been shared, reposted, or recreated.

Philipp. (2019). Woman yelling at a cat. Know Your Meme. Retrieved from https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/woman-yelling-at-a-ca

Standage, T. (2013, October 15). “The Ancient Foundations of Social Media Why Humans are Wired for Sharing”. In T. Standage. Writing On the Wall: Social Media The First Two Thousand Years (p. 6-211). Bloomsbury.