French television company NT1 used a particularly creative strategy to promote the most recent season of The Walking Dead. They'd admonished fans not to click/use/tweet a certain link, warning that doing so would invite the attention of zombies. As is human nature, hundreds of thousands of people tweeted the link, only to find themselves plagued by virtual "zombies". The "zombies" were fellow twitter users who would bombard their victims with such profound exclamations as "Argghirsoa!" or "Bldgagdged!" following their tweet of the forbidden link. While this advertising strategy is undoubtedly creative, and certainly apropos considering the content of the television show, it made me think about the "zombifying" effect that social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has on people. The pros and cons of social media in general have no doubt been discussed before, but I think it's interesting to note the modern-day zombie-ism inherent in social media.
One prominent aspect of social media is it's propensity to give rise to short-lived internet sensations, be they memes or viral internet videos. To me, it is a mystery why some of these sensations become as widely famous as they do. The music video for "Gangam Style" by Korean artist Psy is one such phenomena. Personally, I think to call the video idiotic would be an understatement, and I think many people, if asked in a one on one situation, would say the same. However, why is it that the original music video has well over 1 billion views? Not counting those who would speculate as to the "catchiness" of the tune, I hypothesize that the popularity of "Gangam Style" and other flavor-of-the-week internet sensations is due, at least in part, to the zombifying effect of social media. Consider this: a few people may post about a certain video, picture, or even piece of clothing from a particular brand, and soon enough the amount of people who have not only seen this same item, but also increased it's exposure via "sharing" or "tweeting", has increased exponentially. Once the sensation has gained enough exposure, people begin to develop an affinity for it purely through familiarity, they acquire a taste for it. While this type of jump-on-the-bandwagon mentality has surely been around since before the birth of social media, sites such as Facebook and Twitter inject our social consciousness with it in an extremely subtle, and yet pervasive, manner. I believe the danger in this lies in our ability to be influenced by the inertia of the mob without being conscious of it's effect on us; "zombies" have become for the 21st century what "sheep" were for previous eras.
Link to original article: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/zombies-swarm-around-infected-hashtag-clever-campaign-walking-dead-147702
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Good analogy! Perhaps we might add to it the way in which the internet -- though particularly social media outlets like facebook and twitter, and especially tumblr -- offer users a sort of second life, an extended or alternative existence in a virtual reality. I, for one, do not subscribe to the belief that there is anything "pathetic" or unbelievable about how much time someone like my roommate devotes to her life on tumblr, given how embedded the internet is into our lives and culture. I do not think that recourse to "fantasy" or alternative realities such as those available on the internet is attributable only to those who have failed or struggled to develop "positive" personalities as Lea seemed to be arguing in "Modern Zombie Makers." However, for those that DO use something like tumblr as a way of coping with failure in the "real" (perhaps better to say "material") social realm, it seems that we might be able to read such cases as examples of social media providing life after death.
Another interesting aspect of the viral aspect of information that I find disturbing is in online news sources. Many of these sites have a very real tendency to feed on each other, effectively re-posting stories with little to no research(mindlessness). Some of the best examples of this come from 'real' news sites taking satirical stories as fact:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion#The_Onion_taken_seriously
While these are extreme examples, there is a more general trend of news being constantly re-posted. I'm sure everyone has had the experience of trying to look into a current event only to repeatedly encounter excerpts or whole articles that are identical on several different sites. It's a kind of self-feeding unquestioning spread of information that strikes me as very reminiscent of the zombie mind-set.
P.S., it dosen't have anything to do with my post, but Josh, I really like that idea of digital-reincarnation