Content Culture: Literature in the Age of Viral Media

Abstract

We are living in the era of “content.” Short, digital ephemera designed for rapid circulation on social media—like listicles, hot-takes, or how-to videos—infiltrate every free minute. Still, literary critics have yet to put the precise question: how has “content’s” ubiquity reshaped English-language literary writing? “Content Culture: Literature in the Age of Viral Media” addresses that question, by showing how prominent, mostly-American authors—like George Saunders, Claudia Rankine, and Ottessa Moshfegh—draw uneasy inspiration from popular new genres of viral content, including the “uplifting anecdote,” “iWitness account,” and “depressive comic” (as I call them). The project makes a two-part argument: that viral content, thanks to the unique modes of its circulation and monetization, often embraces a particular aesthetics, and associated ethics (a set of ideas about how we should treat others and ourselves); and that much literature now channels or resist those aesthetics and ethics. To make this argument, “Content Culture” does two types of work. First, it analyzes viral content—chiefly, a database that I have compiled, comprising metadata concerning 204,147 of the most shared pieces of content on sites like Facebook and Twitter, 2014 to 2019. Here, it uses methods of both “close” and “distant” (or computational) reading, including machine learning tools, as recently adapted and deployed by digital humanists (e.g., Topic Modeling, Sentiment Analysis, and Naïve Bayes Classification). Second, it analyzes literature’s relationship to content, relying more on close reading, but still using mixed methods. In this way, the project contributes, not only to our understanding of contemporary literary history, but also to our transdisciplinary comprehension of social media’s cultural effects. Literary and art-critical analyses of popular content—both analog and digital—supplement media theoretical and social-scientific discussions of topics like “eudaimonic media” and “fake news.”