You’ve all seen the lists. “Remember back when gay meant happy, notebooks were made out of paper, spam was a kind of meat, and a hard drive meant going from Milwaukee to Denver in a blizzard?”
Well, tough luck, old people. Or, I suppose I should say “tough luck, fellow old people.” Because I do remember, but I accept that words change meaning. Tonight’s post is about a word that is changing meaning, in what I think is a very positive way.
Viral. When I was a kid, a virus just meant a disease that everybody was catching, and they were pretty frequent. Nobody used the adjective form except doctors and scientists. A viral illness could be spread from person to person by breathing, or just being in close proximity.
Then, computers got themselves invented, and one of their first anthropomorphizations was the term ‘virus.’ Some kind of contamination that could spread quickly from machine to machine. Still a bad thing.
Then came social media, and videos of cute kittens, and prison inmates dancing to Michael Jackson’s thriller, and a very strange young man screaming “Leave Britney Alooooone!”, and flash mobs, and a cute little kid who bit his brother, and they all ‘went viral.’
Although some might view it as the dumbing down of society, it is essentially a positive connotation to the word. Videos go viral because people like them. They entertain us.
But, they do more than that. They provide us with a link to each other, they teach us more and more about what we all have in common, what we all like. And, deep down, I think most people want the same things. We argue about politics and religion, but everybody likes cute animals, and babies, and a good laugh, and a catchy tune, although we might disagree a bit about the specific definition of that last one.
Once we’ve figured out what we all have in common, we can begin building the utopian society of the future around it. This will be a beautiful moment in human history, when clarity and mental health spread, like a virus, throughout the human race.
There will probably be kittens involved. I’m not crazy about that part, but I can live with it.
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