Contagious Media

Personally I like the concept of contagious media. Not necessarily the jokes and mindless forwards that are exchanged between co-workers and friends, but the fact that their still is a means to express beliefs and ideas and have a vehicle to share these with people that express similar points of view. I found it particularly interesting in Peretti’s reading he couldn’t even fathom the people his conversation with Nike reached via the internet. Our government and corporations know all to well how to use mass media in order to sway our beliefs and conceptions of reality, but the fact that we as a mass can still communicate and express our own versions of reality without interjected corporate bias; is somewhat of a small comfort to myself. I was however baffled about the parameters Jonah used to decide what exactly was encompassed in contagious media, and if there were specific restrictions in labeling the content. Let me elaborate briefly, in item number one, he speaks of BWN’s and how they begin the process of spreading contagious media. Then he follows with number 4 saying, “humorous emails, jokes, games, video clips, and political calls to action or forms of this viral propagation.” I don’t agree that political calls to actions and Halo 3 can be lumped together in the same classification simply because as he states in number 5 that the content is unimportant as long as it is pushed through a human powered network. I think that it way to broad of a scope, and restrictions should be not on how many times its sent, but on what the actual content represents; such as personal, intended humor, or just plain “garbage” content.