Paper short abstract:

Virality is a core metaphor for how we have collectively imagined the processes of digitalization. In this paper I consider what it means to conceptualise human sociality in terms of virality, focusing on the interchanges between the AIDS pandemic, processes of digitalization, and covid itself.

Paper long abstract:

If a single metaphor might be used to capture the processes of digitalization – and how we have collectively imagined them – it is surely virality. To quote virologist John Coffin, ‘a virus is simply a piece of information… but the information is dependent on having a cell to translate that information into the components that then become part of the virus particle that carries the information from one cell to the next’. Translate ‘cell’ to ‘packet switched network’ and you’re describing the structure of the internet itself. But viruses also transmit specific kinds of information that damage their host; what’s more, they are contagious and contaminating – two sibling metaphors that are increasingly invoked to understand the negative social effects of digitalization.

In this paper I want to consider what it means to conceptualise human sociality in terms of virality. My specific interest is the interchanges between the AIDS pandemic, processes of digitalization, and covid itself, which have been ‘meaningfully and messily entangled’ (to quote Cifor and McKinney) from the outset. In so doing, I return to concerns that have long preoccupied anthropologists regarding how conceptions of purity and pollution structure the social.