There’s a fascinating virality related article looking at the 2014 student protests in Venezuela in the International Journal of Communication published here http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/3416/1516

Social Media and Virality in the 2014 Student Protests in Venezuela: Rethinking Engagement and Dialogue in Times of Imitation by JAIRO LUGO-OCANDO, University of Leeds, UK, ALEXANDER HERNANDEZ, Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela, MONICA MARCHESI Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalonia, Spain.

“The authors ask whether these technologies were used by leaders and participants as a catalyst to trigger the protests and amplify them across the country or whether they were a galvanizing factor among more general conditions. Following similar research that claims that viral media have played a key role in Spain’s indignadosmovement (Postill, 2014), we use virality/contagion (Sampson, 2012) and cultural chaos (McNair, 2006) as theoretical approaches to analyze these events while examining their limitations and shortcomings in the context of the Venezuelan society.”

Although I’m not entirely convinced by the rather binary distinction made between psychology and technology, on one hand, and users’ practices and political culture, on the other, since it conceptually flattens the importance of Tarde’s more inclusive notion of the social in contagion theory, the paper makes positive use of this material as an “argumentative provocation.”

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