The Writing Is on the Wall: Epidemiology and the Anticipated Ends of Social Media

Abstract

This chapter explores the potential theoretical validity of a recent controversial qualitative study that used epidemiological modeling to suggest that the social media giant Facebook would lose 80% of its users by the year 2017. Reconfiguring this model as the basis of a useful qualitative approach, this chapter considers the historical cycle of adoption and abandonment endemic to message board-based social media sites from the 1980s through current mobile applications such as Yik Yak. What emerges from this approach is a distinct rhetorical pattern that likens the dangers of such social media sites with a virus that infects healthy bodies and communities, much as it functions in outbreak narratives. But like an adaptive virus, social media design has transformed in response, leading to the rise of technology that provide anonymity and ephemerality that makes such mapping much more difficult. As a response, we must consider the affective nature of social media as a way to account for the material and lived effects of its persistent virality.