The International Relations of Social Networking: Memes, YouTube and Going Viral

Presented at the International Studies Association

March 17, 2011

Dan Bousfield

Department of Political Science

University of Western Ontario

Preliminary Draft

DO NOT CITE

dbousfie@uwo.ca

Abstract: This paper explores my experiences with the ethical and political ramifications of ‘going viral’
through an account of an uncontrollably successful and short‐lived viral YouTube video. In late 2009, I
documented and posted an entirely happenstance police arrest on campus, which was subsequently
reposted and picked up by major media across Canada. With half of a million views within two weeks,
the ethical and political consequences of going viral exemplify the changing relationship between
cultural commodities, the study of global politics and the ethics of online politics. From the creation of
immediate parodies and remixes to offers of commercialization and official partner status; the process
of going viral is a series of political and ethical considerations with little room for critical reflection and
response. Subsequent international backlash and campus protests exemplified the ways in which pop
culture harmonizes global issues, but also overwhelms political sensibilities. This paper will explore the
performative, practical and popular consequences of ‘going viral’ and develop an ethical framework to
situate the political sensibilities created by such ‘citizen journalism.’
 This paper will explore the political and ethical consequences of a ‘viral video’ in the
context of a global political analysis. I begin by discussing the representational power of the
viral video, and how in the context of police violence the viral video takes on specific
international and global characteristics. Methodologically, this paper seeks to improve
international understandings of personal and ethical practices, by exploring my own
experiences in producing a viral video. Therefore, I continue by discussing the ethical
consequences of ‘going viral’ which include: the erasure of the ambiguity in the reproduction of
the event; the issues of responsibility that arise from a video’s dissemination; transformation of
an event into a commodity; and the political and community fallout from a video of this kind.
Developing accounts of personal politics are relatively new in international analyses of
technology; this paper seeks to merge the practical and the political in order to analyze the
phenomenon of ‘going viral.’

Mimesis and Going Viral

“Can’t we say that to get an example, to instantiate, to be concrete, are all examples of
the magic of mimesis wherein the replication, the copy, acquires the power of the
represented?” (Taussig 1993, 16).

To situate the significance of ‘going viral’ is to reconcile the political significance of a

representation of politics in the abstract and decontextualized realm of non‐place that is the
internet. The mimetic character of the viral video is to reverse the perception that ‘the
political’ must be the discussion of the reality of worldly experience. In the viral video, the
representation obtains the power of politics, a representation of experience that is
decontextualized, removed and transformed into an ideological object, one that becomes
powerful not because of its political significance, but precisely because it lacks weight. The viral
video’s strength emerges from its reification, its non‐existence. In this sense, the mimetic
power of the viral video is one that challenges us to question the inherent tension between the
representational power of governance and the representational power of objects, as well as the
ethics of decision‐making within these contexts. In order to break out of the impasse of these
forms of representational authority, it is necessary to foreground the tension between the
contingency of actions and the ability to place those actions within political and economic
contexts.

The role of the international in representation

The incorporation of the contingent action (such as a commonplace arrest) into the
study of politics will inevitably reproduce many of the implicit claims of sovereignty of the
nation‐state. Simple assertions to the contrary are not sufficient to exclude how routine events
are structured by and give coherence to the institutional frameworks of social order. Instead, by
introducing an international analysis to the viral video in a way that subverts the priority of the
nation state, we can begin to unearth the ways in which these innocuous events uncover the
incommensurability that makes politics and contingent actions inherently contested and
contestable. International Relations has a disciplinary authority over global spaces which it
rarely uses to explore practices in the global sphere. Moreover, disciplinary International
Relations has only begun to explore its role in supporting practices that challenge the centrality
of the nation‐state as the arbiter of ‘politics.’ In doing so it is possible to understand the way in
which International Relations can politicize and be politicized, as the personal and practical
daily interactions of the global sphere are allowed to become a part of academic discourse.
These efforts follow the position of Rancière in arguing that ‘the people’ is deployed as the
imagined foundation for Western political institutions, especially under democracies of Greek
lineage, which continues to support the exclusion of those who cannot participate (traditionally
this was the poor, women, slaves, etc.). Indeed, the members of society that have ‘no part’
provide the founding moment for Rancière (or the initiating exclusion) of the community itself.
As he argues:

Politics does not exist because men, through the privilege of speech place their interests
in common. Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking
beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing
in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation (Rancière 1999,
27).

The demand for recognition is inherently incomplete and fraught with problems, but integral to
highlighting the extent to which representational power is tied into the very concept of
sovereignty and the state. When police employ violence in the name of security and safety,
they perform the inherent authority of the state in their contingent and ultimately contestable
actions. If we assemble the marginalized practices of nation‐states, International Relations as a
discipline can use ‘the global’ in political and practical ways. In other words, the understanding
of the state as having the monopoly on violence rests not on the monopoly of violence (as this
is a tactical and situated matter), but instead flows from the sovereign’s ability to declare a
distinction between violence and non‐violence. Importantly, this decision produces the
incommensurability of ‘accounting’ between what Rancière calls ‘the political’ and ‘the police’
because, to the extent that the state relies on hierarchical control over an imagined common
order (which it literally polices), it is opposed to the demand of the excluded (the political claim
of the voiceless). As International Relations scholarship often reasserts the primacy of anarchy
in the international arena, it also provides an opportunity to explore ‘anti‐social’ acts. In these
terms, the discussion of the legitimate use of force is the central question of sovereignty and
instances that contest the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence question the
representational power of the sovereign state (who is included in safety and security and who is
not). As recent events in the Middle East have demonstrated, the arbiter of violence and
nonviolence is increasingly an international question. Moreover, by pushing beyond the nation
state we can begin to discuss global politics in practical and personal ways, introducing the
importance of ethics into our global acts.

The Ethics of the Act

In my case, the creation of the video stemmed from an ethical injunction that had very
little to do with the eventual ethico‐political issues which were created by the viral video as
mimetic object. As a researcher who studies the ethical and political significance of protest, the
ability to represent – to account for – the actions and events of protest is a way to counter the
claims of governance and legitimacy granted to the legal and policing powers over the protest
site. As was recently seen at the G20 Summit in Toronto, the representational power of protest
grants important political and moral claims, understood both by the participants and the police.
In the case of the G20, the massive expenditure of resources permitted the extensive videoing
and virtual capture of the events that unfolded, allowing police to establish a post‐hoc list of
‘most wanted’ for acts of vandalism, mischief and other crimes. These are crimes that are
unlikely to ever be prosecuted, charged or even pursued – instead it is the retelling of the
protest through the video that grants moral legitimacy, by objectifying and controlling the
image of criminality. This also deflects questions from the foundations and legitimacy of police
authority during the events. Thus, the ability of protestors to provide their own account of the
same event is a way to challenge the representational authority of police, and therein the very
violence inherent to policing itself, to monopolize the use of violence in pursuit of a coherent
political body.

So, in late October of 2009, I was on the way back from an undergraduate class on
genocide with a group of students and we stumbled upon an arrest of an individual which was
underway on the main floor of the building where my office was located. With a new phone in
hand, I decided to record the events. My creation of the video was neither planned nor given
much forethought, but rather stemmed from a common belief in the necessity of retaining an
account – a copy of what was transpiring. As Zelizer has argued, the dialogical nature of
accounting provides a way to remember as well as to contextualize and politicize. In her words,
“just as journalism needs memory work to position its recounting of public events in context, so
too does memory need journalism to provide one of the most public drafts of the past” (Zelizer
2008:79). Though unplanned, this account of events would become the center of campus
controversy, one which was magnified by the publicness of the video. The contingency of the
taping would later become an ethical issue, as I received numerous complaints (as well an
official police rebuke) about the lack of context provided in the video, as taping began when the
arrest was already underway. However, in the glimpse of recognition by one of the arresting
officers that he was being taped, I immediately posted the video to YouTube, fearing the loss of
my phone as evidence. The ability to immediately post online was a way of using the immaterial
space of the internet to avoid possible confrontation (which in retrospect was unnecessary and
unlikely) and invite external review of the events underway.
 The ethics of my act were largely beyond the scope of contemplation and reactionary,
based more on impulse than reflection. Simultaneously watching and recording the video is
getting very close to what Virilio called the ‘wall of acceleration,’ whereby the event and its
global retransmission are almost simultaneous (Virilio 2000). Indeed, with the instant
transformation into a commodity and then the viral retransmission of the event, the spatial
element of the event is largely surpassed by the method of representation itself. The loss of
fixity of the viral video is also the loss of the ability to reflect, react and analyze; decisions and
consequences made on the ground are caught in the immediacy of representation . When I was
later contacted by lawyers from the case, the ‘original’ copy of the video was requested,
making the phone the closest physicality of the representation of the event.

Moreover, in the wake of the video ‘going viral’ I have been repeatedly contacted about
the role of the video as a form of ‘citizen journalism,’ as if the act had some form of political or
moral sensibility that served to reinforce the importance of either concept. As Outing has
argued, citizen journalism seems to occupy an uncomfortable space between traditional
‘reporting’ and participatory or responsive feedback by the populace (Outing: 2005). My own
reservations about applying this category to the video draw from the central premise of both –
that responsibility for these actions lies in some responsibility to the broader community to
which I belong (rather than opposing it), and the intention to disseminate within some sense of
ethical responsibility based on objective accounting (reporting) rather than witnessing, or some
other ethical foundation.1 Moreover, given the traditional media’s interest in the story for its
own journalistic ends – and my decision not to participate in that process – I do not believe
labeling the video as ‘citizen reporting’ over its ‘viral’ counterpart does much to explore the
character and outcome of ‘going viral.’ Instead, it transforms the object into a knowledge
artifact, to be understood as an example rather than an important thing in itself. It also erases
the ambiguity of the interpretation, which in ‘viral’ terms is an integral part of the
newsworthiness of the experience itself.

The Erasure of Ambiguity

1
Especially given the prioritization of the visual in the retelling of the political narrative (see Weber 2008).
 Part of the significance of viewing the video in ‘viral’ terms it to resist the incorporation
of its visual spectacle into knowledge, erasing its ambiguity, complexity, ethics and politics. As
Taussig argues, “the very concept of ‘knowing’ something becomes displaced by a ‘relating to’”
it, thus, in order to situate a visual object as knowledge, we contextualize and ‘understand’ by
reconfiguring our existing frames (Taussig 1993: 26). In this manner, the more that the viral
video becomes integrated into an academic frame, the more the spectacle is reduced to an
object of knowledge. This is also the reason why I feel it is important to retain the subjective
account of events throughout this paper, as it helps to foreground the tension between ethical
choices and political analyses. Reproduction is inherent to the discussion of ‘viral videos’ in the
structural form of the commodity, but also in its translation into academic analyses. This was
the point of Benjamin’s notion of replication in the age of mechanical reproduction, or the way
in which mimetic machines control the imaginary power of reproduction (Arendt 1968).
Inherent tension between the subjective and the objective is an integral part of ‘the viral’ itself,
as irreverence exploits the contingency of events to make them viral, yet the propagation and
distribution of the video is what gives it its permanence. The danger of academic accounts is
that in their reproduction, they displace one ideological frame with another.

As academics, in retelling these accounts we often marginalize the ideological power of

the mimetic object in order to re‐create it as an objective category of study. Examining an
object in terms of its political significance can minimize the ways in which such academic
accounts are themselves ideological. The importance of the ideology of the commodity form is
the way in which it immediately alienates the creator from its significance, and functions as a
fashionable object of ‘fetishization.’ This very abstraction creates the conditions for
politicization that are both immediate and irrespective of purpose or intent (Taussig 1993: 36‐
37). This allows the smooth propagation of a viral video as a kind of perfect commodity: it exists
in a non‐place, with monetary valorization, and a lack of resistance to dissemination coupled
with an immediacy that responds directly to demand. So while mimesis helps to divorce the
representation of the viral video from the conditions of its emergence, the system of ownership
and valuation transform authorship into a property relation. To relate to the viral video as a
non‐commodified object of knowledge would place my academic account within the circulation
of commodities, in effect contributing to its valuation without recognizing the way in which my
account becomes ideological. More simply, it is easy to examine the contents of a viral video
without directly addressing the ways in which that account will inevitably support the capitalist
relations that underpin it. My references to the video, my linking to the videoand my continued
referencing of the video is situated in a capitalist system of advertising and referencing which
benefits from academic knowledge.

Can the object be an Other?

After uploading the video on YouTube and it began to propagate (about 300 hits in the
first 8 hours, 30,000 in the first 24 hours), events unfolded which I was both responsible for
and unable to control or direct. The foremost decision was about leaving the video online and
accessible when it became clear that the fervor it was creating was likely to be uncontrollable.
The image of campus and city police striking a university student repeatedly on the main floor
of a campus building immediately triggered responses of outrageand concerns about safety and
policing practices. Moreover, because of the insulated and networked nature of the university
environment, it quickly placed me in the position of possibly having to remove the video to end
the increasing clamor. My initial ethical compunction to post the video as a witness quickly ran
into issues of perceived censorship, university policy and community reaction. To the
University’s credit, the administration also took no position on what I was to do with the video
as it was unclear (I believe to everyone involved) if it was a policing, academic freedom or
freedom of information issue. I had posted the video under a common alias, but the students
who were with me at the time as well as friends on campus quickly propagated my ‘authorship.’

The question of anonymity and responsibility never really emerged as anything other
than ambiguous. When I initially posted the video, my description was just a visceral reaction to
the perception of a “drunk arrested on campus” and was the only description placed alongside
the video’s title “UWO arrest.” This information was subsequently changed after more
information was forthcoming, but within 24 hours, the campus newspaper had met and
interviewed me about the incident. It was this initial encounter that prompted me to remain
largely absent throughout the video’s transition to full viral status (upwards of 500,000 hits
within a week), as mainstream media coverage clearly wanted to bifurcate the issue as police
violence versus students’ rights, even if that was not my impression of events. After one
campus interview where this drive for bifurcation became evident I no longer answered any
formal media requests (I was contacted by every major news outlet in Canada as well as local
newspapers, radio and television shows), as it was clear that my ambiguous potion on what the
video ‘showed’ was unlikely to be useful in the developing controversy. Moreover, by the time
the video went viral, campus rumors started implicating the University in my decisions (and
non‐decisions), which was one of the reasons that I removed my voice from the debate that
unfolded.

Copies of Copies

The mimetic character of the video lent itself to a range of (re)presentations which
served to further magnify its political and cultural salience in the unfolding of events. The
cultural and political literacy of the university environment only served to reinforce the mimetic
faculty through parody, irony and remix and what Taussig would call the ‘mimesis of mimesis’
(Taussig 1993:79). Indeed, copies of copies will be an important part of the discussion of
censorship and copyright that is to follow below. The ability to re‐present the initial video as a
way to capture and draw upon its increasingly viral status was encouraged by the meme ‘stop
resisting’ – the instructions repeatedly yelled by the officers during the duration of events.
Within 12 hours several students recreated the exact scene in the place where the original
arrest took place, and the ‘Stop Resisting’ ‘Sparta Remix’ highlighted the exaggerated
masculinities at play in the scene by interspersing it with imagery and sounds from the movie
‘300.’ Can this ironic representation of the scene be understood as an effort to come to terms
with the aesthetic and visual power of the events or the mocking of the seriousness of the
events as I recorded them? If an integral part of ‘going viral’ is the lack of resistance to
distribution and redistribution, it would also explain the integral ‘economies of exchange’
undertaken in the mimetic process, as the dissemination of representation is necessary for its
political and social impacts (Ibid). As a condensation of cultural and social properties, the
mimetic object cannot be fully understood in its reified form without also understanding that
commodification does not end or monopolize the process of signification, only that its valuation
is inevitably weighted and incorporated as a magnification of its transmission.

Moreover, the use of parody to retell the events is a way to come to terms the de‐
contextualization and speed of the viral space. As Crapanzano has argued, parody can be
understood as the insertion of an alternative voice into the frame of the spectacle, in order to
both stylize and objectify a discourse (Crapazano 1991:437). In other words, parody contributes
to the re‐articulation and contextualization of the events in order to address the seriousness of
the content and to subvert a simple retelling of the event. Parody helps to render accessible
context to otherwise shocking events, but also to destabilize simple meanings. The speed in
which the parody took place also helped to magnify its relevance on YouTube, driving forward
its viral status.

Viral as valued commodity

Given the constant efforts underway at Google to transform the YouTube experience
into one that generates income for the company, the issue of payment and copyright was
immediately foregrounded in the viral process. The ability to embed links throughout the video
for viewers to click on while watching resulted in immediate and constant offers to partner with
online companies in order to establish pay‐per‐sale arrangements. In most cases, these
arrangements themselves were an effort to utilize web traffic with only the promise of payment
(and no method of verification) which I never seriously considered. Given that this was my first
experience with a viral video, YouTube eventually offered me ‘full partner’ status for the second
video associated with the event (I also videoed as the struggle with police continued outside),
though with low traffic and less inflammatory footage, I have yet to accept this offer. 2
However, the unexpected consequence of the viral video as commodity was the question of
what to do (the ethics) when others attempted to profit from the unaltered resubmission of the
identical video. Given my initially limited description of events combined with a relatively
innocuous title, it is perhaps unsurprising that others chose to attempt to draw on the
immediate and fleeting opportunity provided by the national media coverage of the video. This

2
See Arnott 2008 for a discussion of the monetization of YouTube videos.
placed me in the awkward position of a copyright holder with the responsibility to choose
whether to allow further dissemination for profit or challenge the valuation of the viral
commodity by retaining its non‐commercial status. The speed in which such decisions are
required serves to reinforce the inability to develop the foundations for ethical action that
prompted me to record the video in the first place.

Capitalism and ethics

Moreover, a YouTube‐only news organization reproduced the video in an unaltered

state with the embedded links that I was not willing to support. To think of the video as a work
to which I held authorship seemed repugnant, but so did the idea that others were going to
financially benefit from the same situation. Moreover, about 200,000 (almost 50% of the final
traffic) to the video was directed through the secondary site, which complicated the ability to
track the video’s path and overall ‘success’ on YouTube. In the end, I filled out a DMCA request
on site and had the secondary video removed. Here the international norms surrounding
copyright are outpacing the governance, as a Canadian citizen asserting copyright on an
American video site speaks to the effective forms of governance in the absence of formal ones.3
With a ‘sworn’ online affidavit I was able to assert my primary control over the outcome of the
video, even if I had little ability or interest in controlling its social, political or cultural
signification. It is telling of the ideological status of the mimetic commodity, which functions
easily as an individuated property, but poorly as an ethical or political instrument.

The strength of going viral is embedded in its claim to sociality, or the way in which it
horizontally propagates through ‘web 2.0’ forms of media. In my case, facebook linking played a
critical role in the move from linked to viral status. However, unlike much of the perception of
the benefits of social media for the next generation of internet technology, this case does not
necessarily imply the benefits of positive social space. Indeed, to maintain the critical position
on sociality itself and to imply that the social doesn’t already manifest a range of exclusions
would be to shift from a model of politics to governance, and sacrifice the necessity of a
political analysis. In other words, to treat social media as an object of sociological examination

3
See Dannenberg and Gerk 2008 for the cross‐border influence of the DCMA.
assumes the existence of a coherent and unified populace, one that has underlying
characteristics in common. To return to Rancière, such a view would be doubly dangerous;

For sociology is precisely not a chronicle of social diversity. On the contrary, it is the
vision of a homogeneous social body, opposing its internal vital principle [that of
political contestation] to the abstraction of the law. Republicanism and sociology, are in
this sense, two names for the same project: to restore beyond the democratic rupture a
political order that is homogenous to the mode of life of a society (Rancière 2006: 64).

This is to argue that the horizontal character of ‘web 2.0’ is only a spatial metaphor that
attempts to de‐politicize and erase the power of networking. In my experience, the onslaught
of massive viewership is a potent political tool, one that can be used to support or refuse
political and ethical decision‐making. So, while I was willing to add certain videos as
recommended in the sidebar of the viral video, others I was not. The University’s public
meeting over the issue of violence on campus will be addressed below, but there were dozens
of other requests attempting to channel the volume of traffic into spillover to other issues and
causes. I even put out a call on facebook to friends for issues or causes that I could link to, as I
was able to take the momentary spike in traffic and divert it to other causes. In the end, I was
only able to link to a few Korean activists who were working with migrant labourers and one
who was going to be expelled from the country. I was able to triple traffic to the pages I linked,
but the impact of this was likely negligible.

The horizontal power of ‘web 2.0’ is best utilized by frameworks already in place to deal
with large volumes of traffic and covert them into social, political and cultural capital. The viral
nature of the video pushes up against the organizational capacity of individuals and is easily co‐
opted by forces better prepared for such issues (see van Dijck 2009). Thus, while my experience
was one of personalization, others use preemptive irreverence, academic intent or marketing
strategies. This is also to recognize the role of infrastructure and governance efforts that are
underway in such arenas, irrespective of traditional governance capacities. As Schafer (2009)
has argued, online communities are likely to take over governance and authority claims if they
are not adopted by the businesses or working business models. In the end, it was mechanisms
of censorship that effectively killed the viral propagation of the video. Just over 15 days after
being posted, the video was labeled as ‘mature content,’ I was given no notice as to why this
was the case, or why it happened after the public propagation of the video. YouTube has no
clear mechanisms in place for appealing such labels, and why this content was labeled as
mature when others are not demonstrates how the arbitrary and anonymous governance
models within social networking may be anything but social. Now users must log in before they
are able to access the video, which has reduced the capacity for the video to be easily accessed
or linked to. This effectively killed the viral video, demonstrating institutional capacity to
intervene in online social relations, which speaks the underlying structural power in which
these cultural commodities are embedded.

Inherent Ethics

My responsibility for the consequences of the video is inescapable. As was explained to

me at one point, the University had spent considerable resources over the previous 5 years to
build up the image of the campus as a ‘safe campus,’ which I had inadvertently undermined
without any consideration of those effects. However, part of the perception of the ‘safe
campus’ efforts had to do with better integration with community policing services, thus,
increasing the likelihood that the experiences of the community would also be felt within it. The
University held several large public meetings with the student and security representatives
answering questions and posting those videos online (which I linked to the initial video), and
the University’s public relations office was the primary point of contact with the national media.
Without dueling voices for the debate or my participation, eventually the story was eclipsed by
more sensational events (the ‘balloon boy’ hoax). I did make myself available for meetings with
campus security to express my opinions about why and how the situation happened, but could
offer little insight into the correct way to prevent/deal with such situations in the future.

To this point I have not addressed the primary person for whom I had an ethical
responsibility, namely the student in the video itself. For the purposes of this paper I will not
address the details of his case or provide information that could lead to further examination of
the student’s experience, except to say that I understood that the viral nature of the video
presented a dually ambiguous situation for the student. On the one hand it publically
spotlighted what would have otherwise been a likely private criminal matter; on the other, it
did make it more likely that the University would seek to address the issues involved in the case
rather than seek retribution or prosecutory options. An unforeseen consequence for everyone
involved was that the student’s home country also became aware of the situation and ignited
local national debates about ethnic and international treatment of the host country’s citizens
abroad. This included public statements and inquires from the country’s ambassador as well as
increased web traffic from the country about 4 days after the initial viral peak.

The third ethical aspect of ‘going viral’ that became evident involved decisions relating
to feedback of the video on YouTube. YouTube provides the option to disable comments, allow
comments only for registered users and allow comments from anyone, whether registered or
not. I did contemplate making comments available only for registered users, but finally allowed
the default option which was to allow anyone to leave feedback on the video. Jodi Dean has
discussed the ways in which reproduction and dissemination of information and feedback has
overwhelmed engaged discussion and resulted in a foreclosure of substantive political debate
online (Dean 2008:102). The reactive character of social media produces an inflow of opinions
with very little exchange. However, given the amount of traffic being received and the visceral
character of the video, I did make the active decision to moderate user comments. Though I
was unwilling to lend my voice to the public debate on the issue of the video, I did adopt rather
aggressive standards of oversight and censorship on the comments section of the video. In
total, I pruned about 10% of the over 4000 posts to minimize more explicit hate directed at
police, or extremely offensive comments directed at anyone involved. How can I reconcile this
with the initial ethical impetus to upload the video? Primarily this had to do with retaining the
ambiguity of ultimate decision‐making on the political significance of the event. While I
certainly understand the need to intervene on behalf of convictions and causes, the inherent
ambiguity of events and of the video itself made me attempt to retain that position in the wake
of the viral status.4 In most cases, comments that I removed clearly were not related to the
video itself but rather personal opinions and experiences of police violence that were directed
at the online space. Here the mimetic power of viral also becomes a central rallying point for
emotional outrage, anger and experience exemplified in the events of the video.

4
See Cammaerts 2008 for a discussion of censorship and Web 2.0
 There was one comment that did impact my decisions about the ambiguity and
positions I adopted in the effort to retain a certain neutrality of the contents and experience of
the video. After approximately 2000 comments, one user posted a comment directly at me,
questioning my irresponsibility for not asserting a clear opinion from the outset and reinforcing
ignorance by not providing additional information. As my primary concern at that point had
been to minimize my involvement in the events, my actions taken with regards to traditional
media did seem inappropriate in the online space. Can we think about web 2.0 as requiring a
different set of ethical commitments?5 I intervened in the comment section and replied directly
to the user agreeing with his assertion, and proceeded to post my account of events. In the
YouTube space, I had the ability to both maintain the subheading of the video, the description
of events and interject in my own voice a description of how I saw things. I asserted the primacy
of my witnessing, the ambiguity of my interpretation and my desire not to further propagate
the problems it created. The question of personal ethics raised by my experience with the viral
video also raises questions about the role of the Internet in International Relations research. As
a discipline, International Relations is still relatively inexperienced with the personal, the social
and the web. Despite recent discussions (see Vrasti 2008, Montsion 2010) about the role of
ethnography in international relations, as a discipline field research, personal experience and
questions of ethics remain largely unexplored. The tension between academic responsibilities
and personal responsibilities came to the fore in this case without pretenses to a resolution.

This paper has argued that the viral video is an important but complex global
commodity. Adopting a personal perspective can provide insights into avenues of global politics
that would otherwise be excluded by analyses focused on the significance of the nation‐state.
The representational power of viral video challenges us to think about the representational
norms of political discourse, as well as the ethical issues arising from personal and global
politics. Being able to discuss ethical concerns from the practical consequences of individual
decision‐making is a way for us to understand the relationship between contingent events and
the representation. Combined with the online space and the commodification of social
networks, the viral video is an integral part of contemporary political sensibilities. The

5
See Markham 2005 for a discussion of ethics online.
unpredictability combined with the sociality of the viral video challenges political, personal and
ethical sensibilities. Only by engaging in these spaces can we begin to both understand and
appreciate the significance of these spaces.

References

Arendt, H. Illuminations: Walter Benjamin essays and reflections. New York: Schocken books, 1968.

Arnott, Sarah. “Google admits it still can’t make money from YouTube.” The Independent, Friday June
13, 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/google‐admits‐it‐still‐cant‐make‐
money‐from‐youtube‐846339.html

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