Feb 22 - Gibraltar Going Viral
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
My phone goes off in my pocket, I’m walking, on my way to work, it’s 7:50am and I need to reach into my pocket to have a look. We’ve become extremely dependent. It’s not even 8am and I’m already chuckling to myself watching a video on WhatsApp, in danger of either getting run over by a car or twisting my ankle in a hole in a pavement (it happens a lot).
I’ve never been a big WhatsApp user. I’ve had it for maybe six or seven years but I’ve never been as heavily involved as other people. Well, until now, I think. I realise how practical it is, I use it to speak to my girlfriend all the time, and some friends sometimes and I see it as a little less of an annoyance than Facebook Messenger, where any old idiot out there can send me a Message Request. But of course there’s a lot more to WhatsApp, you could even say the way I use it is primitive. Now it’s all about the groups. I guess it’s always been but I think I’m new to this since maybe a year and a half ago. So here’s what my WhatsApp looks like: So I’ve got my girlfriend and like the two or three friends I speak to on the regular, and my mum, and my boss and then there’s one group for one of my bands, and of course another for my other band, one group for my family and another for my art collective, oh and another for the office - my office - and another for my office and our other office together, from the one time we arranged to go for dinner, and of course another for the YGTV staff, and another which is an old band I was in…The list goes on, because let’s face it, there are probably another three or four that are not that active but will come around every once in a while.
Now, in theory what’s the problem here? You have ways of staying on top of things, staying in touch with everybody, ways of organising things easily; but then it’s 9:30pm on a Wednesday, just before my automatic Do Not Disturb feature kicks in, and my phone goes crazy, makes ten WhatsApp notification noises, vibrates and moves from the centre to the edge of the table and loses ten percent of battery in three seconds. I grab it, look through the notifications and they are all for the same video. On individual chats and in groups. With plenty of thumbs up and laughing emojis and little more interaction, and on to the next one.
Virality is interesting. There was a time where videos went viral because they were shared via email. There was a time where YouTube didn’t exist (remember that?). Then there was a time where it took sharing a video on Facebook a million times to make it viral and noticed. Nowadays all it takes is a quick share, tick all the boxes next to peoples’ names and off round WhatsApp it goes, the same video you’ve already seen on plenty of Facebook pages and profiles, and as quick as you saw it come, it’s gone. I am honestly surprised El Negro de WhatsApp has made it this far, that he is still relevant today, after so many videos and photos. It’s all here now, gone in ten seconds.
As fast as things disappear, things appear. The speed in which I receive things is crazy. Something happens across the border and within minutes I’m watching it on my couch; and that’s the danger of it. That is what we don’t realise about virality today. I mention across the border because of that video I’m sure you’ve all seen. I think up to now, at least in Gibraltar, we’ve had some detachment from what we receive on WhatsApp. Just the other day I was talking to my bandmates about how things travel so far over the internet that we are not only desensitised to what we see but we also find it difficult to wrap our heads around them. Because it’s not all videos of people falling over, dogs farting and a black man’s penis.
And it’s not only the desensitisation seen today on WhatsApp to things happening on the other side of the world. The truly worrying thing is the desensitisation to things closer to home. We are so used to receiving something and immediately sharing to everybody that we end up sharing things we perhaps shouldn’t; and I’m not just talking about me sharing something my friend has sent me to another friend, I’m talking me filming something and sharing it, for the sake of getting a pat on the back from a friend for the funniest or best video they’ve seen that day. I guess it’s all well and good if it’s a video of say me in a hotdog costume (this happened) and I share it to a handful of friends; but I’m sure you’ve all seen a certain video doing the rounds featuring a tiny pupper. Or a handful of photos featuring a motorbike.
I guess the reason why these things get out there is because we are a nation of trash sponges. We leech off rubbish like Salvame and the minute we see something even remotely similar to what’s promoted on TV shows like that, and that we can relate to, we share like there’s no tomorrow. We all HAVE TO see this. But it needs to stop. Don’t get me wrong, I love some juicy gossip as much as the next person, but the fact that things are being shared around WhatsApp (or Facebook, or anything else for that matter) that can be incriminating are a cause for concern. And what’s an even bigger cause for concern, and quite frankly ridiculous, is how these things are shared directly from the source, to end up on everybody’s phone across the city, and for the person who filmed and shared it to then get angry about how viral it’s gone.
I think we’ve gone too far. We need to take a step back and truly analyse where this is going and where we want it to go. There’s a big difference between getting sent a video of Chiquito de la Calzada telling some jokes and getting a video of people you see down the street, doing things they wouldn’t do down the street, if ya know what I mean. All I’m saying is, keep sending me videos of dogs being funny, or maybe even El Negro de WhatsApp, but PLEASE, no more trick videos of the woman moaning and definitely no more of what I’ve mentioned above.
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