Unhealthy Trends

There has always been a very negative connotation to the word viral, and yet being a viral video is one of the most celebrated things you can be on Youtube. So why is there that negative connotation with viral? Well a virus is something that spreads very quickly from person to person, giving the viral video it's name. The main difference is that a virus is something that hurts you, while viral videos are often considered harmless. My question is are viral videos actually harmless? What real life impacts have these videos had?

The main reason I've brought up this topic is because of a few viral videos who had some unfortunate consequences. The first group of viral videos that have had really negative effects are challenge videos such as the cinnamon challenge, in which people take videos of themselves swallowing a whole spoon of cinnamon, often unsuccessfully. Some of these videos have a very dangerous nature about them, such as the salt and ice challenge in which salt is placed in the hand and ice is squeezed in that hand. This causes a chemical reaction that leads to a severe skin burn. Or the gallon milk challenge, in which challengers drink a whole gallon of whole milk, often leading to puking pink as the milk wears away the stomach lining. These may seem like rare instances, but a lot of the challenge videos involve ingesting dangerous amounts of something or placing oneself in a dangerous situation.

Another group of viral videos that has been dangerous are the ones that involve public displays. These are ones that create a large commotion in a public place for the humor of watching people try to react. One example is called the two gallon smash, in which members would go to a grocery store, smash two milk cartons together, and lie in the puddle pretending like they had fallen until someone tried to help them up, and then proceeding to slide all over the ground when people try to help them up. This upset grocery stores a lot who started to become less and less sympathetic to the people who did, until arrest became a serious possibility. This was upsetting to the grocery stores for obvious reasons, it created a mess, it wasted milk, it hindered other shoppers, and made their stores look like dangerous places.

The last group is more of just the attitude towards viral videos. People want to be the biggest and best at each viral challenge or pose. The one that most easily comes to mind is the planking fad. People became obsessed with finding the best planking pose and the coolest, funniest, or most dangerous planking pictures. This came to a head when a man was killed after he fell off of the hotel balcony that he had been planking on. It was an absolute tragedy and a warning against this type of behavior, but planking still continues on and on. 

In some ways the online community has created more of an online school playground in which people are competing to get attention through stupid, offensive, or self-harming actions. We need to stop applauding those people who turn our online community into that kind of overly defensive macho competition. Whether this is a situation in which Youtube should use their banning  privileges is a question for another debate.