Last May I read an article in the New York Times by comedian Jake Flores about what happened when a joke he posted on Twitter went viral. At the time, it had about 30,000 retweets and 45,000 shares on Facebook. The joke was mentioned during CNN’s coverage of the Republican primaries, and recycled around the world. Flores watched all of this unfold from his apartment in New York, where he was unemployed. Going viral gave him a nanosecond of fame, but didn’t change his life one iota. “It’s everywhere and it’s made me no money.’’ he wrote.
I’d heard celebrities talk about fame, and how the storm of publicity and endless online chatter didn’t affect them, because it was completely removed from their lives. This seemed implausible, until it happened to me, twice.
The first was when I wrote a piece for The Washington Post’s On Parenting column about letting my ex live with us on the weekend. On the day the piece went online, I received an email from my editor at about 8 a.m. letting me know it was online. To me it was just another day, another piece; and I went to work on my next story. An hour later a friend called to tell me my piece was on the Yahoo home page. Interesting, I thought, and continued working.
Just after 10 a.m., I received an email from my editor saying that my piece was the most read on the Post’s website — above Trump coverage — and that 8,000 people were reading it right that second. From there, things moved at lightning speed. My editor was sending me updates every few minutes, the column was on newswires, and emails from readers were pouring in to my personal account.
I had gone viral.
It would be more accurate to say that my work had gone viral, but as I would learn in the coming days, many readers did not separate the work from the person who wrote it. I was far too busy that morning to read the comments. Freelance journalists are only as good as their last piece, so I seized on my 15 minutes of fame to pitch stories far and wide, including two to the Post.
Friends and family members were reading the comments, though, and reporting back to me that there was contentious debate among readers about whether I was living my life correctly. This upset them far more than it upset me.
As the number of online comments ratcheted up, I began to think about the fact that hundreds of strangers were conversing about my family. It was surreal. I was still sitting at my desk writing my stories, running to the Co-op for groceries, walking my dogs and otherwise going about my life.
By the next day, the piece had 300,000 hits on the Post site alone, and 652 comments, none of which I had read. The only opinions that mattered to me were those of the family I had written about, and they were supportive and proud that it had struck such a chord.
A few days later someone posted a link on my professional Facebook page. I absentmindedly clicked while talking on the phone. What appeared was a vile blog post, in which the writer had taken my column paragraph by paragraph and rewritten her interpretation of what she believed my piece was actually saying. It was so hateful that I only scanned it before quickly closing the tab. My instinct told me not to respond, but I forwarded it to the Post because I thought it infringed on their copyright. The Post’s lawyers agreed, and offered to send a cease-and-desist order, which I declined. Why add fuel to the fire? I held my head high, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t shaken and upset.
That night I received an email from the woman who wrote the blog post, in which she said she “hated the author of the column” and then eviscerated my character. Reading her email made something abundantly clear; she was projecting her own experience and world view onto me. She had expended a huge amount of energy telling me what was wrong with my life, when in fact she was really commenting on her own. I went from being hurt and upset to feeling pity.
The realization got me thinking about those 652 comments. I decided to read some of them, and discovered that they were full of projections. Everyone had an opinion, and depending on the reader’s perspective, I was either a saint or a selfish doormat.
I’m neither, and in the end none of it mattered. The readers went on with their lives and I went on with mine. My brush with fame probably helped me get my work read by a few editors who might have otherwise ignored my email, but it didn’t guarantee instant success.
About two weeks later, I was sitting outside having my morning coffee when a family of bears wandered into my backyard. I quickly jumped inside, woke my sleeping family, and then stood in the doorway filming the cubs playing with our rope swing. That afternoon I sent the video to WNNE with a note that said it might be fun to run on the evening news.
As I drove home from the vet with my two dogs the next morning, a reporter called to tell me the video had gone viral. I called home and asked my son to Google “bear on swing video.” Sure enough, we were number five. My phone was lit up like a Christmas tree for the rest of the day, with producers from various stations requesting the video. So we were viral again.
Having the two experiences so close together demonstrated the capriciousness of our society, and how information and ideas spread in our digital 24/7 world. The first time I went viral was for an essay I had labored long and hard over, about a subject that was at the very core of who I am. The second time was because I was in the right place at the right time, shot a video, and evidently bears are irresistible to the American public.
The day after the bear video went viral a company from Los Angeles that wanted to buy the rights contacted me. The agent offered me $500 to let him market the video worldwide. He knew I had already given it away to anyone who asked for it, but he said he could sell it to television shows. Sounded like a sweetheart deal to me, until a lawyer friend explained that a little clause in the contract would give the agency lifetime rights to my name, likeness and biography. I didn’t sign.
It’s one thing to go viral, and another to sell your soul.
Hanover native Jaimie Seaton has been a journalist for 20 years. She has contributed to and edited publications in the U.S., South Africa, the Netherlands, Singapore and Thailand.