Joseph Reagle, an associate professor of communication studies, dissects the viral Coldplay concert moment.
The Coldplay kiss-cam moment that unmasked a high-powered work tryst may have come and gone.
But thanks to the internet, scenes like these have a way of sticking around.
The viral moment — involving Andy Byron, the CEO of AI and software company Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of HR — showed the pair canoodling during a concert live feed, then ducking for cover when they spotted themselves on the big screen.
It quickly spawned endless online commentary about expectations of privacy in public, speculation about the pair and their families, and a veritable avalanche of memes. There were even reenactments of the ducking-for-cover moment at other sporting events.
Exactly how did the fleeting spectacle explode into a viral sensation?
Joseph Reagle, associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern University, says there are two reasons the clip went viral.
“First, we have the format,” Reagle says. “The clip itself was no more than five seconds; it was perfectly sized to go viral. So, it is extremely and immediately accessible: anybody can see it, have an immediate opinion and feel a little bit of the cringe.”
Secondly — and relatedly — he says, is that the clip housed a mystery.
“It’s having a mystery that affords additional investigation and sleuthing — because we know people online love a mystery,” he says. “But a way to enter that mysterious story and saga by way of something that is very, very brief.”
Reagle is writing a book about online advice columns, zeroing in on those corners of the internet where users moralize about real-life situations, including subreddits.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of those subreddits and popular culture, including advice columns, are a sort of folk philosophy,” he says. “And popular events like this become case studies by which we discuss moral principles and pragmatic realities.”
“So here, in this case, putting the format aside, the substance of what is happening obviously contains some kind of morality tale — it has moral implications,” Reagle says. “When I looked at the conversations, those are the two things that people were talking about: the morality, potentially the hypocrisy, and the schadenfreude of a billionaire getting caught out in public.”
Should the “kiss-cam” moment have occurred, say, 20 years ago, Reagle says it wouldn’t have had nearly as much purchase as it did.
That’s not only because of the rise of social media and the algorithms that shape them in the 2010s, but a growing “react culture” that fuels virality by amplifying it in a chorus of user reaction.
“The reason I don’t think this would have made a splash back then is, again, the format allows everyone to instantly have an opinion,” Reagle says. “If it appeared in a news story, people would still see it or have a thought about it, but they wouldn’t be reacting to it the way they can now with social media.”
Social media algorithms are now tuned for such viral moments, Northeastern experts have noted. In the early days of social media, particularly in the late 2000s, social media content appeared on users’ feeds based on who they connected with online.
In other words, algorithms tended to prioritize recency and social connection — a set of conditions that describe the “social graph” era of the social media of yore.
Now, algorithms on platforms like TikTok, for example, focus on content delivery by analyzing user interests and behavior — what people watch, like and share, as well as how much time they spend on each video, according to John Wihbey, professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern.
That shift has enabled viral content to reach users more quickly, as platforms like TikTok and YouTube promote content beyond users’ social networks.
But all viral moments inevitably fade — sometimes just as quickly as they caught fire.
Indeed, Reagle notes, “there’s nothing new about two people having an affair.”
“It really is this ephemeral froth on the top of popular culture,” Reagle says. “I do think there is a journalistic tendency to want to make something more of it. And, indeed, maybe there is something more to it: maybe it is a poignant moment in time that reflects a larger zeitgeist. I’m certainly making an argument about the format and popular culture as a morality play.”
But, he adds: “Nobody is going to be talking about this two weeks from now.”