ABSTRACT
The commercial, for a brand of bottled water, employs actor Jennifer Aniston as part of a self-reflexive parody of its own strategic attempt to manufacture virality. The Smartwater commercial is a carefully produced metatextual parody of the concept of manufactured virality. In 2011, the New York Times Research and Development unit published details of Project Cascade a digital tool which provides an intricate visual metric of the movement through social media networks of a single communicational event such as a tweet. Jussi Parikka writes that AIDS 'sparked the use of viral concepts' in computer discourse, not through simple cause and effect but as a kind of 'feedback system where causalities are multidirectional'. Henry Jenkins offers the term 'spreadable media' in place of viral media, partly in an attempt to shake off the negative connotations of viruses. Sharing disks and other acts of intimate connection between computers the heteronormative protectionism of AIDS panic, a new language of risk and promiscuity.
