It takes a lot of courage to admit this, but I am against eating pink slime. Also, I think that guy in Uganda should stop kidnapping and murdering children. Also, I laughed at the old lady in North Dakota who wrote a rave review of the Olive Garden. Wait, did I say that it took a lot of courage? I meant it took none at all. In the world of viral opinioneering, it takes neither brains nor intelligence nor even a brain of any kind to get on board the bandwagon. All it takes is a Like button. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wshlnRWnf30] In case you’re not spending a lot of time on Facebook these days, pink slime is an unspeakably vile mixture of beef scraps and connective tissue, which, washed with a goodly amount of ammonia, goes back into the food supply in school cafeterias, fast-food restaurants and maybe even supermarkets. The Ugandan guy is a warlord named Joseph Kony, who is the target of a very cannily designed, and less than 100% accurate, social-media campaign. The lady in North Dakota, Marilyn Hagerty, is the reviewer for the Grand Forks Herald, and her entertainingly clueless review of Olive Garden has been the sport and diversion of coastal sophisticates like myself for the past week or so. For different reasons, these three topics have been among the most discussed on social media in recent weeks, but the same dynamic is at play. You find out about something via a Facebook post, often one directing you to a video clip, and then either reshare it, Like it or tweet it, in whatever order. You don’t actually engage with the debate in any way; you just pass it along. Both the pink-slime protests and “KONY 2012” were designed with going viral in mind; that was the goal of the latter, to make Kony’s name better known, and it has succeeded, having been viewed by more than 76 million people on YouTube since it was posted on the site a week ago — although not without inspiring a number … Continue reading Pink Slime and the Problem of Viral Campaigns