Viral phenomena are objects or patterns able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them.

The concept of something, other than a biological virus, being viral came into vogue just after the Internet became widely popular in the mid to late 1990's. An object, even a non-material object, is considered to be viral when it has the ability to spread copies of itself or change other similar objects to become more like itself when those objects are simply exposed to the viral object. This has become a common way to describe how thoughts, information and trends move into and through a human population. Memes are possibly the best example of viral objects.

Examples of viral phenomena in addition to memes are:

• Viral marketing
• Clothing fashion trends
• Viral email
• Viral recommendations
• Blogging
• Software licenses: Certain types of software license have also been called viral because they require that changed copies of the original work be released under the same license, GPL being a prominent example. Despite the fact that the GPL does not infect other software the viral characterization is used to imply that it will and that is used to create fear about using GPL'ed software. See The GPL is a license for further explanation.

See Also

• Computer virus
• Virus
• Examples of memes

External Links

• GNU General Public License
• A viral recommendation system
• Rankings of current viral emails, warning: possible adult content