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DRAFTMetaphorigins - S5E6
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Details and Transcript

Buzzsprout Affiliate Link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=891796​

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Timestamps​

  • 00:00 - Introduction

  • 01:24 - Segment 1: Apple or Chocolate? (Short Story)

  • 10:11 - Segment 2: The Origin of "Go Viral" (Metaphor History)

  • 23:23 - Segment 3: Influencer Culture (Communication Topic)

  • 40:48 - Segment 4: Talk With *** (Guest Interview)

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References

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Theme Music​

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Transcript

 

To my monumental family and friends. Near and far. Old and new. This is Kevin Mercurio on the mic. And welcome to the 46th episode of the Metaphorigins Podcast.

 

To show support if you find yourself enjoying wordy scicomm content, please take a few seconds to rate and subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify or whatever platform you are listening to this on, as it truly does help independent podcasts reach new people, through essentially minimal effort. You can always leave a lengthy review as well, and follow @metaphorigins on Instagram, that’s @metaphorigins, where I will be posting all updates, as well as on my personal website: kjbmercurio.com/metaphorigins. There is now a Metaphorigins LinkedIn Page as well, so check it out and give it a follow if you like passionate scicomm initiatives. Like every season, I will hold a  prize draw on my 50th episode for… some top secret merch. Have a listen in later episodes for more information about this, underground confidential artifact, whatever it ends up being.

 

Okay. For today’s episode, I’ll be talking about an idiom that is used so often on the internet that it brings things like fortune and misery, but most certainly fame.

 

Annnnnnd, articulate. The last one shuts the door. Each one of you walks to an empty seat at the table. Before sitting, you all wait until your superior makes it down the long side opposite the door, taking their sweet time, as they browse their phone for the latest emails and tweets. They make it to the front, wheel out the sleek, black leather cushion and sit. Like dominoes, you each repeat the motion.

 

You look around the room. Men and women in professional attire, of various dark shades, suit jackets, striped ties, ornate necklaces flashing from some jubilee. On the table, notebooks and tablets, portfolios and fountain pens, mugs of steamy office-brewed espresso. Hanging in the middle of the room is a dazzling chandelier, sparkling by self-illumination. Behind you, nailed to the wall, are medical charts and golden plaques, dictating milestones achieved by the company.

 

An assistant stands to bring your superior two items of food, an apple, and a chocolate bar. Your superior finally puts down their phone to begin the monthly meeting.

 

“Thank you everyone for attending today,” your superior states, “and to those joining us from home virtually. As I know this is quite a busy time for us here at the company.” They gesture towards the honours and medals behind you. “See those there? These are the final goals achieved for many of our products in the Phase 2 and 3 stages. The results are absolutely incredible. Truly, I hope all of you have slept as well as I have knowing that we our working tirelessly to save the lives of many out there.”

 

Your fellow colleagues nod in unison, some nearest your superior even applauding in excitement. It truly was a great time for the company. The latest two drugs, inflictlovemab and stealyourbreathol, originally used to treat loneliness and anxiety separately, actually work better together to treat depression, with a 51% efficacy rate. This combination of two products was actually discovered in the research lab you head, and only a handful of bright scientists were able to produce the work to find this.

 

Your superior continues, “this would not be possible without the incredible work done by our research lab”. Gesturing to you. “It was the research lab that put on their thinking caps and figured out the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This is what we pay them to do! And frankly, they never disappoint. We’ve got some Nobel energy in here, if only these weren’t patented HAH!”

 

The room echoed a grumbled guffaw. You joined in hesitation. In reality, you didn’t really like working at this company. All this talk about saving lives, and profit margins, and patient statistics was just noise (although sometimes significant), and took you away from the fundamental science, the connections made between these antibodies and compounds to their target receptors of specialized cells, or those disease-ridden. It was the beauty of life’s complexity yet mechanistic nature that sparked such a flame of curiosity, of waking up everyday, of setting your trajectory into the biological sciences and ultimately the pharmaceutical industry. Like many of your peers in science, it was understanding people down to their individual cells and their predictable components that motivates you the most.

 

Your superior cuts your train of thought. “As we enter a new quarter, strategically, we need to set ourselves up for another win, another grand-daddy Hail Mary that our competitors will never see coming. But for this achievement, we should focus on this.” At that moment, they pick up items brought to them by their assistant moments ago, with the apple in one hand, and the chocolate bar on the right. “What I have in my hand is a choice that everyone makes every single day. Should I eat this apple, or should I eat this chocolate bar? Show of hands, who would rather eat this delicious milk chocolate bar of goodness?” They unwrap the chocolate bar and reveal its decadent coating.

 

Almost everyone in the room except for yourself and your dairy-allergic colleague raise their hands. They continue, “Of course it’s the chocolate bar. Why would it NOT be the chocolate bar? But that’s just it people. We know that the apple is the better choice in the long term. We don’t think like that. We want immediate satisfaction. Why doesn’t this apple, which is much better for us, taste better? You can have the best apple in the world but 9 times out of 10 we are going to eat this chocolate bar. This is why a large proportion of this country is obese, a cause of much of the trauma and chronic illness we try and fight everyday. We must address this problem. Any thoughts?”

 

Without skipping a beat, all eyes look towards you. As head of the research lab at the company, most of the ideas come from you and your team, and are delivered by you and your team. You close your eyes and think for a moment. Do we really need another product in development? Should we not just carry these other products to the end and bring them to patients who need them the most? In frustration, you think of something outrageous, just to get them to reconsider this initiative. “Well,” you say, “We can look at the current landscape. Coming out of COVID-19, we know that this impacted obese people the most. Therefore, this is certainly an endeavour that we could pursue. What if we turned viruses from our enemies, into our allies?”

 

In the room, your colleagues gasp. One gasps too hard and chokes, taking an anti-choking pill called provideyourbreathol, a precursor to stealyourbreathol.

 

You continue, “Viruses are essentially these multiplication factories. They take up shop in one of our cells and replicate, producing anything written in their genetic code, and repeat the process. So, to come full circle, what if we could treat obese individuals with a virus that infects the stomach to remove the feeling of appetite?” You pause to smile, expecting the room to erupt in laughter.

 

“That’s a genius idea!” Your superior shouts.

 

You turn to them. “What?” 

 

“It’s brilliant. We treat obese individuals with the virus your team makes, ohh wait that doesn’t sound good. Let’s call it a service, a biotechnology, like viral therapy or something, yeah that’s it. It’ll be a part of a line of viral therapy services we offer. We can call it our Go Viral line, yessssss. Your team creates the primary therapeutic virus that stops people from feeling hungry. And then when they’re actually hungry, and that their body demands it, they’re not going to reach for this stupid tiny chocolate bar, they’re going to reach for something with substance, like this apple. It’s a magnificent idea, yet again!”

 

You shake your head and raise your hand. “Wait, stop, this was only a joke. Let’s not make this idea any more than it originally was, a joke. I used content from the current environment to provide a contentless idea.”

 

Your superior smiles, “Ah, I see, you’re being humble. Look everyone, our scientist is being humble again. Ohhh, you’re great. Here, have this chocolate bar.”

 

They chuck it in your direction, but it misses you completely and lands in the mouth of your colleague, allergic to milk. They immediately start choking and gasping for air. The colleague beside who gasped so hard earlier tries to feed them some provideyourbreathol pills to help with the choking. Your team, mainly working from home, uploads this recording of Go Viral’s inception to the internet, achieving 50 million views overnight.

 

Haha, yes that’s exactly how the internet works. I knew at some point I would have to bring in the dairy allergic person again, and when I thought of that ending in my head I literally laughed out loud. Also can I get a hell yeah for the 3 dimensional meaning I placed in this story. Anyway, if you caught today’s expression, it certainly makes me wonder how viral particles began infecting the lexicon of internet fame?

 

What’s the origin to the expression, “go viral?”

 

*Theme Music*

 

 

Most of this information was obtained from many articles discussing the uses and origin of this expression. All sources will be mentioned in the description.

 

I was at a pub with some friends a few weeks ago, talking about some of the smart devices they were wearing (I know, really nerdy stuff, but would you expect any less from a group of scientists?). They were wearing different types of smart watches, each collecting vast amounts of data from them everyday, every minute, every second the watch is on. I was comparing them to myself, who until recently hadn’t adopted this massive collection of metrics, excluding the smart phone I carry in my pocket. I mean, what sort of data does this black mirror collect? My location when using google maps? My steps, when planning my route to a destination on google maps? My time, when deciding which route from my location is best, based on the steps it will take, on google maps? I use other apps, I promise.

 

One of the main data collection features I get weekly notifications about on my phone is screen time. Do any of you look at the statistics of that feature? Or like me, do you avoid it like the plague, deciding not to be disappointed with how you spend your daily moments? It’s truly absurd how much we dedicate the 24 hours we have each day to a device that we know causes neurological changes. In a 2017 article by Sarah DiGiulio published on NBC News, psychologists and neuroscientists summarize various ways in which tech has modified long-standing human behaviour, things like how we empathize with others, how we understand our own worldviews and how we learn. This doesn’t even get into how it’s affected our sleeping patterns, reality checked our self-confidence, compounded feelings of anxiety and stimulated our pleasure centres, all at once. To quote Bo Burnham in his 2021 Netflix special Inside, “Apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime, anything and everything, all of the time.”

 

There’s just so much out there. So many pictures of cats. So many videos of people falling down. So many stories of that time someone fucked up today. So. Much. Content. And there’s also so many platforms curating that content for you, content it believes you will engage with. Again, it’s curating content it believes you will engage with. It being the algorithms of background lines of code producing what you are seeing and hearing, and engage with, press a like button, share it to your social network, or even weirder, not scroll away from it for a certain duration of time. All of this data is being collected by those same background lines of code manifesting that content onto your device. Hell, even as I am writing this, I am also consuming content of a podcast about Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (side note, this is the best fighting game of all time, even with the release of Street Fighter 6). How many rabbit holes have I or any of you gone down, trying to research something for a project you are working on? Please internet, I know this is ironic, but please let me produce content for you to show others without being distracted by the content produced by others.

 

It’s an endless cycle, despite the novelty that content can take form. Sure you can write something new about content creation, from a new angle, perhaps through a podcast about expressions and communication, but so what? It will be ingested and regurgitated by a few people here and there, like a virus replicating within host cells. And here we are (what a segue), to the expression of today. Described in Wonderopolis, to go viral or “going viral means sharing something via email or social media that spreads quickly to millions of people online.” Most of us probably know specific content that has gone viral on social media, but email? Of course things still went viral in the absence of social media technology. One of internet’s first viral videos was one that was shared via email. In a 2018 Wired article by writer Joe Veix titled The Strange History of One of the Internet's First Viral Videos, he speaks about a video labeled badday.mpg, which depicted a typical office administrator getting frustrated at his computer for not working efficiently, to which he violently lashes out his frustration with a few smacks to the monitor and keyboard, followed by smashing it to the floor, with the appearance of his colleague’s head poking up from the cubicle wall beside him. The administrator, Vinny Licciardi, a man who at the time worked for a Colorado-based tech company called Loronix, spoke about the video’s fame, ““I was traveling on a plane, talking to the guy next to me, telling him about my video, […] And he’s like, ‘I’ve seen that.’ And the guy behind me is like, ‘I’ve seen that too!’ and the stewardess was talking, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that!’ It’s amazing how many people have seen it.”

 

Going viral, viral content, virality, all words and expressions that stem from the act of something being shared amongst individuals through the internet. These same words and expressions have a different weight to them after this pandemic. Do we just forget that we hate viruses, if the viral content is of a cat falling down after someone fucked up today? Turns out we didn’t forget, at least to the degree that we have changed our usage for the figurative sense of viral. In a 2020 article published in the MIT Technology Review titled Maybe it’s time to retire the idea of “going viral”, Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, stated, “We need to think differently about our information ecosystem […] The metaphors we use can help shape our thinking on our responsibility.” Misinformation is one of the downsides to a content-heavy digital environment, in which Philips mentions, ““There’s no PPE […] It doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to protect you when you write about it and read about it.”

 

What makes content go viral? The answer logically seems subjective and depends who you ask. However, there are striking similarities to viral content. In a 2020 blog post written within the Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing professor at the Wharton School and author of the New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On Jonah Berger states six principles that drive what people talk about and share: 1) Social currency (how people see us), 2) triggers (things that make us think about that content), 3) emotion (often arousal), 4) publicity (or how easy it is to see and imitate), 5) practical value (such as stating upfront 6 principles that… oh I’m doing it right now), and 6) stories (content that is part of a larger narrative). The consequences of hitting these principles by content creators have made them celebrities overnight,  intentionally or unintentionally. You just hope it wasn’t because of a tweet you sent out just before going to sleep (side note: there’s a great book by writer Jon Ronson called “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” about undesired celebrity status due to viral content). 

 

Surprisingly, to go viral, content doesn’t necessarily need to be reviewed and evaluated, it just needs to hit these principles. The more we spend on our devices, on apps that manifest content to be engaged with, the more it feels our duty, our obligation, to ensure that certain content becomes noticed. In at 2014 article published in the New York Times titled Why that video went viral, writer Natalie Kitroeff states “data recently compiled by Chartbeat, a company that measures online traffic, suggests that people often post articles on Twitter that they haven’t actually read. “What we found is that there is no relationship whatsoever with the amount that the article is shared and the amount of engaged time and attention given to that article,” said Tony Haile, Chartbeat’s chief executive. It’s amazing that, for example, identifying as someone who loves cats, will install the online personality of one who engages with cat content.

 

But alright, before you start thinking that this episode was just clickbait, let’s get to the origins, when and where did we start using the idiom, “go viral”? Grammarphobia references the Oxford English Dictionary and states, “The OED’s earliest citation for “go viral,” […] is from How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, a 2004 collection of accounts by young people who influenced elections: [saying] “Their petition also went viral, gathering half a million signatures in a few weeks.” However, other sources date records of earlier usage for the expression. The online etymology dictionary mentions it, “attested by 1999, originally in reference to marketing and based on the similarity of the effect to the spread of a computer virus”. This is also echoed in a blog post written on Rivier University’s website, where they state “ In 1996, Jeffrey Rayport, a Harvard Business School professor, authored an article for Fast Company titled “The Virus of Marketing,” in which the term “viral marketing” appeared. Additionally, venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson claims that they coined the term in a 1997 Netscape newsletter, using inspiration from Hotmail’s marketing strategy.”

 

It is unclear exactly where virality described something that wasn’t as significant as a computer virus or a biological virus. It is interesting to realize that in order to go viral, content must be able to replicate and resonate with individuals, just like computer viruses to computers and biological viruses to biological life. In my view, it’s not the content itself that is identical to these viral forms, but the very act of engagement with that content. Like a computer virus that, at the end of the line of code, says to repeat the same thing again, or a biological virus that tells a cell’s protein machinery to make copies of itself, viral content makes us share it with others. It’s something I think about when I make my own content, and how I want people to engage with it, including myself. It’s an endless cycle, despite the novelty that content can take form. Sure you can write something new about content creation, from a new angle, perhaps through a podcast about expressions and communication, but so what? It will be ingested and regurgitated by a few people here and there, like a virus replicating within host cells. And here we are, what a segue! Uh, wait a minute…

 

*Theme Music*

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For the communications segment, I want to talk about an aspect of modern day that has been increasing in both its advocated benefits by some, as well as its dystopian outlook for the future of humanity by others. Fuelled by an online economy that can find content out of everyday scenarios like buying groceries, riding the public bus or eating dinner with your family. And that topic is influencer culture.

 

I set my alarm to 4:30am, just before dawn. Over time, your body will naturally find its rhythm and wake up on its own. I immediately do arm and leg stretches to entice blood flow throughout my body. I head to the bathroom and wash my face, skin care in the morning and at night is extremely important to unlock those pores and keep your face looking youthful. After brushing my teeth with enamel repair toothpaste, I head downstairs in my house and make a coffee. I grind the Colombian dark roast beans fresh, ensuring a quality cup to the start of the day. I make a porridge of organic oats and sliced berries, along with a cup of electrolytes, people, remember, we gotta replenish those salts. After getting dressed, I pet my cat and head out the door. This is my morning routine.

 

Of course, this is just satire. I don’t own a house, and I don’t think I ever will in this economy. And I don’t have a morning routine, as I’m lucky if I get out of bed by 10am in a daze from that vivid dream I had of racing camels off the pacific. Morning routines have become a viral sensation for years now, with people obsessing over the routines of successful people, like Barack Obama, Jennifer Aniston or Stephen King. The thought is, or at least presumes to be, that by mimicking the behaviour of successful people every day, they too can have the motivation, charisma, opportunity bestowed upon them in their own lives. Although, there was one morning routine by a content creator named Ashton Hall (the guy who runs like he’s about to bust through a brick wall like the Kool-Aid man) that reached levels of popularity not by its usefulness but by its perplexity. But maybe rubbing a banana peel on your face may actually be the secret to youthful skin.

 

Morning routines are just the tip of the iceberg for things that you can rabbit hole down into and learn about on the internet. Want to get a tattoo and need some help in choosing what to get? There’s video content about different art styles, colours to use on skin tones and even how tattoos work at the molecular level. Want to engross yourself in a new video game next week? There’s review content on what games fit your genre preferences, game storylines and whether the game you chose, likely Grand Theft Auto 6, got delayed yet again. Ever wonder why towels have those bands at the end of them? Why asbestos was used so ubiquitously? Want to know how Martin Luther King was assassinated? Or reevaluate how aliens may have created the pyramids? To quote yet again musician and comedian Bo Burnham in his 2021 Netflix Special Inside, “Welcome to the internet […] could I interest you in everything, all of the time?”. Just watch it if you haven’t, it’s so good.

 

Through all of it, through the sadistic nature of our nervous system’s reward program, a modern ancestral hunt to prevent the now fundamental need for lack of apathy and boredom, at least artificially, was born. And because of this, internet content we consume tends to influence our behaviour, particularly in teens. In an article published by the American Psychological Association titled “Social Media’s growing impact on our lives”, writer Summer Allen described a study that stated “high school seniors heading to college in 2016 spent an “ hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction”. Even in adults, this trend is stark. More recent numbers highlighted in a 2025 post by Stevenson University suggest that “Time spent with friends in person has dropped by 20 hours per month since 2003; The number of people living alone has doubled since 1960; People don’t interact with their neighbors as they used to“ statistics pertaining to the loneliness epidemic.  The post continues, calling technology a “double edged sword” and summarizing some research findings by the U.S. Surgeon General on social connection “Excessive social media use is linked to higher levels of loneliness and depression; People who use social media for more than two hours a day are twice as likely to feel socially isolated; The rise of remote work has reduced casual, in-person social interactions, leading to a greater sense of isolation”. 

 

Honestly, I’m just thankful I grew up before the internet age, as the battleground around childhood development in schools is now completely different. With so much thrown at children as they grow up in larger and larger communities, schools, educational boards, government bodies all attempt to design policies that bring about a sense of safety. In fact, discussed in the 2018 book the Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Safetyism was and is an approach to prioritize feelings of safety, first coined by psychologist Pamela Paresky. The authors argue that by discouraging topics and feelings of uncomfortableness, children have slowly become less resilient to difficulty, leading to an inability to handle failure. Now, I don’t fully agree to this, as I will always be a proponent of positive reinforcement, particularly in getting through uncomfortable situations, I agree that eliminating these awkward scenarios does not seem like the greatest solution. Without controversy, I wouldn’t have viewed situations from another’s perspective. Without failure, I wouldn’t have learned that true failure is not working on the next steps. 

 

Of course, over correction is not the solution either. I often contemplate on the purpose of certain experiences I had in my youth, and whether it allowed me to grow as a person or whether it was just downright unnecessary. I think about my early years in high school, where, coming from an elementary school with about 10 graduating students, with about half going to the high school I went to, I had to form new relationships fast, or suffer the consequences of loneliness and exclusion. Sometimes, I felt I didn’t belong to any particular group or clique, and would pretend I had an Uncle in the neighbourhood where I would often go have lunch, when in reality I walked and walked the nearby streets until our lunch break was over. In my quest for finding new friends, I was frequently insulted for my inability to remember movie scenes, laughed at for the appearance of my face, punched when I stated in a matter-of-fact way that I bruise easily. What we remember as adults is somewhat of hazy recollection, merely a spec of the actual experience, distant from the notion that you were actually there experiencing the trauma, developing as a person because of it. I learned to pick my battles, to not share certain information, to conceal emotions that would otherwise lead to more conflict. These lessons, along with building my knowledge in the classroom, allowed me to progress professionally, despite the exposure to such behaviour. Sure, one could develop in the same way without negativity, and these experiences likely also came with other emotional baggage, but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

 

Often times when we are unsure about something or need to take a step back, we take out our smartphones and check the latest updates on social media. In this fog of filtered pictures, multiple-shot reels, ring-light videos, and meme-ified gifs, we spend 141 minutes on it everyday, based on Statista reporting among internet users worldwide in 2025. That’s well over two hours of scrolling, swiping, keyboard thumbing, reacting and sometimes, even posting something yourself. And that’s an average user, there are surely others who spend double if not triple of that time online. What’s scary, to me, is not just the time spent on a device, leading to less connection with people, sleep dysfunction and steady addictiveness, but the kind of content we are exposing ourselves to. Tik Tok CEO Shoe Chew stated in a 2023 Ted discussion that the mission of his company was “to inspire creativity and bring joy”. Sure, I feel joy when I see a dancing cat shuffling to a catchy beat, or a cat getting the zoomies at 3am breaking everything in their path, or a cat trying to get off a piano but scared of the keys their pressing (okay, my content is extremely curated damn), but that is not always the emotion I feel. Unconsciously, I’m being shown polarizing political content, anti-immigration posts, and so many Trump mishaps that I’m surprised no one has made a compilation… oh wait there it is, good on you Reddit. The algorithm has discovered that I want to see this type of content, but it’s not because I actually want to see it, it’s because it’s so absurd, cruel and unfortunately, interesting. Why couldn’t I get this interested in topics that actually matter, like physics, or biology?

 

Oh boy, there it is, we finally got to the topic for this segment, thought we’d never get there did ya? It is here that influencers can be a solution to that content. Influencers, by and large, are people who regularly post on social media platforms and engage with their followers, enough so that they can, wait for it, influence them in multiple different ways. One of the first influencers I regularly followed was a man named Pewdiepie, a fellow millennial who rose to fame for his let’s play gaming videos, particularly of the horror genre. Over time, he branched into different content, pop culture discussions, review content, ultimately becoming the most subscribed YouTube channel for 6 years (between 2013-2019). During that time, he had some controversies and cringey rap moments, but there was something different about him compared to other YouTubers. Even now, his content has shifted towards vlogs about his family life moving to Japan, and his new hobbies in computer engineering, drawing and reading. He’s authentic, very intelligent and seems to have now found a balance between content creation and just living life. Similar influencers come to mind, like Jenna Marbles and Tyler1, perhaps also encapsulated in controversy at times, but nonetheless have been around the internet content zeitgeist for years and have since showed they can live a healthy life.

 

Creators have the power to become more than Internet personalities, they become attractive to sponsors and ads. The larger the creator, the better the sponsors. In a 2021 video by Pulse Advertising, they categorize influencers into four different types: 1) mega influencers who have over a million followers, 2) macro influencers who have over 100,000 followers, 3) micro influencers who have over 10,000 followers and 4) nano influencers who have under 10,000 followers but still have an active follower base. They further explain that “Brand partnerships involve compensation (monetary, product, or both) in exchange for content that promotes a brand, product or message to the creator's audience. Modern influencer marketing involves creator selection based on audience-fit data, campaign briefing, content production support, disclosure compliance, and performance measurement across multiple KPIs including reach, engagement, conversions and brand sentiment.” This in itself is controversial, particularly those who have a following majority that is underage, leading to claims of scamming, lawsuits and poor product placement. If you haven’t yet, watch internet investigator MegaLag’s in depth look at the browser extension Honey, and how it has been spying on your internet purchases in order to create a profit.

 

But influencers can be more than just advertisers or pop culture regurgitators. There are many influencers out there who, in one way or another, become educators, trained in how to best keep viewers watching or listening to their educational content. Most of my life I have been watching YouTube content dedicated to teaching me something about the world I never would have been exposed to, the scale of the universe, the deadliness of the influenza virus, the diversity of the Cambrian period, and kept me engaged with easy to follow narration and impressive graphics. These science influencers, like Michael Stevens from VSauce, Hank Green from Vlogbrothers and SciShow, Dianna Cowern from Physics Girl, did the very thing I tell new students and professional researchers alike, that the point of science communication is not to teach someone something, but to get them to teach themselves. They inspired me to take astronomy in my undergrad, join student-run science groups, and even create scientific content of my own.

 

What’s more impressive, are those influencers that produce content while also being scientific researchers themselves. It’s not their full-time job to think about ideas that engage an audience, but so happens to be among the things they love to do outside of their work. In an 2025 article by ACS Media Group titled “What makes Science Influencers so effective?”, Professor and Science Communicator Kimberly Hilton stated about science marketing “If you want to stay relevant, you have to evolve with where people are consuming content. Science marketing isn’t just about facts — it’s about connection.”. Marketing science is simply stating the fact that the world and the universe we live in is a wonderful place, containing things so mind-blowingly crazy that we often mistake it for illusion, encouraging famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to title his 2011 book “The Magic of Reality”.

 

The idea that scientists can participate in public discussion on social media with scientists and non-scientists alike is relatively new. In a 2017 article published in Science titled “Scientists need social media influencers”, authors Mauro Galetti and Raul Costa-Pereira state that “communicating with the public through social media is time-consuming, and most scientists are not trained for it […] we need inventive strategies to educate the public, particularly critical in fields such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and sustainability”. They even put forth the idea of leveraging famous celebrities outside of the academic research community and working with them to highlight important issues society is facing today. This strategy has its pros and cons, but nonetheless, is a progressive step towards using a technology whose original purpose was to connect people together.

 

These ideals, in my mind, ask for the scientific community to really understand the importance of social media engagement. If scientists, who in fairness were never trained nor even selected for in their interest for social media presence, use social media in their work, they can contribute to stabilizing the trust the public has in science as a institutional torch at the dark frontier. In a 2023 article published in Sage titled, “Scientists as Influencers: The Role of Source Identity, Self-Disclosure, and Anti-Intellectualism in Science Communication on Social Media”, researchers found ”the identity of the source can significantly influence how people respond to both the source and the content of the message. Notably, scientists were perceived as higher in authenticity and expertise than influencers […] These results are interesting in that they show scientists, with their direct expertise and affiliation with scientific institutions, still hold a dominant influence on scientific issues such as those related to the environment and health. That is, scientists have the potential to be just as effective influencers on social media. Second, concepts like authenticity and parasocial interactions, which have been heavily explored in the influencer and celebrity marketing literature, are not exclusive to the traditional influencer alone. Scientists can similarly leverage strategies that seek to influence these variables, which have proved to be a hallmark for how influencers remain such persuasive sources for their audiences”. Scientists, myself included, now more than ever, need to evolve in the internet age and be a major player in online discussion, ultimately embodying the notion that science is and always will be a two-way communication between a community that is supported in the work that they do, while enhancing a society they do work for.

 

For influencers themselves, science content creators or otherwise, the point is not to get lost in the sauce. Influencers, for better or worse, have shaped the way we take in information on social media platforms. In a 2025 documentary by Al Jazeera titled “A new form of capitalism: The Influencer Culture”, clinical psychologist Sherry Pagato states “Social media platforms have created influencer culture, and influencers are people like us, their shooting from rooms that look like our bedrooms, our kitchens”. From the viewer’s side, we forget that the origins of internet content were not fuelled by ego and fame, at least for the majority of creators. Understanding the way algorithms function, the documentary further states that “the real problem was never that creators were addicted to gaining attention, it’s that platforms are addicted to creators. And as long as your identity remains monetizable, the algorithm never stops running. We used to want to be seen, now we want to be watched, and somewhere along the way we forgot there was a difference.” From creators to lurkers to everyone in between, we must remember that social media is a tool, and that the digital footprint we leave behind should be starkly distinguished from the living footprint we leave in our real lives.

 

 

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