As a sociologist of digital culture, I spend enormous amounts of time contemplating, talking about, writing on and participating in virtual social worlds such as Massive Multiplayer Online Games. And why not? From an intellectual standpoint, not only are these games gaining popularity as an entertainment form of choice amongst an increasingly wider segment of the population in developed Western nations, but also offer a staggering array of possibilities for theorizing around such topics as social participation, methods of communication, personal identity and democratic engagement. Undoubtedly, the academic work being conducted today, in a field that is still in its relative infancy, will provide many crucial insights on the operations of social life in the sprawling, digitally rich mediascape of the 21^st century.

From a consumers point of view (taking off my sociologist hat for just a moment), these games are a ton of fun! We have come a long way since the days of Pac-man, Space Invaders and Tetris. The new ‘non-linear’ social experiences being offered through the digital entertainment technologies of today are increasingly providing consumers with a wider range of possible action, not only increasing the level of interactivity involved, but indeed allowing participants the freedom to create – or at the very least manipulate – their own unique storylines. Without a doubt, the endless creative possibilities offered by games like Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Second Life, which allow players the opportunity to become authors of their own unique imaginative narratives, accounts for a large part of their ever increasing success.

It should be noted that the desire to interact with and manipulate the digitally rendered narratives of social life on the screen is a phenomenon that extends way beyond the boundaries of virtual worlds and online digital games. Business today simply cannot ignore the increasing cultural demand for an ability to directly engage and interact with commercial media and other advertising content. Not only do wider arrays of consumers appear to perpetually crave a steady stream of new and entertaining content in the messages they receive, but also appear to desire the ability to tinker with it – to make a game of it – at some sort of quasi-meaningful level traditionally denied by previous technologies of media distribution. Certainly, we find evidence supporting this observation when we consider some of the recent marketing campaigns which have, to use an industry buzzword, gone viral.

Take, for example, Cadbury’s drumming gorilla. The commercial, which was originally aired during the finale of the United Kingdom reality show Big Brother, was subsequently uploaded to the video sharing website YouTube, only to begin tearing its way through the blogosphere like a California wildfire out of control. To date, it has garnered over six million views, and has branched off into other social networking sites such as Facebook where, as a topic of interest, it has spawned at least 62 community groups at the time of this writing. Yet, perhaps what is even more fascinating to me from a cultural studies standpoint (sociologist hat back on), is the way in which interested publics quickly began to interact with the campaign, with the consent of Cadbury I might add, creating their own spoofs and spinoffs, such as Bonnie Tyler Gorilla, Deep Purple Gorilla, and 50 Cent Gorilla amongst a slew of others. Even a few clever people in the corporate world began getting in on the fun in an attempt to capitalize on the incredible buzz that was being generated. Needless to say, the executives at Cadbury were ecstatic with their campaign results (not to mention how happy Phil Collins must be with his 1981 hit enjoying an astonishing resurrection). Yet, all this success happened more or less as the result of an inadvertent, yet fortuitous, accident. Or did it?

Certainly, important questions arise out of this incident (and others) that those in the corporate world of marketing must seriously begin to consider. Without question, there is a need for more research on the social dynamics underlying how an advertisement gets sent into the viral stratosphere in the first place. If we consider that a message going viral is, at its bare essence, a form of social group creation, it becomes important to trace the connections by which this phenomenon occurs. As any good sociologist knows, forming groups ALWAYS leave their traces. But within the digital context, these traces become even more prominent, even more…well…traceable than perhaps in any other context we can think of! Just ask any good web analyst!

It is important to remember that in order for any group to come into existence, no matter from where or from what they are being created, there are always spokespeople who initially speak for the groups’ existence. Despite often appearing to us as social ‘things’ in and of themselves that simply manifest out of thin air and exist ‘out-there’ as tangible entities, groups are simply the provisional product of a continuous process of group enrolment. From a marketing standpoint, and in relation to my previous points, this clearly translates into a need for research which aims at identifying the current social trendsetters of the online social world. This moves us way beyond the territory of the ‘real’, outside of analyzing those considered ‘cool’ and ‘trendy’ in the eyes of more traditional forms of media, and into the desert of the real itself. This involves researching individuals who not too long ago were considered social outcasts – the computer and gaming ‘geeks’ of the world. These are the trendsetters in the digital context. Now, perhaps more than ever, it is imperative for marketers to pay serious attention to these voices, and to increasingly monitor and interact in the virtual environments in which they dwell.

Certainly, I don’t mean to imply that business leaders and marketers of today continue to live in the fog of a recently, but ever more quickly, disappearing mediascape of the past. These are very smart people who must constantly adapt their messages to resonate closely with every change that occurs in social life…or die trying. However, it should now be increasingly clear that the science of marketing must move beyond the econometric field of counts and correlation coefficients, and into the qualitative field of cultural studies. Undoubtedly, sociologists of digital culture can be called upon to play a vital role in these endeavors.