Two girls and a puppy – what’s not to Like? Along with the rest of the world, we’ve been enjoying watching the story of our former colleague whose daughters’ plea for a puppy attracted more than a million – more than 4 million, actually – Likes on Facebook. Four million is a lot of people.
What’s fascinating, too, is that the story of this exercise in virality is now exhibiting a contagious nature of its own, advancing across species in the manner of the flu:
- from social media to mainstream TV (doesn’t get much more mainstream than this segment from Wednesday’s “Good Morning America”;
- through the blogosphere (to whit!) to sermon point;
- via serious journalism to, if you can believe The Atlantic this morning, future scholarly analysis and, likely, publication.
Ryan was the director of the writing center at St. Norbert until the family moved to New England this summer. Lovers of irony will note that he is also a prominent figure in the emerging field of the digital humanities, blogging on the topic as Prof Hacker for The Chronicle of Higher Education. So not only was he in no position to be surprised by the power of social media, but he now sees a legitimate subject for study within his own home.
And just to wrap things up, his family yesterday embraced a new member, Millie the million Likes puppy, rescued from a Long Island animal shelter.
