These last couple of days I have witnessed firsthand one of the cooler and more intriguing aspects of the internet: watching how something relatively obscure suddenly heats up and gets a lot of notice, for no apparent reason. Since yesterday morning, I have received 9 comments on a post written and published on March 10th about what the best time is for high schools to start classes. When I last checked to see how many people had read it, I was astonished to see that it had gotten over 1700 hits during the last 27 hours, more than it had during the 5 ½ months between the time it was published and this past Thursday. This flurry of activity made it the second most read and emailed post on the Psychology Today blog website yesterday.
In short: it went viral. Unfortunately, I am not able to track how that happened, but I am really curious: how did it reach the critical tipping point at which it burst onto center stage and attracted so much attention? Did someone getting ready for the return to school come across it and link it to a popular website? If so, which one?
My cousin, who is a post graduate student studying geography at the University of Colorado, and who is also an accomplished DJ with an international career and reputation, had told me about this phenomenon when I was out there visiting this spring. He told me a story about another DJ he knows who had posted a clip on YouTube, which had gotten fewer than 50 hits for 6 months, until one day it was discovered, went viral, and got over a million hits within a week. While I was able to understand how that could happen with music, I never imagined that it would occur (admittedly on a much smaller scale) with a piece on adapting school schedules to the natural sleep tendencies of teenagers.
