Two Girls and a Puppy- Social Experiment

As Professor Ryan Cordell has discovered, even academic expertise can be upended by the social media savvy of twenty-first century kids and the unpredictable course of an internet sensation.  Cordell, a scholar of digital humanities and nineteenth-century American literature, unexpectedly became the subject of his own experiment in “going viral” when he and his wife promised their children a puppy if they could get a million “likes” on Facebook.  In an interview with Rebecca J. Rosen in The Atlantic online, Cordell connects the pre-copyright reprinting landscape of the nineteenth century U.S. to the viral culture of the internet today.