Cultural spread was first theorized as a contagious epidemic

Evidence

As webcam videos from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts reached international audiences, media pundits required new vocabulary to describe the internet’s rapidly evolving cultural dynamics. The most immediate metaphor was borrowed from infectious disease: “going viral.” Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller, The Tipping Point, argued that ideas could behave like “social epidemics,” spreading exponentially as individuals shared them with their peers. This framing felt intuitive—cultural contagion was just like the flu. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Links Gladwell’s contagion framing to the book’s core claim that such epidemic metaphors encode assumptions that may misdescribe culture as zero-sum contagion. — connects to: Established theories treat cultural change as random or contagious rather than chosen — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 16