*WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GO VIRAL* *Daniel Miller* I guess most of you will have seen some items of news based on my initial blog about Facebook no longer being cool amongst teens. It was not just NBC TV news, I had emails from Taiwan to Chile telling me it was out in local languages. I have now published a new blog post called Scholarship, Integrity and Going Viral athttp://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/ which reflects on the experience and responds to some of the criticism. Actually I entirely stand by my original assertion. My ethnographic research has shown that in terms of coolness the phrase `dead and buried’ was not an exaggeration. The statistics may not help, the teens don’t leave Facebook, they keep it for family connections. But they stop using it to communicate with peers. The schools know this perfectly well. They communicate with pupils through Twitter, never Facebook. If you doubt me, just ask the teens. The problem was that journalists used that phrase to refer to the prospects of Facebook as a company, while our research shows that in some of our other fieldsites such as India or Brazil there is no evidence for any decline in its attraction amongst teens. But you might look at the new blog post because it is a salutary lesson in keeping control over what you post. Journalists constantly try and persuade you that you `need’ to sex-up your academic language, but you just might want to resist this. Thanks, Shriram Venkatraman www.gsmis.org http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking @UCLSocNet