What I Learned From Going Viral 20 Years Ago

Getting attention doesn’t mean holding it, virality is not about substance, and meaningful success requires more

Image: Michele Palermo, Shutterstock, standard license, purchased by the author

It may have been the first viral online essay ever, although it’s hard to know for sure. No one kept track of that stuff in 2001 when the Earth was young.

It was a time before social media. Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school.

Dinosaurs roamed the Earth with names like Internet Explorer and Netscape and mostly communicated via dial-up.

But, after Alternet published my piece on school shootings that March, it became enough of a sensation that a column about the article appeared in the Washington Post. Then in July, under the heading “Talk of the Net,” Yahoo Internet Life — probably the largest publication about the online world at that time — ran a piece about it as well.

Ultimately, I would receive more than 10,000 e-mails from people who had read it. So whether it was the first viral online essay or just among them, it was clearly a rarity.

The piece came after the latest of several school shootings in “nice, safe” neighborhoods — this time in Santee, California. My message was simple: these things kept happening in these kinds of places precisely…