Gone Viral

Patricia Wilson, known to everyone as Grandma Pat, was seventy-four years old and had owned a smartphone for exactly six weeks. Her grandson Josh had given it to her for her birthday and patiently shown her how to make video calls, take photos and send messages. He had also, without really thinking about it, created a social media account for her so that she could see pictures of the family. What he had not explained was what the big red button did.

One Sunday evening, Pat was making her famous pumpkin soup in her kitchen in Brisbane. She had propped the phone against the fruit bowl because she wanted to record the recipe for her granddaughter, who had just moved to London. As the soup simmered, her favorite song came on the radio. Pat had been a dancer in her youth, and she couldn't resist. She danced around the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hand, singing loudly and spinning past the camera, before finishing with a dramatic bow to the soup pot.

Then she pressed what she thought was the button to save the video. It was not. It was the button to post it.

By the time Pat woke up the next morning, the video had been viewed two million times. Her phone, which she had left on the kitchen table, would not stop buzzing. There were thousands of comments, hundreds of messages and notifications she did not understand. At first, she thought the phone was broken. She rang Josh, who was on the train to work. He was silent for a moment, and then he started laughing so hard that the other passengers turned around to stare at him.

The attention grew quickly. A morning television program asked if they could interview her. A company that made kitchen utensils wanted her to advertise their products. Strangers recognized her in the supermarket and asked for selfies, and someone turned her final bow into an animated sticker that people were sending each other all over the world. Most of the comments were kind and funny, like "This is my new favorite person" and "I want to be her when I grow up". A few, however, were nasty, and Pat, who had never come across an online troll before, was genuinely hurt.

The family held an emergency meeting around her dining table. Josh, who worked in marketing, took charge of the practical side. He changed the account's privacy settings, turned off the notifications and showed her how to block and report abusive users. "Don't read the comments," he advised. "Or at least, only read the nice ones." His sister Mia, who was studying law, read through the contract the utensil company had sent and warned her grandmother not to sign anything without asking a lot of questions first.

Pat listened carefully, and then she made her own decisions. She turned down the advertising deal because, as she put it, "I've used the same wooden spoon for forty years, and I'm not going to pretend I like a plastic one." But she agreed to do the television interview, on one condition: that she could cook her soup live in the studio. The presenters loved it. The clip of her teaching a nervous young presenter to dance while stirring the pot was almost as popular as the original video.

Then Pat had an idea of her own. Every Sunday, she began posting a new video of a family recipe, with a little dance included, and asked her followers to donate to a local charity that delivered hot meals to elderly people who lived alone. In the first month, they raised over thirty thousand dollars.

Eventually, the excitement faded, as it always does online. The number of followers stopped growing, and the strangers in the supermarket stopped asking for photos. Pat did not mind at all. She still posts her videos every Sunday, and her granddaughter in London watches every single one. And these days, Pat knows exactly what the big red button does.