Tony D. Sampson

Tony D. Sampson (born 1964) is a British academic author who writes about philosophies of affect, digital media cultures and labour, marketing power, design/brand thinking, social and immersive user experiences and neurocultures.

This work is influenced by the 19th century French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde and concerns contemporary analyses of viral phenomena and affective and emotional contagion on the Internet.

For example, in an analysis of how the ice-bucket challenge spread pervasively on social media, marketing researcher and author George Rossolatos uses Sampson's revival of Tardean sociology, and the "coinage of the virality perspective," to argue for "a more nuanced understanding of how memes propagate in the current networked economy of signs.

Sampson's use of Gabriel Tarde to explain the somnambulistic (sleepwalking) viral tendencies of the contemporary social media user has been critiqued by a number of authors in various fields of study.

[14] Sampson has published extensively on digital media cultures in academic journals, books and chapters in edited collections (see selected reading below).

In a review of this book for the journal AI & Society, Tero Karppi describes how the brain becomes the main figure of Sampson's work because its "potential is harnessed in our contemporary culture of capitalism.

Finnish Professor of Media Studies, Susanna Paasonen, describes the work as "a thought-provoking, occasionally scary, and thoroughly fascinating exploration into the complex networked intensities within which we operate.

This is a refrain that spreads through viral platform architectures with a staccato-like repetition of shock events, rumours, conspiracy, misinformation, big lies, search engine weaponization, data voids, populist strongmen, immune system failures, and far-right hate speech.

The A&SM conferences in east London are an annual interdisciplinary event that brings together internationally renowned researchers, postgraduate students and artists interested in the nonconscious, emotional, affective and feely aspects of social media interaction.

Interviewed in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal by the Colombian newspaper El Espectador in 2018 Sampson discussed the political nature of memes making the point that "Recent events have shown that the right wing has powerful contagious moods that help spread their ideas... Education has to be central on a global scale, but there must also be new ideas that can infect the mood of a population so that it can empower itself instead of becoming docile to hate messages.

In this introductory video presenter Armand Valdes explains how the theories used in Sampson's thesis help support the idea that virality has increased because of the rise of the network society.

All you can do is prime the environment, create a mood, and just maybe, the accident will happen,"[40] More recently, Sampson's work on contagion theory has been referred to in press coverage of the new coronavirus outbreak in 2020.

In an interview with Sampson in March 2020, Bloomberg journalist, Alex Webb, draws attention to his sleepwalker contagion theory to point to 'a strand of social thought... which looks at how ideas, and at times irrational behavior, are spread in a group.