Bill Wasik investigates the mysterious world of viral culture in an illuminating and hilarious new book: And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
When we hear a news story or a new song, pass along celebrity gossip or form an opinion about a political candidate, we participate in a media culture based on trends—stories that are created, live and die like living organisms. Sometimes they blossom and wither in mere days; other times they grow and grow. They can translate into fortunes for their creators, shape the way we live our lives or influence whom we elect to run our country.
Bill Wasik, creator of the famous Flash Mob movement and senior editor at Harper's Magazine, investigates this mysterious world of viral culture in an illuminating and hilarious new book: And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. The Internet, he argues, is not making the media more like everyday people, but making everyday people more like the media—obsessed with fads, with fame, with getting the story first at any cost, with novelty for its own sake. Our burgeoning online culture is being built not by starry-eyed amateurs but by a new breed of canny cultural operator who balances cynicism with science as he or she learns to engineer viral videos, contagious websites, indie-rock hits and political smears.
In And Then There's This, Wasik travels through this world not as a sober outsider, but as a giddy Internet storyteller himself, conducting six experiments including the invention of what became the 2003 worldwide Flash Mob fad, which used emails to gather people together into absurd groups in urban spaces. He tours through the worlds of politics, business and music, revealing his own tests, describing the projects of others and laying out the human psychology that so inexorably draws us into the churn of a new, novelty-obsessed online existence.
And Then There's This is a must-read for anyone in journalism, business, music, politics or information technology. For everyone else, its great, eye-opening fun.
Read a Q&A with Bill Wasik:
And Then There's This takes a look at "viral culture." What exactly is "viral culture"?
It's the new way we find out about things, the new means by which we understand our society and our world. Instead of a small number of large media outlets and corporations telling us what the culture is about—what new music to listen to, or shows to watch, or books to read; which news stories are important and which aren't—we now have an explosion of sources, all vying to show us new things, to tell us new stories. The result is that we're bombarded by new stories, every day, all the time. Although it's the Internet that has made this change possible, I see "viral culture" as being bigger than just the Internet. The whole way we understand our world is being reinvented on the Internet model.
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Read an excerpt from And Then There's This:
2.
ANNUALS
EXPERIMENT: STOP PETER BJORN AND JOHN
SUBCULTURES OF NARCISSISM
In June 2004, a twenty-nine-year-old prosecutor named David Lat, who spent his days working at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark, New Jersey, began a hobby that eventually cost him his job but also elevated him as an icon of both his profession and his time. Adopting a persona called "Article III Groupie," a drink-addled female devotee of constitutional law, he began writing a legal blog—"Underneath Their Robes"—which promised, in its first post and de facto manifesto, to apply the methodology of celebrity magazines (Lat listed as his models
People, Us Weekly, Page Six, The National Enquirer, and Tiger Beat) to the rarefied culture of appeals-court juristry. In an early series of posts, Lat selected the "Superhotties of the Federal Judiciary," male and female; of Supreme Court justice David Souter he wrote, "Certiorari is GRANTED to that hot, lean body!" Lat encouraged readers to send in anonymously sourced "blind items" on high-ranking judges, whose identities would be left to the reader's best guess, e.g.:
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