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.
How did this book come about?
In 2003, I put together a social experiment in New York that used viral emails to create what I called "inexplicable mobs" of people for ten minutes or less. Within weeks, it spread around the world and became the fad called "flash mobs." I had meant the project as a joke, even as a sort of prank, but after it spread so widely I realized I needed to take my joke more seriously. I became really interested in the way that ideas spread through the Internet—not just silly trends like mine, but more serious ones too, in music, politics, business, and more. I decided that I wanted to write a book where I did more experiments of my own, but also, along the way, followed other people's efforts in cultural contagion.
Why start with Blair Hornstine, the briefly notorious high school senior who sued for valedictorianship?
At the very beginning of the book, I define the basic unit of viral culture as the "nanostory" that is, a tiny, seemingly meaningless narrative that ricochets out through multiple media outlets, both large and small, to reach a huge audience. As I said before, I don't see this as just an Internet phenomenon—the concept of the nanostory will be clear to anyone who watches cable news, for example, or listens to talk radio. But my argument in the book is that the Internet, with the way it allows thousands of amateurs to spread stories just like the pros do, is amplifying this process where tiny stories becomes miniature sensations overnight.
The "nanostory" of Blair Hornstine was going on at the exact same time that I was planning the first flash mob, and I remember having thought a lot about it at the time: just how crazy it was for this poor high-school girl to become a nationwide symbol for a few weeks, and then get entirely forgotten. I decided to begin the book with her for two reasons: first, because she's a very human story; and second, because I wanted to make it clear up front for readers (especially those who might be turned off by "technology" books) that this isn't just a book about the Internet: it's a book about how we tell stories today.
You've divided the book into different experiments you carried out—internet campaigns and flash mobs, for example. How did you choose your material?
Idiosyncratically! I definitely didn't set out to describe every viral phenomenon I saw, because that would have been impossible to compile (and not very fun to read, either). I also thought very carefully about which stories would still hold some interest for an audience that was reading about them months or years after the fact. One major theme of the book is a sort of cultural spoilage: the way that things we're obsessed with as a culture today come to seem, even a few weeks later, like the most irrelevant things in the world. So I tried to pick particularly funny stories, or ones that very vividly illustrated the basic concepts that I believe are at work underneath all this viral media.
I also perform five of my own experiments in the book, one in each chapter, and a lot of my decisions about what to include were driven by the construction of the chapters. I wanted my own, sometimes silly misadventures to always be balanced out by my reporting about more important phenomena and concepts. So the book wound up breaking down into five chapters. The first is about the flash mob experiment, and the basic psychological concepts of boredom and herd behavior that drive cultural contagion; the second is about online music, as an example of the larger phenomenon of spreading arts and culture in an Internet-driven marketplace; the third is about a competition I entered to create viral websites; the fourth is about so-called viral or "word-of-mouth" marketing, in the business context; and the fifth is about American politics.
You seem to have done a fair amount of work on websites and campaigns of your own (some of it pretty costly). Is this a hobby of yours, or was it all in the name of research for the book?
It's definitely a hobby of mine. In my writing, I've always been a satirist first and foremost, and one thing that's drawn me to the Internet is that the online viral sensation has emerged as an unparalleled medium for making people laugh. In part, that's because the Internet is so democratic: it's so cheap and easy to create something online that looks professional and then find a huge audience with no promotion at all. But the same is true of more serious viral projects, too. Part of the premise of this book is that the silly stuff and the serious stuff bear similarities that aren't just superficial.
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