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And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
By Bill Wasik (Viking, 2009)
An examination of how messages, memes, chart-topping bands and other quick-peaking cultural phenomena gain and then lose traction, by the man who claims to have invented flashmobs. I almost put it down several times, because the first three chapters felt like a celebration of some of the most obnoxious aspects of our culture that elevate something for a brief moment and then let it die.
I’m glad I stuck with it, though. Chapters 4 and 5 and the conclusion redeemed the book and provided a great deal of insight—including some self-reflection about why some of his stunts (and those of other manipulators he cites and often interviews) might not have been the best course of action, and in some cases weren’t even ethical (pp. 129-133).
The book was published in 2009 (which means likely written in 2008) and feels a bit quaint sometimes: He’s all over what happens on MySpace, but doesn’t even mention Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, all of which had already been running for several years.
This would have been one of the first books to really look at how communication shifted when everyone could be a creator and anonymous creators could achieve (although not necessarily maintain) stardom—and, from that stardom, influence the culture. A lot of the science we take for granted now wouldn’t have been done yet.
Still, the insights on how memes worm their way into our brains and change the way we think and act feel extremely relevant as I write this just two weeks after the 2024 US presidential election, where memes overpowered facts and someone was elected who was widely known as a serial liar on a mass scale.
This, for instance, feels eerily prescient:
“…the Internet and confirmation bias are conspiring to erode what remains of reasonable political discourse…even the most assiduous news fan can consume an entire day’s reading by simply ingesting only those tidbits that support his or her own views; and…the network of political blogs…has evolved into a machine that supplies the reader exactly this prefiltered information (p. 165).
In an age where everything is trackable, being an influencer doesn’t just change the culture. It also changes the content creator. It’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to tweak your content to get more Likes, shares, comments, etc. (p. 28). While eyeballs were the commodity in the TV ads of the three-network era, now it’s clicks. And we know precisely how many people clicked. If we want to go deeper, it’s not hard to find out how long they kept the article open, which subsequent links they clicked, and even how their eyes (and their brains) processed the material And this is why when you read a story even in respected legacy media like the New York Times, you’ll see a bunch of click-bait headlines.
However, some of this data may not be what it seems to be. As an example, I will often open an interesting link but not get around to reading it for days or even weeks. While the measuring tools would show me as engaging with this content, I’m actually ignoring it until I have the right moment.
Clickbait, in my opinion, certainly contributes to our collective short attention spans and craving for the adrenaline rush. We spend so much energy seeking out the superachiever outliers (he calls them Black Swans; we usually know them today as Unicorns) that we neglect the slow-and-steady Kaizen-style advances (p. 151). But so many of our supposed Black Swans turn out to be deeply flawed, like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. And for every Buckminster Fuller or Alice Walker, there are tens of thousands of others building the slow advances that take the whole culture forward.
We treat news as an extreme sport, and that makes it really hard to gain any deep and meaningful understanding of our world. Nanostories are NOT real stories (pp. 144-152)—and to achieve greatness in any artform, “we must learn how to neuter our nanostories” (p. 182). And both Left and Right have eroded the perception of legacy media as trustworthy (p. 154). In fact, our views of candidates and their policies are actively manipulated by “hundreds of thousands of self-taught pundits” who see message creation as more important than organizing (pp. 158-159).
Wasik makes an interesting distinction between Orwellian (1984) and Gladwellian (The Tipping Point) psychological manipulations (p. 136). The former concentrates power in the hands of an authoritarian government, while the latter lets any of us exercise some usually relatively small degree of power.
And even virality experts get it wrong. A lot. Wasik describes several of his own failures, including a site called OppoDepot (pp. 158-162) that gathered all the accusations against candidates, regardless of party, one web page per candidate. He experimented with several permutations but couldn’t get traction.
Finally, he turns his attention to the systemic failure: “I even have felt tempted, like Time’s ‘You’ issue, to lionize viral culture as a people-powered paradise. But I have also seen the day-by-day destructiveness of the Internet churn, of the manufacture of nanostories with little regard for their ultimate truth” (p. 183).
And then he explores “how to sap the machine of its tyrannical power”: gathering solutions that include month-long “Internet Ramadan” (proposed by jake Silverstein), a weekly “Secular Sabbath (Mark Bittman), and thinking in 10,000-year timelines (the Long Now Foundation, whose founder Danny Hillis cites the builders of Oxford’s New College Hall, whose 14th-century foresight led them to plant a forest to supply replacement beams that were needed hundreds of years later) or “time-shifting” by reading ancient magazines as if they were new (pp. 183-185).
He settles on urging all of us to become Stoics, who accept the good and the bad, rather than Epicures, who only choose the finest things (pp. 186-187). This, he says, will lead us to embrace “more sustainable approaches to information, to novelty, to storytelling. We cannot unplug the machine, nor would we want to, but we must rewire it to serve us, rather than the other way around. And for that, we must learn how to partially unplug ourselves” (p. 187).
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