All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
* Illustration: Kouzou Sakai * Bill Wasik wants Wired readers to forgive him. "I'm one of you," he insists. His new book, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, is a critical takedown of the Internet-Media Complex and our unhealthy obsession with memes of the moment. It will likely be lumped in with Internet-backlash works like Andrew Keen's angry The Cult of the Amateur and Lee Siegel's whiny Against the Machine. But that's not company Wasik wants to keep.
In case you've forgotten, the Harper's senior editor engineered the first flash mob. Back in May 2003, he sent his friends an anonymous email asking them to participate in a "project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less." A week later, scores of strangers descended upon a Manhattan jewelry shop, stood around for a bit, then dispersed just as mysteriously. By August, flash mobs were popping up in cities around the world and the concept became the subject of countless blog posts and news reports. By mid-September, Wasik and friends staged their final siege, making the phenomenon another fad that, like a flash mob, disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. Wasik became an amateur Internet scientist, hooked on analyzing ephemeral media memes, or what he calls nanostories.
The result is an odd but happy marriage of sociological observation and Gonzo-style adventure, conducted in the same spirit as the flash mob experiment. In his chapter on guerrilla marketing, Wasik becomes a "BzzzAgent," foisting Zip 'n Steam Ziploc bags on friends. In the section on that ficklest of subcultures, indie rock, he mounts an online campaign to halt the rise of the next big "buzz band," Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John.
Amusing hijinks, but there's a moral here, too: The Internet empowers us to become our own media outlet, even providing metrics—from pageviews to number of followers—to gauge popularity. As a result, Wasik says, we've become obsessed with the kind of one-hit wonders that make up a single day's grist for a site like Gawker. "We've begun treating as trivial subjects that we once took seriously," he says. Naturally, Wasik is worried about coming off like a scolding schoolmarm, especially because his cure for our Internet-fired ADD is a bit obvious: Slow down and consider the long view. His scorn, after all, isn't just directed at us. "This book was written out of a terror in seeing what the Internet had done to me. It's a work of self-loathing."
Play Previous: Robot Sidekicks: Sci-Fi's Long Line of Nuts-and-Bolts BFFs Next: Why a Plastic Camera Pioneer Reinvented Lo-Fi Film Shooters Wired Guide to the Tubiverse, From SimTube to PotTube
