And Then There's This Article: 7 Truths About Viral Culture
A Conversation With Bill 'Flash Mob' Wasik
There's something a little heartbreaking about the very existence of "And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture," by Bill Wasik. After all, it's a meditation on living, breathing virality that resides between the hard, dead covers of a book. I can point you to its Amazon page or to any number of reviews and write-ups -- including, most recently, James B. Arndorfer's "Father of Flash Mobs on the Future of Viral" in the Ad Age Bookstore -- but the actual pages of "This" are trapped, even on a Kindle, in their own separate, fixed, unlinked world.
The basic back story of the book: Wasik was, he confesses, simply bored when he decided in May 2003 to try to persuade large groups of people to suddenly and briefly assemble in public places -- such as the lobby of Manhattan's Grand Hyatt Hotel -- for no apparent reason. Amazingly, his experiment worked, thanks in no small part to the clever ways in which he seeded and targeted the anonymous e-mails announcing his various flash mobs to (mostly) young New Yorkers invested in the mechanics of "buzz" and New York "scenesterism." The flash mob quickly became a global media phenomenon -- and an enduring inspiration to marketers, who keep assembling faux flash mobs to attempt to cool-ify their products and services (e.g., see the viral-video sensation The T-Mobile Dance, from this past January). "And Then There's This" tells the story not only of the flash mob but of other experiments in virality devised by the cunning Wasik -- folded into a sweeping, Big Think analysis (occasionally sardonic, occasionally earnest) of viral culture in general.
What follows is a brief mash-up of excerpts from our conversation and quotes from his book that I found to be particularly piercing. They're numbered because, well, the least I could do in writing about about virality is spit out a numbered list. Because the internet loves numbered lists, right?
1. The flash mob is a metaphor for the pile-on media culture we now live in.
Wasik, in conversation: "I could have written a whole book just about flash mobs, but that just didn't seem satisfying to me, because part of the whole sort of conceit of the original Harper's article" -- Wasik revealed the secret origins of the flash-mob phenomenon in the magazine in March 2006; that essay is adapted into a chapter in his book -- "is that I was coming forward as the inventor of this extremely forgettable fad that was hardly worth having been invented. And so to extend that joke to book length seemed impossible. But after the article came out, I began to think about extending this idea of this kind of quick-hit disposable culture, in the way that flash mobs almost became a sort of metaphor for that media phenomena. You know, the idea that everybody piles on something and then everybody disperses from it, and you repeat the process, and that's the media culture that we now live in -- and the internet has only tightened the cycles and made that more pronounced.
2. On the internet, as in life, forget the white-hot center; the margins are what matter.
3. The human impulse to share stories is timeless, yes, but viral culture has irretrievably warped the process.
Wasik, in his book: "In keeping with the entrepreneurial wordsmithery of the times, I would like to propose a new term to encompass all these miniature spikes [in stories that briefly seize the popular consciousness], these vertiginous rises and falls: the nanostory." What kills nanostories? Wasik continues: "This need to tell ever new stories about our society and ourselves, even when there are no new new stories to be told. This impulse is far from new, of course ... What viral culture adds is, in part, just pure acceleration -- the speed born of more data sources, more frequent updates, more churn -- but far more crucially it adds interactivity, and with it a perverse kind of market democracy."
4. Nick Denton rules the world.
Seriously. One of the recurring, not-so-obvious themes of Wasik's book is that the powerful forces that catapult certain memes into hyper-virality are often not so mysterious. For instance, he writes of secretly participating in -- while also covering -- the Contagious Festival, a monthly contest sponsored by the Huffington Post in 2006-2007 with one simple rule: "Create the website that gets the most visitors, and win $2,500." Wasik, under the pseudonym Will Murphy, launched a site he wryly called The Right-Wing New York Times, which remains online in an archived state. ("The website would look just like the Times'," he writes, "but when a reader moved his mouse over a story, it would transform into a paranoid right-wing reading of the same article.")
The site muddled along, getting a minor amount of attention and traffic, until one day it suddenly took off. What pushed it over the top and into the winning No. 1 slot during the month Wasik was competing? A post on Gawker, the flagship of Nick Denton's Gawker Media blog empire. (Wasik fascinatingly traces the origins of Gawker taking notice: Rob Norris, a random HuffPo reader in Chile, happened to pass a Right-Wing Times link to his childhood friend Chet Farmer in Texas, who blogged about it, which piqued the interest of his old college friend Chris Mohney -- who was in New York working for, yes, Gawker.)
So, while on the one hand Wasik makes a compelling case for a "perverse kind of market democracy" -- the internet as one great, erratic, decentralized grass-roots phenomenon -- time and again it turns out that the levers manipulating our collective mind share are controlled by a rather small circle of usual-suspect media moguls and their minions (with the man behind the curtain these days more and more likely to be a bloggy Dentonite than, say, an inky Murdoch type).
5. The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy.
Wasik, in conversation: "It is really interesting that the lack of a reliable business model on the internet for creating content has basically been a problem since the dot-com boom. ... When the phrase the 'Attention Economy' was coined, I think people were imagining that attention would translate into money in some way. But the funny thing is that even though that hasn't really happened for almost anybody, predictably and rationally, the fact is that you still have people rushing into creating content, and then it becomes about all of the cheesy things that people say about the internet -- that is really is about human connection and people finding more people that are like themselves. We are social animals, and the internet plays to that -- it plays to that urge to try to get attention and to try to make connections and to try to get on board with the interesting new thing as it's happening and to feel in that way like we are at the very heart of the culture."
6. The model is what matters.
Wasik, in his book: "Underlying the success of 'The Tipping Point' and its literary progeny is, I would argue, the advent of a new and enthusiastically social-scientific way of engaging the culture. Call it the age of the model: Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself."
7. And about that T-Mobile faux flash-mob ad ...
Wasik, by e-mail, after the fact: "Re: T-Mobile, etc. To me, what they're trying to connect with is the larger sense of ecstatic, instant community that our era presents as possible. Your phone isn't just a phone but is also a magic portal to a world where all these cool people are your friends. Flash mobs (at least in my initial, characteristically sour conception of them) were about that on some level, but on another level they were about how fleeting and contentless those kinds of connections are; 10 minutes later, after all, you were by yourself again."
~ ~ ~
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.
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Second... the piece makes me think that Wasik (and many others) may mistake the lack of clear large-scale money-making possibilities that are immediately recognizable to the lack of long term value. Going backwards, originally television was thought as the ideal form for education, Hollywood as an industry was almost killed first by monopolies that owned film stock (Kodak) and then by the Spanish Influenza (people found it dangerous to gather together to go) and pornography has led the use of all new media technologies. Wasik's bountiful imagination and playfulness are precious. Thank God we have science/artists like him on the landscape, a sort of Buster Keaton explorer in a new media form. Their genius is in the ripples and inspiration they generate as in what immediate things they leave behind. But just as Keaton was only the start of something, same here. Again, Dumenco's own playfulness strikes me as proof of that.
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That appeared in a column titled "The Real Meaning of Ashton Kutcher's 1M Twitter Followers," published on April 17: http://bit.ly/pMlHz
And in response to commenter Jonathan Field (who, like rjdegen, brought up Iran): Thank you!
Simon Dumenco
Media Guy columnist
Advertising Age
"I'm not forgetting that tools like Twitter can facilitate immediate human connectedness and sometimes even aid actual revolutions. But those who think the mass protests central to the so-called Twitter Revolution in Moldova couldn't have happened without Twitter are forgetting Harper Magazine Senior Editor Bill Wasik's 2003 invention: the Flash Mob, a phenomenon that got the word out mostly by e-mail -- which, of course, can be as instantaneous as Twitter. (Perhaps you were involved in celebrating the latest iteration of flash mobbery -- World Pillow Fight Day, on April 4.) Electronically-assisted word-of-mouth, whether pro-pillow or pro–Moldovian democracy, is inspiring, no doubt. But let's not forget that the core activity here is the marketing of an idea -- getting people to act, either logically or illogically -- through broadcasting."
Simon Dumenco
Media Guy columnist
Advertising Age
One very intriguing concept here shoots out at me - "Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself." Man, I must admit that I am - along with many people within media - often times guilty of this analysis-paralysis type mentality.
That said, I would be remiss not to point out something that hopefully has more visceral resonance than a semantic one, which is what Faris Yakob has described as the 'spread' scenario that can define the relationship between content and culture.
What makes culture itself, or at least the values itself, seem to die on the vine is the very viral nature of its functions. Pile-on media culture changes when our adoption extends beyond the event or flash mob itself and formalizes itself in currency that has an indelible and indefinite impression on our collective mindset. I believe this is the long-term value Jonathan is speaking of, and one that has seen success on the brand side of things, as sporadic as it may be or has been (think of Coke's Happiness Factory or Audi's transmedia efforts). I also happen to believe that these adoptable narratives are where influencers are operating within the margins that Wasik speaks of.
Anyway, great stuff - would love to read more material like this on AdAge ;)
Gunther Sonnenfeld
@goonth
The primary difference between Hoffman's flash mobs and viral communications back then and what we see now is, of course, the internet. Obama's unprecedented and obviously successful use of it in the last election set the gold standard for the future.
But apropos to Wasik's comments on the "Attention Economy" and financial models, we in marketing are dancing on the head of a pin if we truly believe that investments in flash mob or viral marketing tactics can be quantified any time soon in terms of direct contribution to brand dollar sales.
All of which is to say, I love today's social media chaos and fully embrace it. Would recommend to any client that they participate and make a modest investment in this marketing mayhem. Just don't bet the brand ranch on it! bcrandallnyc@aol.com
On The Origins Of Viral Species
Exclusivity is a good energy source that increases the velocity of a viral message. The more exclusive, the greater the desire to be a part of something, the more velocity a viral message gians.
The last remaining toasted coconut doughnut at Dunkin Donuts suddenly is an object of great desire when another person in line mentions they want it too. The person who nabs it, is compelled to tell others how they were lucky to get the last one and how delicious it tasted.
The velvet rope at an exclusive night club creates a purposeful barrier that builds a crowd in waiting outside, raises the cost of entry to get in, makes the club more attractive to club goers, and grows its reputation virally through word of mouth.
A sense of discovery and an element of surprise work well with exclusivity to grow attraction and propagate viral messages.
A long line to a new park ride attracts people who want to be one of the first to do a discovery ride, even though there are other similar thrills in the park. The wait and anticipation and the ability to share the discovered experience with others actually somehow makes the ride better. So much so, it's the highlight of the entire park visit that is shared with others, as long as it doesn't disappoint. Disney World, Costco and Nordstrom base their business model on this principle.
When a very exclusive discovery is made, there is a desire to hoard the information, because if everybody finds out about it, it won't be as special. But one still feels compelled to tell a few "trusted" friends, the information is just too good to keep inside.
What compels people to share secrets? The building of their credibility currency, which makes them more attractive or popular with other people they themselves admire.
When attractive information is discovered, there's a sudden mad rush to become a first to disburse it. Why? To earn credibility currency from it.
"I wore this before it was mainstream" or "I was onto this at the beginning," are often heard by influencers in focus groups.
Being popular in other places is also an attractor that propels viral messages.
Want to become famous in the US? Find some measure of notoriety in the UK or other parts of the world first.
So, what does all this mean for viral messaging in the blogging and social networking world?
Exclusivity, an element of surprise and multiple audiences in different places all can make your message more attractive and accelerates the spread of it, as long as it's relevant delivers on its promise.
Rodney Mason, CMO
Moosylvania
The Great State Of Design
www.moosylvania.com
www.twitter.com/rodmoose
www.twitter.com/moosylvania
Rodney Mason, CMO
Moosylvania
The Great State Of Design
Books will long outlast Twitter.
Puh - and, dare I say, - leeze.
http://www.promovideochannel.com