Three pages into his new book, Bill Wasik presents the first of several charts illustrating the “telltale spike” of viral culture on the Internet — that is, a dramatic burst of attention around one piece of content followed by interest that doesn’t so much taper as tumble. You know this spike well, even if you’ve never seen it: in visits to Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia page or Google searches for “swine flu.”

The intent of these charts — “Fig. 1.3 — Media References to Flash Mobs, by Week,” “Fig. 3.8 — The Spike (Again)” — isn’t just to describe the fickle nature of popularity on the web. Wasik argues that our very understanding of the spike is integral to how online content is produced and consumed: “They” — he means we — “are so acutely aware of how media narratives themselves operate, and of how their own behavior fits into these narratives, that their awareness feeds back almost immediately into their consumption itself.” Has anyone ever shared a “viral video” with you by describing it as such? Sure, right? All the time. I’ll click on anything if you tell me it’s popular.

The self-consciousness of viral culture is Wasik’s strongest point in And Then There’s This. He finds meta-awareness, for instance, in the most-emailed lists on news websites, which have become not just measures of popularity but grist for reporters to craft the ultimate viral article. In the video above, Wasik tells me, “I think there’s a way that the Internet lays bare the process of things becoming popular in a way that people kind of see and they analyze and they think about and they cotton to it.” On the Internet, everyone knows if your content is a dog.

In his book, Wasik visits creators of viral content — part of a “subculture of meme-makers,” he says — who seem ripped from a Don DeLillo novel. He observes that political news sites have increasingly adopted “insidery” names: Talking Points Memo, Politico, The Note. Their reporting, too, often focuses on the mechanics of politics, and Wasik would trace that back to the telltale spike: an attempt to climb aboard a “nanostory” — his coinage — on its way up. (It’s instructive to read the essay that Salon published upon the arrival of Slate in 1996, criticizing the site’s “meta-commentary, game-oriented, inside-baseball” approach to news. That was once a novelty.)

For news organizations, the implications of viral culture are fraught with moral questions of duty, purpose, and whether it’s OK to be (god forbid) popular. We talk more about those issues in subsequent videos, but my general perspective is this: Knowing what makes content popular online, having that meta-awareness, latching onto narratives developed by the crowd, attempting to manufacture virulence — those are essential duties of a news site, not something to be shied away from, as Wasik ends up arguing. But we’ll get to that. Today is just an introduction to his ideas. A transcript of the video is below. Keep reading »

[We're doing another Lab Book Club this week and next, on Bill Wasik's And Then There's This. Today, Ian Crouch summarizes and reviews the book's arguments; we'll have more excerpts from our interview with Wasik in the coming days. —Josh]

Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture deceptively slim book is packed with anecdotes, theories, and arguments about contemporary media culture. It’s part memoir from Wasik, the merry prankster who created the flash mob craze in 2003. And it’s part cultural inquiry, complete with clever social experiments and searing commentary. 

While Wasik admits he is often tempted “to lionize viral culture as a people-powered paradise,” he thoroughly and persuasively argues that most of what we see, read, and discuss with one another is disposable by design, and ultimately corrosive. Let’s consider some of Wasik’s larger arguments.

The nanostory

Does the name Blair Hornstine ring a bell? Probably not, though that’s fine with Wasik. He suspects that if you remember anything about her, it will be her brief notoriety as the “girl who sued to become valedictorian” of her graduating class in 2003. She had been forced to share the top spot with a classmate due to a technicality, and rather than graciously share the honor, she decided instead to take her case to federal court, where the judge awarded her sole rights to the position and a hefty chunk of cash in punitive damages. Hornstine’s tale might have ended there, had the local paper she often wrote for not discovered that many of her stories contained extensive cases of plagiarism. Harvard rescinded her acceptance and talking heads rushed to label her emblematic of all that was wrong with America’s success-obsessed youth.  Keep reading »

I’m reliably informed that the current issue of Vanity Fair contains a lengthy, engaging, and revealing profile of Sarah Palin, full of unflattering details like an email she wrote to friends and family in the voice of God, signed, “Your Heavenly Father.” But I must confess: I haven’t read the piece. I’ve read about it.

So it goes with lengthy magazine articles and the scarcity of time these days. I read what I can but, like most consumers of digital media, rely on blogs to brief me on the rest. For the Palin profile, I quickly digested a post by New York’s Daily Intel, which “pulled out the ten most unflattering ways that Palin was depicted in the article for your convenient perusal,” and scanned The Daily Beast’s “top 10 quotations from the nearly 10,000-word article.” (If there were 11 items of interest, well, I guess I’d have to read the piece.)

This new reality must drive the creators and publishers of long-form content nuts. Their nuanced reporting is reduced to atomized bits and peddled by rivals. But the key word is “reality,” as in unavoidable, and I wonder why publications like Vanity Fair don’t do more to serve casual readers. There’s no reason, except pride, that the magazine couldn’t have offered a precis or top-10 list to accompany the Palin piece.

In the video above, I talk to Bill Wasik about a similar situation that’s documented in his new book on viral culture, And Then There’s This. During the 2008 presidential campaign, The Boston Globe ran a 10-part profile of its hometown candidate, Mitt Romney, but the only piece of that reporting to catch much attention was the colorful tale of poor Seamus, the Romney family dog who was tied to the roof of a station wagon and made to suffer other indignities during a vacation in 1983.

Keep reading »

The New York Times reports today: “For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.” By that measure, I’m past due in responding, but here’s why the Times has it wrong.

The study in question demonstrates a fascinating technique, borrowed from genetics research, for tracking memes in media coverage, and produces some surprising results that I’ll get to below. But part of the paper is based on a flawed methodology that totally discredits the findings highlighted by the Times. Here’s the illustration of that two-and-a-half-hour gap between peak coverage of memes — in this case, phrases from the 2008 presidential election — in the mainstream media and on blogs:

In order to determine whether a news source belongs on the red curve or the green one, the authors look to whether it’s indexed by Google News. If so, the source is labeled as “mainstream media.” But Google News indexes loads and loads of political blogs, from conservative Hot Air to liberal Talking Points Memo. It includes Daily Kos, Power Line, AMERICAblog, and the celebrity news site Just Jared. Even the Nieman Journalism Lab is in there, so by the study’s reckoning, you are currently consuming mainstream media.

So it may be true, as the Times reports on the front of its business section, that “the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow,” but the study doesn’t support that conclusion. What it finds is a surprisingly narrow gap between 20,000 prominent news sources, of all stripes, that are indexed in Google News and 1.6 million websites that don’t make the cut. Or, as Jon Kleinberg, an author of the study, told me: “This shows how important it is to look at blogs and news media as one single organism.”

Keep reading »

The fascinating, if flawed, meme-tracking study that I wrote about yesterday is full of rich data on the mechanics of American political journalism. To review: The paper analyzes commonly repeated phrases from a broad swath of media coverage in the last three months of the 2008 presidential election. Phrases like “lipstick on a pig,” “No way, no how, no McCain,” and “Hey, can I call you Joe?” (Aw, don’t you miss the campaign?) The study’s authors hoped to determine the speed, duration, and evolution of those phrases, which they refer to as memes.

What you’re looking at above is the average time between particular news organizations first mentioning a phrase and its peak among all news sites and blogs. (Here’s a larger version.) For instance, the conservative blog Hot Air typically reported on a phrase 26.5 hours before it became a veritable meme, putting the site furthest ahead of the pack. But it’s worth noting that Hot Air only ever reported on 42 of the 100 most-popular memes, whereas The Huffington Post mentioned 73 of them and was still, on average, 18 hours ahead. The New York Times political blog The Caucus was generally 11 hours ahead — between ABC News and Politico — while reporting on 43 of the top 100 memes. (The data is on the study’s website.)

For my graphic, I’ve played with the paper’s cardinal curves, which represent the volume of mentions for your average political meme, spiking in a matter of hours and dissipating nearly as fast. Yesterday I dwelled on the difference between the red and green curves, but today it doesn’t matter. A few other caveats: The long tail at left was drawn by me and isn’t quite precise. The data for Talking Points Memo only represents TPM DC (née TPM Election Central), and The Associated Press data is from the AP feed on a site called My Way, which might not be as fast as the news service.

It’s tempting to view this chart from left to right — as in, who scooped whom — but remember that nearly all of these memes originated from public statements by the candidates, so it might be a question of which news outlets engaged in the most group think (to use Jay Rosen’s favored term for political reporting). When I spoke to Jon Kleinberg, an author of the study, he offered several interpretations, including what he described as a “two-step flow of influence.” Sites like Hot Air and TPM identify phrases of potential importance, while CNN, ABC, and Politico, in turn, transform the message into a meme. Then the AP conveys the conventional wisdom.

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Bill Wasik begins his book, And Then There’s This, with a “plea to future historians.” Well, when the early history of online news is written, a crucial document will be the memo distributed at a Politico staff meeting on July 21, 2008. Written by the news site’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, a veteran of Time and The Washington Post, it read in part:

We are not the AP or The New York Times…If we ONLY do what those two great organizations do, WE WILL NOT SURVIVE AND WE WON’T HAVE JOBS…OWNING THE MORNING is vital to our prosperity. Early links have a longer shelf life, and our journalism has more of an opportunity to shape the Washington agenda. We’re online by 5 a.m., promoting your stories and looking for fresh opportunities to drive conversation.

Later in the memo, Allen posed several criteria for determining whether a piece of news qualifies as a “STRONG POLITICO STORY,” including:

a) Would this be a “most e-mailed” story?…
d) Will a blogger be inspired to post on this story?…
g) Will my competition be forced to follow this?

By all of which, Allen meant: Will it spread? Keep reading »