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?

In the video above, Wasik, whose book on viral culture we’ve been discussing this month, agrees with my suggestion that Politico is as much a meme organization as a news organization: intensely focused on creating content that maximizes pageviews. Just as Wasik describes the meme-driven Internet as “an economist’s dream of the free market,” so is Politico intent on “OWNING THE MORNING.”

But while I’m frequently dismayed at Politico’s sense of news, I’m hardly as critical as Wasik, who interviewed the site’s two founders for his book. He sees in Politico the dominance of decontextualized and overhyped news, while my sense is that the site represents a challenge for better news organizations to act more virally. All of the available evidence that only “tawdry” political news will spread on the Internet is, I think, skewed by the reluctance of most newspapers to play that game at all.

The required background reading on Politico — in addition to Wasik’s book, of course — includes Gabe Sherman’s piece in The New Republic, which is the provenance of that epic memo, and Michael Wolff’s more recent treatment in Vanity Fair. A full transcript of our video is below, and if you’re into Wasik’s ideas, check out the previous installments of our book club.

Bill Wasik: In the book I interview the guys who founded the Politico, so — you know, John Harris and Jim VandeHei from The Washington Post. And this was just as the site was launching, and they were describing their sort of road-to-Damascus moment about the Internet. And when both of them were at The Washington Post, they looked at the most-emailed stories, and they realized something that was very positive about them, which was, people were not responding to a lot of what they called the “obligatory duty” coverage that the Post was doing. So, for example, George W. Bush has a press conference. You know — sure, something interesting might get said at the press conference that needs to get reported on, but for the most part press conferences, you know — the idea is you send somebody there because, as a sort of comprehensive news organization like the Washington Post, you feel that someone needs to be there and someone needs to report on it. You just — you go through the motions of doing it.

Their point was, you know, look, the audience is as smart — the audience is smarter than we are because they’re not emailing these stories around. They understand that this news is already old by the time they get it — certainly by the time they get it online, you know, even by the time they get it online. And so the audience is responding to stuff that’s more kinetic, you know. They’re also not responding entirely to stuff that’s scurrilous or just empty controversy. People do respond to really great investigative pieces that, you know, push forward a big issue in some way.

That having been said, though, you know, in my sort of traveling through this world, particularly with politics, I feel like that the stories that tend to excite the audience tend to be the stories that can be used as, you know, clubs in the partisan warfare. You know, where a story’s gonna give ammunition to one side or the other, and that side is going to, you know, send it around and it’s going to become, you know, a tool of motivation and activism among the bloggers and among the sort of email universe and among these very, very balkanized partisan readership.

So for better or for worse, and in — my argument in the book is, unfortunately, for worse — I feel like that a lot of what’s going viral online in the political space is stuff that is just sort of kindling for this, like, big, big war that’s taking place, you know, between political factions. And that if you can, you know, if you can feed those factions in any way, you know — maybe it’s with something that’s very, very substantive. But maybe it’s with something that is very, very, I don’t want to say scurrilous, but something that’s a little bit, you know, tawdry.

And my concern about the Politico, which I voice in the book, is that I feel like that if you think about doing media in terms of going viral, you often tend to lump those two together in a way that I think is a little distasteful. So they talk about an example of a story where, you know, one representative called another representative a whore, and this, you know — this story posted on the Politico, suddenly it was on Drudge and then suddenly the Colbert Report’s doing something about it. And, you know, as they’re describing this to me in the interview, they’re saying, “you know, we need to find a way to get more stories into that kind of a pipeline.” But to me on the outside, you know, that instinct is a worrisome instinct, and I think that if you’re following the culture of the most-emailed list, then I worry that’s the instinct that you develop.
 
Zach Seward: Fair to say they’re as much like a meme organization as a news organization?
 
Wasik: Well, yeah. I think if you’re, if you are — and if you’re doing an online news organization and traffic is your goal, then it’s almost inevitable that you begin to think in those terms, which is, you know, “how do I get my stories into this, this pipeline of, you know, getting them talked about in this kind of churning conversation?”
 
Seward: Right, because you do also say that memes are, could be seen as just an expression of the free market. [...]

Wasik: I mean, it’s tough. Because I absolutely see where Harris is coming from. You know, as he put it, you know, the Times and The Washington Post, they see themselves as reality-defining or reality-creating enterprises. By which they mean, they do wake up every morning and say, you know, what’s the news that’s fit to print? Not meaning, you know, that they’re going to censor the rest, but that, you know, what they will be presenting in their pages is their best attempt at a definitive, authoritative take on what’s happening in the world on that day.

And obviously, they would never pretend that they always get it and they always get it all, but that they’re they’re trying to refine it and they’re trying to get, you know, the best comprehensive picture. And, you know, as he says in the book, like, first of all, you know, that’s a terrible burden for them. And second of all, there’s an argument that it doesn’t work anymore, that it’s not relevant anymore, because people don’t rely on a single source of news. Certainly in the kinds of readers that a site like the Politico has, they’re going to be ranging all around, they’re going to be creating their own set of information streams that will form their daily news diet. And so — so I wouldn’t necessarily say that the Times model is a model that organization like the Politico should follow, and I’m not even sure they could follow it. And arguably, that model is going away.

What does worry me is the idea that with the decline of that model, that we’re entering this great new world of a news converstion where we can look at the most-emailed list and the most-blogged list and which stories are getting the most comments, and we can feel very comfortable with the idea that that’s where we should be going as journalists. There’s a blitheness to that way of thinking that I heard with Harris and VandeHei that bothered me. I’m not saying that I think they should endeavor to do the reality-creating thing because it’s not — it’s just not possible any more, and I totally see where they’re coming from. It’s just, I would like to see them become a little bit more judicious than they were in the way they talked about those things with me. I should say that there were moments during the campaign where they would talk about these processes, you know, about the news cycle and about the use of these like tiny little smear stories and all that in a way that definitely shows that they get it, that they understand that that process is going on. But I feel like in the heat of it, these online-centric news organizations, it’s hard for them not to be driven by these like very sort of traffic-focused concerns, and that is a little bothersome.

Seward: Certainly, there was, as news organizations that were traditionally in print moved online, there was always aversion to focusing on the stats. The most-emailed list was pretty much the best — the most public indicator and maybe the only thing that the reporters saw about whether their content was popular. That’s certainly not the case at Politico. I wonder — I mean the aversion to, to looking at the stats seems misplaced to me. I mean, it seems like, if you care to operate on the web — regardless of the question of, you know, does it produce good or bad journalism — ultimately, you can’t be operating, there is no way to produce online journalism that is true online journalism without knowing whether what you’re doing is popular?

Wasik: No, I absolutely agree. My only point is that it is a Pandora’s box and that as much as you sort of, you know, you look in the box and then you say, well, “I’m only going to use this knowledge in a very judicious sort of way.” I think that that’s possible, and I think that’s what all of us in the journalism world that have opened the box, you know, should strive to do with that information. You know, to keep our heads about us about what exactly that means.

What I find more troublesome is the way that there’s this — I keep coming back to this word “conversation” because I feel it’s this great big euphemism in journalism right now, where what we’re supposed to be doing online with the readers is creating, you know, engaging them in conversation over social media. And if a story gets emailed around a lot and read a lot and blogged about a lot and commented a lot, then that means we have somehow, you know, tapped into this sort of touchy-feely idea of conversation.

To a certain extent, it’s a whitewashing of the age-old thing of give people what they want to read. You know, if you told a newspaper editor 20 years ago that, you know, what you should do is run the stories that make people buy the newspaper, the editors of certain newspapers would have said well, that’s crass. But today if you say to the same people, well, your job is to engage the readers in conversation over social media, well then, you know, you’re the VP of online development. [...]

It was the ignorance that almost, that saved journalism for so many years. You know the idea that — okay, you put a story on the cover, and you might have a sense for how that story does or doesn’t, you know drive people to pick up the paper and buy it. But today, what we know is all the way down into the deepest, deepest section of the newspaper, you know, what’s getting read — at least by the online audience, what’s getting read and what isn’t getting read. You know, what’s getting forwarded along and what isn’t getting forwarded along. So again, it’s like when, before maybe the market for — because all we had was data about — all we thought we had was data about the cover stories, then, you know, that was all the data you could use. And now that we have the more data, we use the more data. And again, I think you’re essentially right, which is that it’s hard to imagine that any organization is going to get that data and not use it. And so I don’t think the answer is not to use it. I just think the answer is to, to think hard about what this data-rich environment really means for journalism.

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.

Another way of looking at the data is that influential blogs hanging out on the far-left tail are more likely to report on iterative developments as they happen, while mainstream news outlets feel compelled to fit memes into a broader narrative. The study lists several phrases that were first “discovered” by blogs more than a week before peaking, like when Sarah Palin quoted Ronald Reagan at the end of a debate. That immediately raised flags among bloggers who identified the quote’s origins in a 1961 Reagan speech opposing Medicare, but it didn’t gain traction until more than a week later, when Medicare briefly became an issue in the 2008 campaign.

However you view the chart, it feels like each news organization has situated itself quite intentionally along the curve, staking out a role in the political news cycle. With the meme-tracking technique demonstrated in Kleinberg’s study, news outlets could themselves keep track of where they stand and adjust their reporting strategy if they prefer another spot on the cure. They might consider, for instance, whether they add anything at all to the political discourse by reporting on a meme so close to its peak.

The study also includes a stacked plot of the 50 most-popular phrases (below), which appears to show that media coverage of the campaign tended to coalesce around memes in September 2009 more than in October. “September has this kind of rhythmic feel to it, each week something dominates,” Kleinberg told me. “And then you get to October, where it’s this strange new pattern where there are all sorts of threads with no one thing rising to the top. It was harder to break through.”

He likened the pattern to an audience clapping in rhythm and then breaking down into scattered applause. “This feels like a system that’s sort of lapsing in and out of sync,” Kleinberg said. A question for political journalists to consider is: why?

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.”

From that perspective, the paper has quite a bit to add. First, it’s fascinating that memes in political reporting can be tracked with methods drawn from bioinformatics and genetic sequence analysis. As Bill Wasik explains in his new book on viral culture, And Then There’s This, the term meme was coined by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote in The Selfish Gene:

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about it its primeval soup…The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

Perhaps owing to those biological origins, we have come to describe particularly fast-moving Internet memes as viral, which evokes the image of passing through a population (and doesn’t, for what it’s worth, have anything to do with genetics). In New York magazine’s discussion of Wasik’s book, Times culture critic Virginia Heffernan questions whether the virus metaphor is “misleading — and ripe for retirement.” The meme-tracking study provides an alternative analogy: the heartbeat.

Back to Kleinberg’s idea of the web as a “single organism.” The study found that, yes, memes peak on prominent websites — that is, those indexed by Google News — before less prominent ones, but both of those peaks are generally preceded by a blip on the less prominent sites. Here’s how it’s illustrated in the paper; we’re looking at the percentage of each meme’s mentions that occur on sites not indexed by Google News. Zero hour represents the meme’s overall peak:

The authors describe this as a “‘heartbeat’-like dynamic” or a series of handoffs between blogs and mainstream media. My hunch is that the heartbeat would be even more visible — healthier, you might say — if the study had made a more-precise distinction between mainstream media and blogs. But in any event, the finding explodes that worn-out notion, furthered by today’s Times piece, of parasitic blogs merely reacting to the work of professional journalists.

It also complicates Wasik’s description of viral culture: “This telltale spike, this ascent to sudden heights followed by a decline nearly as precipitious.” He attributes that fleeting attention span to the Internet, but the meme-tracking study finds that, if anything, obscure blogs dwell much longer on a meme — in that heartbeat-like fashion — than the more-prominent news sources indexed by Google News.

There are a few other findings that I’ll highlight tomorrow because, despite some flaws in the methodology, the study is totally fascinating — and worth exploring on its dedicated web site. When I talked to Kleinberg two weeks ago, he acknowledged that Google News was an imprecise measure of mainstream media but argued, reasonably, that they had to draw a line somewhere to produce any meaningful results. He also noted that the paper was, in part, intended to demonstrate the meme-tracking technique they’ve developed, in which case, the distinction isn’t important.

And while I was writing this post, Scott Rosenberg weighed in with many of the same criticisms, while concluding:

Nonetheless, I fully expect to see it taken as conventional wisdom from this point forward that “news starts with the traditional media and then moves into the blogosphere.” Perhaps the Memetracker folks can follow the phrase “2.5 hours” and show us exactly how that happens.

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.

Wasik coins the term “nanostory” to describe how blogs seized on the Seamus anecdote and turned it into the hottest story of the campaign for two weeks in the summer of 2007. (See Ian’s review of the book for more on this.) In the process, the Globe undoubtedly lost traffic to political blogs, including many by other mainstream news organizations, that chose to focus on the nanostory. The original Globe story doesn’t even appear in the first 10 pages of results on a Google search for “mitt romney dog.”

Wasik thinks this is awful and decries the state of American political discourse, but I prefer to think about how news organizations could best operate in this inevitable online landscape, awful or not. My proposal: that the Globe should have atomized the content itself, running the 4,500-word article and a separate blog post with only the nanostory of Seamus and his cruel treatment at the hands of the Romneys. Something to link to. (Something like this Globe blog post, “Introducing Seamus Romney, ‘Mr. Personality’,” which the paper ran after the nanostory caught fire, when it was too late.) For Wasik’s critical take on my proposal, check out the video, a transcript of which is below.

But before you do, it’s worth noting that not all nuance is lost in the era of the nanostory: Even without my help, Vanity Fair’s profile of Palin generated nearly 2 million page views in its first six days online — not quite the traffic enjoyed by the magazine’s photo essays of Jessica Simpson or Miley Cyrus, but excellent for a 10,000-word political piece.

Zach Seward: One example from the book that seemed worth looking a little closer at was Mitt Romney’s dog. That began in, I think it was, a 4,500-word profile. It was part of a ten-part series —

Bill Wasik: That’s right.

Seward: — in The Boston Globe. And they, they knew they had something because they put it into the lead, but I think it didn’t — you know, it didn’t really get to the, like, you know, the dog, you know, the scatological parts of the story until, like, the fifth or sixth graf. And it was presented the way a newspaper would present a story, which was as an anecdote that speaks to a broader profile of Romney as a man and so on. But as soon as they put it out there, the Globe kind of lost control of the story. I mean, I think they probably didn’t get very much — I mean, they probably got a ton of traffic at first, but it was lost to blogs that essentially, that picked up on that one particular anecdote.

Wasik: Right, exactly. They seized on this one tiny, little corner of, as you say, it was a ten-part series — and, you know, full of all these complications and all this nuance, and the idea was, here, you’re going to get from the hometown paper of, you know, this leading candidate, this very sophisticated idea of who he is. And, literally, the thing that everybody seized on was this one tiny, little funny detail. And, of course, it involved the dog. So, back to the cute animals.  

But, and that, yeah, essentially is the process that I write about in the book. I sort of coin this term “nanostory” to talk about what I see is like the basic unit of cultural transmission in this, like, very, very intense, like, like, information-saturated conversation, which is everything gets boiled down to these tiny, little stories that then become, you know, passed around and satirized, and twists and turns are made on them. It’s the football that gets kicked around, you know, over the course of a week or less. [...]

Seward: I wonder if the Globe, if there’s even room to criticize the Globe, too — that they had something that they lost. Because they present a ten-part series, and that’s great, and I’m sure that got, you know, a significant readership. Bu that maybe there was a way to package the dog story — because it was pretty obvious this was going to be something of interest that might be viral — and, package it in a way that would have, that would, for instance, mean that, that that would still be on the first page of Google results for, for that query.

Wasik: Yeah, well, I mean, no, I’m sure there would be. It’s, you know. But gosh, I mean, well this is back to the earlier point, like, do I want to live in a world where, I mean, would I rather lose The Boston Globe than have them make that decision? Like, I might rather lose the Globe. Like, I might rather lose — you know, because when the authoritative institutions go that way, it’s almost worse than when they fail to go that way and somebody else eats their lunch instead. ‘Cause I can’t imagine a packaging of that anecdote in The Boston Globe that would have seemed anything more than embarrassing for the Globe. Like, the idea that they would take — ’cause it happened so many years ago, and it happened as part of their reporting, the really big-picture reporting on it. It would have been probably very weird vis-à-vis the source and the sources. Like, you know, the idea that they would take something so petty out of the story and put a box around it or put a thing about it online, like, it would have seemed, it would have seemed a little weird.

And, of course, this conversation speaks to the heart of the dilemma of papers like The Boston Globe, which is that it’s like your lunch gets eaten, and you can’t even do anything about it because you are constitutionally structured as an organization that’s not supposed to eat that lunch.  [...]

You know, one of the things — and this is obviously something you guys must think a lot about here at the Nieman Lab — is, everybody’s talking in these very kind of, you know, flippant terms about how the Internet is eating newspapers’ lunch. But, meanwhile, there are no business models yet for any of these places to make money. I mean the Politico is, is subsidized by Allbritton Communications, which owns TV stations. I would be shocked — maybe, through their content. I mean, do you guys know anything about the finances of the Politico?

Seward: They make money some months and not others. They probably will achieve profitablity, but I think that’s a fair point.

Wasik: Yeah, and because they’re a lean organization. They’re doing, I imagine they’re making money from their content-sharing stuff where they’re, people are paying for it.

Seward: And advertising.

Wasik:  Yeah, but the point being that the Internet advertising market has been suffering to the same extent or maybe even worse than the print advertising market. And so, you know, I do think that it’s weird that old media organizations are being asked to leap into this pool that we don’t really even know if it’s full of water or not.  Like, that, that there is — and a lot of the organizations that we think of as successes in the online space are being borne aloft by, you know, VC money or by inflated stock prices and that kind of thing. So I’m not sure if the time is even right for those kinds of decisions to be made.

Photo of Seamus by Mitt Romney’s sister, Jane, via The Boston Globe.

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. 

Wasik uses this unsavory story to introduce a new term, the nanostory — the “media pileons that surge and die off within a matter of months, days, even hours.” Once Hornstine became a big story — in major American newspapers and across cable and the Internet — she ceased to be a person, or even a name. She instead became a titillating and easily digestible modern fable, modern not only in its meaning but in its arc. All stories have a fixed lifespan, but the nanostory is so named both for its brief, bright existence and its false aura of social importance:

We allow ourselves to believe that a narrative is larger than itself, that it holds some portent for the long-term future; but soon enough we come to our senses, and the story, which cannot bear the weight of what we have heaped upon it, dies almost as suddenly as it emerged.

These stories get huge initial buzz, but then suffer from nearly simultaneous backlash — as if fame and backlash are not only inseparable but adjacent on a timeline. The stories and people involved are, writes Wasik, “gobbled up into the mechanical maw of the national conversation, masticated thoroughly, and spat out.” Susan Boyle was a nanostory. So was Miss California. You’ll find a couple new ones on most news aggregators every day. 

These are silly news stories that break big. But Wasik also argues that many nanostories are generated and promoted by the subjects themselves. Take Amber Lee Ettinger, last fall’s Obama Girl, whose parlayed her role in the YouTube hit “Crush on Obama” into political commentator appearances on CNN and elsewhere. She recently tossed out the first pitch at the Brooklyn Cyclones’ Obama night.

Viral culture and the media mind

But you might argue that these bits of triviality have always been around. We’ve been distracting ourselves with gossip, nonsense, and superficial oddities for ages. What makes the nanostory different? 

Wasik says the nanostory thrives today because we live in a viral culture. That culture labels ideas and stories as culturally significant almost instantaneously; it rewards shamelessness and confers attention for the briefest of moments. But Wasik admits that these same factors have been in place throughout the television age. The difference, he writes, is the audience. Wasik argues that people now operate with a collective media mind: that we are all savvy marketers of ourselves and eager to reward such initiative in others. 

Having been sold culture for so many years, in so many sophisticated ways, consumers have now been handed the tools to sell themselves and they are doing so with great gusto.

Central to that self-marketing is access to data. Just as corporate marketers measure success and make predictions based on sophisticated analysis, so do individuals who put themselves out there online. Wasik argues that the ubiquity of user behavior data on sites such as Technorati and Alexa give individuals tools that once cost corporations millions. Not only can we monitor the performance of a blog post or uploaded video, but we can use data to predict what new content might make a poster famous.

And Wasik argues that fame seems more attainable than ever. Anyone posting on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook is making a considered presentation of themselves to the world at large. They are acting out a role in the public sphere. And that act, Wasik argues, “changes what you say, how you act, how you see yourself.” Wasik never says it explicitly, but when he writes about the “hoardes of supposed naifs out there writing their blogs,” he is primarily talking about a certain demographic: the always-coveted 18-25s and 26-35s. In Wasik’s viral culture, these demographics are no longer just consumers of media and advertising; they’ve seized the means of cultural production as well. While it might be a democratic triumph to have the power to create media wrested away from a select group of culture makers, the new products created by that democracy leave Wasik dismayed.

The flash mob

Wasik knows firsthand about the allure of new media fame. He caused a stir in 2006 when he outed himself in Harper’s as the until-then anonymous architect of flash mobs, a social spectacle that hit New York in 2003 and spread around the globe — even seeping into the world of corporate advertising. Born out of what Wasik describes as a sort of existential boredom, the flash mob was a supposedly spontaneous assembly of people in a public place — a Claire’s accessory shop, the lobby of a Grand Hyatt — orchestrated beforehand by a series of email instructions. Wasik’s descriptions of these new media capers make for great reading — flash mob attendees wander through the rug department of Macy’s looking for the perfect “love rug,” or form a line blocks long ending at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, waiting for Strokes tickets that will never turn up. While another writer may have smugly observed the nonsense he had created, the strength of these tales comes from Wasik’s obvious bewilderment and dismay. How had he done this?

Again, Wasik argues that the prominence of his nanostory emerged from the Internet’s unique role as an archive of data and content. While television swamped us with stories, we had few ways to measure who cared about what. Now, as social networks and traffic monitors reveal popularity on a nearly minute-to-minute scale, we are more susceptible than ever to herd behavior or the bandwagon effect. Wasik recalls watching with a mix of delight and horror as he transformed into the shrouded cult-figure “Bill,” venerated by the hoards newly at his disposal. The crowds grew as e-mails were forwarded on and on, and soon the conventional media began to take notice. Wasik did interviews with hundreds of media outlets, themselves eager to be seen reporting on the cutting-edge of culture. 

Wasik was interviewed by scores of media outlets from around the world, but he singles out reporter Amy Harmon of The New York Times as particularly emblematic of the way that members of the traditional media approached the story. Harmon contacted Wasik (still anonymous at that point) by phone long after many other outlets had covered the story. Harmon said she knew the Times was late to the story but planned to devote prominent space in the Week in Review section identifying flash mobbing as a fascinating current trend. Instead, Harmon’s piece focused on growing backlash against the mobs on the web. But Wasik writes that the backlash hadn’t even happened yet — the Times was simply pushing this nanostory along to the next logical stop on its path to irrelevancy. The evidence marshaled by Harmon, Wasik writes, “hardly constituted a ‘backlash’ against this still-growing, intercontinental fad, but what I think Harmon and the Times rightly understood was that a backlash was the only avenue by which they could advance the story, i.e., find a new narrative.” 

Wasik never makes clear whether he feels the Times story led to the backlash that followed, but eventually it did come, and the mobs were soon over. He notes that they could ultimately unsustainable, since they were the very definition of a nanostory: they didn’t mean anything, and soon people came to realize it. 

But mobs live on. Wasik describes the surreal experience of attending a “flash mob” for the Ford Fusion at City Hall Plaza in Boston, orchestrated entirely by a marketing company. The event is a bust; it feels staged and obviously commercial. People walk by, disregarding the scene as the marketing stunt it clearly was. Like traditional media, which seemed both eager and clumsy while covering the story, corporate America had fallen for the gag but somehow missed the point. 

Following his unnerving success with flash mobs, Wasik set out to perform a series of similar experiments in the new media world. Fascinated by the star-making power of the music-review site Pitchfork on the indie scene, Wasik attempts to destroy the Swedish band Peter Bjorn and John as they threaten to emerge at the 2007 SXSW festival. He starts the blog “Stop Peter Bjorn and John” and arranges a mock-protest. Within a week EW.com and Mother Jones, among others reported on growing backlash against the group. Soon this innocuous pop group had earned the label “controversial” on the San Francisco Chronicle’s culture blog. But not all his experiments build buzz: his oppodepot.com, which attempted to aggregate dirt on all the 2008 Presidential candidates, attracted little traffic — because the site failed to take a partisan angle, Wasik says.

So what? Conclusions and ideas looking forward

What conclusions could one draw from reading Wasik describe — and experiment with — these new cultural products? Here are a few:

— The Internet is a false cure for boredom. Wasik says he began the flash mob project out of a sort of existential boredom; he admits he is often bored. The web, with its instant access to information and entertainment, is the ultimate place to “do something” without doing much at all, Wasik argues. He writes that the web has not eliminated our boredom, just distracted us from it.

— Viral culture rewards narrow thinking. Each of Wasik’s social experiments was founded on a clearly defined meme, a narrow and finely executed idea. We see that blogs that tend to gain notoriety (or book deals) do one thing really well, while blogs with wide focus often fall by the wayside. But serious writing or good political commentary thrive on complexity, exactly what viral culture rejects as too complicated. 

— Culture is infected with a virus. He writes that a meme or nanostory is like an “independent agent loosed into the world, where it travels from mind to mind, burrowing into each, colonizing all as widely and ruthlessly as it can.” Wasik argues that these trivial items are choking us, blinding us, and making us both stupid and crazy.

— Everything is a meme. Though Wasik lumps both news items and self-promoted projects under the same “nanostory” or “meme” headings, it seems that these two categories are fundamentally different. He devotes too little energy to sorting out who continues to control and disseminate information, and grants too much power to individuals and too little to still powerful media conglomerates and corporations.

— Crowds are not as wise as they seem. Wasik suggests that culture has devolved into a popularity contest, with news outlets mistaking clickthroughs, pageviews, and most-emailed lists for reliable indicators of quality and worth. He cites a Columbia study that found people tasked with downloading and evaluating music relied largely on the popularity of the songs among other respondents.  

— Nanostories are killing us. In the book’s final section, Wasik offers this rousing plea: “We want reason in our politics, greatness in our art, and we see that these are incompatible with our feckless, churning conversation. We must learn how to neuter our nanostories, or at least cut off their food supply.” Viral culture, he seems to argue, is at perhaps permanent odds with seriousness and quality. 

— We might be doomed. While there’s much to agree with in Wasik’s arguments, he offers us few specifics on how to “neuter” these viral stories. He mentions Jake Silverstein’s idea of an Internet Ramadan, during which participants go offline for a month, or Intel’s flirtation with offline “quiet time” one morning a week. Rather than offer specifics, Wasik focuses on individual choices, the familiar idea of unplugging ourselves from the constant flow of information — or, more elegantly, that “we must become judicious controllers of our own contexts, making careful and self-reflective choices about what we read, watch, consume.”

Wasik asks hard questions to which there are no simple answers. But if we are experiencing a moment of cultural catastrophe, shouldn’t the remedies extend beyond such relatively simple, personal decisions? After all, we can only consume what the culture makes available. A constructive question going forward, it seems, might be: rather than simply cut ourselves off, can we use the apparatus of digital media to produce and enjoy quality content? 

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.

Zach Seward: I guess should start by asking whether there’s anything we could do to this video to make it more viral.

Bill Wasik: [Laughter] Do you have any cute animals around?

Seward: [Laughter] Nudity? Would that also help?

Wasik: Well, sure there’s nudity. But, I mean, if you don’t want to go there, then there’s always really adorable animals.

Seward: Sure. But to that end, I guess then, there’s a — the theme running through your book is that it is, in fact, possible to create the quality of being viral, or at least to attempt to manufacture it. That it’s not necessarily a completely organic process. First, whether you agree with that notion or my reading of your book that way, but — well, is that a fair reading?

Wasik: I do agree with that. I mean, but in part it’s because making stuff that’s viral is really just about making stuff that causes conversations and that sort of hooks into social processes and why people talk to one another. So, on some level, it’s possible to engineer it — but on another level, the way you engineer it is just by doing the things that those of us who — on some level — that those of us who sort of, like, express ourselves for a living have always done, which is try to make stuff that people are interested in.

It’s somewhat more complicated than that. The technology does lead to certain aesthetic values or certain things being more, you know, more popular in an Internet age than they might have been in an offline age. But nevertheless, the basic principle still applies.

Seward: I guess then a crucial question is: Are we talking about something different than popularity? Is viral a distinct concept?

Wasik: From popular? Well, to me, what — when I think about viral, I think about not just the quantity of attention but the speed of it. You know, the sense that — it’s not that you accrue, you know, 10,000 fans or 2 million views over the course of two years. It’s that you do it more, like, over the course of two weeks or maybe two months.  

You know, that, to me, is — well, you know, it’s the thing about the Internet that’s got everybody kind of scratching their head and saying that this has changed the culture. It’s the fact that you can have these things come out of nowhere with no institutional backing and become incredibly ubiquitous within a very, very short period of time.

Seward: When — so you identify a few different elements: speed, you already mentioned. But you also talk about shamelessness, duration, sophistication. Talk about a few of those.

Wasik: Yeah, sure. Well, shamelessness — somewhat tongue in check, but I really think its true that, you know — the Internet values controversy, and you can go viral for being a complete jerk as well or perhaps even better than you can for being the kind of person who somebody would actually want to hang out with.

And similarly with your content. I mean, obviously you can make something so outrageous and that’s so — that people hate so much that it winds up becoming incredibly viral. Now, that, of course, that’s been true in an earlier era, too, you know. To me, the thing that’s really new about viral success is the speed, and, then, as you said, sophistication.  

And sophistication in a particular sort of way. You know, people are really aware of how popularity operates these days. You know, there’s this kind of meta quality to the way we think about success, to the way we think about popularity. I think the Internet encourages that in a lot of ways because of all of the data that it gives us, and also all of the ways we can see things spread through social networks. You know, so just the act of receiving an email from a friend and then — take Susan Boyle, this woman who became, who became this sort of overnight viral sensation. And, you know, when you received it from your friend and you looked at it and maybe it had 10,000 views. But then you see it two days later on the news, where it has 2,000,000 views. You have a sense that you saw the process in action. You get a sense for how it is that it happened.  

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. And then, I also just think it’s true because we’ve been forced into a kind of sophistication by advertising and by, you know, 25 years or 50 years or 100 years, arguably, of mass media, where we’ve been played upon systematically by ads for so long that we develop a certain kind of consciousness of the way that things get sold, the way that things get popular. So I do think that there’s a sort of sophistication today that’s different.