One of the best videos I've ever seen on the Internet is that of a flash mob of some 200 participants scattered throughout the main concourse of Grand Central Station all freezing at precisely the same moment and holding their frozen positions for five minutes, while passers-by moved around them, bewildered at the scene. The event, organized by a performance group called Improv Everywhere and executed in January 2008, was built upon the idea that Harper's editor Bill Wasik initiated back in 2003 when he sent email messages to 63 friends and acquantances that read:
You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in NewYork City for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.
You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in NewYork City for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.
So begins Wasik's interest in and introduction to the "meme," a concept first coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and entered into the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1998. Defined as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture," the meme is Bill Wasik's subject in And Then There's This.
Wasik details his experimentation with flash mobs through their inherently rapid demise and explores further memetic phenomena such as the creation of national buzz in the indie music industry, as created by the blogerati and online meme-making giants like Seattle's KEXP radio in the meteoric rise of the band Annuals. He recounts his further experimentation with online viral culture, including what turned out to be a wildly successful website entry in the Huffington Post's Contagious Festival, a contest that awards the entrant who creates the most contagious website, that which attracts the most visitors, within the short span of a month.
Wasik details his experimentation with flash mobs through their inherently rapid demise and explores further memetic phenomena such as the creation of national buzz in the indie music industry, as created by the blogerati and online meme-making giants like Seattle's KEXP radio in the meteoric rise of the band Annuals. He recounts his further experimentation with online viral culture, including what turned out to be a wildly successful website entry in the Huffington Post's Contagious Festival, a contest that awards the entrant who creates the most contagious website, that which attracts the most visitors, within the short span of a month.
Wasik is a sharp writer, and And Then There's This is a smart and timely read, elucidating how Internet-made culture explodes virally to huge proportions and disappears as quickly. And now that anyone can be a creator of culture, we are all suddenly very interested in how culture is made, and more specifically how we can be successful in the creation of viral phenomena. This may be, I imagine, the reason I was drawn to Bill Wasik's book, but ironically I found my interest in the topic waning well before the book was done, my attenition span perhaps as fleeting as the phenomenon itself.
