And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Chapter 1. - MY CROWD
Chapter 2. - ANNUALS
Chapter 3. - I HAVE A MEME
Chapter 4. - AGENT ZERO
Chapter 5. - NANOPOLITICS
CONCLUSION
Acknowledgements
INDEX
VIKING
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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Bill Wasik, 2009
All rights reserved
Portions of this book first appeared in different form as “My Crowd” in Harper’s Magazine and
“Hype Machine” in The Oxford American. “Hype Machine” was later published as “Annuals:
A North Carolina Band Navigates the Ephemeral Blogosphere” in Best Music Writing 2008,
edited by Nelson George and Daphne Carr (Da Capo Press).
Graphs by the author
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wasik, Bill.
And then there’s this : how stories live and die in viral culture / Bill Wasik.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-05770-4
1. Internet—Social aspects. 2. Information society—Psychological aspects.
3. Internet users—Psychology. 4. Blogs—Social aspects. I. Title.
HM851.W38 2009
303.48’33—dc22 2009004100
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INTRODUCTION:
KEY CONCEPTS
THE NANOSTORY
I begin with a plea to the future historians, those eminent and tenured minds of a generation as yet unconceived, who will sift through our benighted present, compiling its wreckage into wiki-books while lounging about in silvery bodysuits: to these learned men and women I ask only that in telling the story of this waning decade, the first of the twenty-first century, they will spare a thought for the fate of a girl named Blair Hornstine. Period photographs will record that Hornstine, as a high-school senior in the spring of 2003, was a small-framed girl with a full face, a sweep of dark, curly hair, and a broad, laconic smile. She was an outstanding student—the top of her high-school class in Moorestown, New Jersey, in fact, boasting a grade-point average of 4.689—and was slated to attend Harvard. But as her graduation neared, the district superintendent ruled that the second-place finisher, a boy whose almost-equal average (4.634) was lower due only to a technicality, should be allowed to share the valedictory honors.
At this point, the young Hornstine made a decision that even our future historians, no doubt more impervious than we to notions