And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [12]
Although Dawkins clearly intends the meme to be analogous first and foremost to the gene—which spreads itself only through successive generations, through the reproduction of its host—on the very same page he invokes the more apt biological metaphor of the virus. “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain,” he wrote, “turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”
Why has the meme meme spread? Why has the viral become so viral? The Selfish Gene was a bestselling book thirty years ago, but it was not until the mid-1990s that the meme and viral ideas became epidemics of their own. I would hazard two reasons for this chronology, one psychological and one technological. The psychological reason is the rise of market consciousness, in a culture where stock ownership increased during the 1990s from just under a quarter to more than half. After all, the meme vision of culture—where ideas compete for brain space, unburdened by history or context—really resembles nothing so much as an economist’s dream of the free market. We are asked to admire the marvelous theoretical efficiencies (no barriers to entry, unfettered competition, persistence of the fittest) but to ignore the factual inequalities: the fact, for example, that so many of our most persistent memes succeed only through elaborate sponsorship (what would be a genetic analogy here? factory-farm breeding, perhaps?), while other, fitter memes wither.
The other, technological reason for the rise of the meme/viral idea is perhaps more obvious: the Internet. But it is worth teasing out just what about the Internet has conjured up these memes all around us. Yes, the Internet allows us to communicate instantaneously with others around the world, but that has been possible since the telegraph. Yes, the Internet allows us to find others with similar interests and chat among ourselves; but this is just an online analogue of what we always have been able to do in person, even if perhaps not on such a large scale. What the Internet has done to change culture—to create a new, viral culture—is to archive trillions of our communications, to make them linkable, trackable, searchable, quantifiable, so they can serve as ready grist for yet more conversation. In an offline age, we might have had a vague notion that a slang phrase or a song or a perception of a product or an enthusiasm for a candidate was spreading through social groups; but lacking any hard data about how it was spreading, why would any of us (aside from marketers and sundry social scientists) really care? Today, though, in the Internet, we have a trillion-terabyte answer that in turn has influenced our questions. We can see how we are embedded in numerical currents, how we precede or lag curves, how we are enmeshed in so-called social networks, and how our networks compare to the networks of others. The Internet has given us not just new ways of communicating but new ways of measuring ourselves.
PROPAGATION
To spread the Mob Project, I endeavored to devise a media strategy on the project’s own terms. The mob was all about the herd instinct, I reasoned, about the desire not to be left out of the latest fad; logically, then, it should grow as quickly as possible, and eventually—this seemed obvious—to buckle under the weight of its own popularity. I developed a simple maxim for myself, as custodian of the mob: “Anything that grows the mob is pro-mob.” And in accordance with this principle, I gave interviews to all reporters who asked. In the six weeks following MOB #3 I did perhaps thirty different interviews, not only with local newspapers (the Post and the Daily News, though not yet the Times—more on that later) but also with Time, Time Out New York, the Christian