And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [19]
DISPERSAL
I announced that MOB #8, in early September, would be the last. The invitation e-mail’s subject was MOB #8: The end, and the text began with a FAQ:
Q. The end?
A. Yes.
Q. Why?
A. It can’t be explained. Like the individual mobs, the Mob Project
appeared for no reason, and like the mobs it must disperse.
Q. Will the Mob Project ever reappear?
A. It might. But don’t expect it.
The site was a concrete alcove right on Forty-second Street, just across from the Condé Nast building. Participants had been told to follow the instructions blaring from a cheap boom box I had set up beforehand atop a brick ledge. I had prerecorded a tape of myself, barking out commands. I envisioned my hundreds of mobbers, following the dictates of what was effectively a loudspeaker on a pole. It was hard to get more straightforward than that, I thought.
But the cheering of the hundreds grew so great that it drowned out the speakers. The mob soon became unmoored. All of a sudden a man in a toque, apparently some sort of opportunistic art shaman, opened his briefcase to reveal a glowing neon sign, and the crowd bent to his will. He held up two fingers, and to my horror the mob began chanting “Peace!” In retrospect, I saw it as a fitting end for an experiment about bandwagons and conformity, about inattention and media hype. My crowd had ultimately been hijacked by a figure more mysterious, more enigmatic than even the semianonymous “Bill”—by a better story, that is, than me.
Of all my experiments in viral culture, the Mob Project was by far the most impressive in its spread; and indeed this spread spurred much of my ensuing interest in the subject. In starting the project, my major interest had been in the intersection of the virtual and the physical—I had seen the mob as a way for online connections to manifest themselves visually, corporeally, disruptively in the sidewalks and spaces of urban life. But as the mob grew beyond my most optimistic projections, and then collapsed, I became less fixated on the mobs themselves and more focused on the storytelling about them. The arc of a mob, of the Mob Project, of flash mobs as a general phenomenon, of the media narrative about the phenomenon—all were strangely congruent in the rapid rise and fall, and I desperately wanted to understand the storytelling that made these spikes operate.
Chapter 2 is an exploration of the most basic breeding ground for spikes, and the stories—i.e., the nanostories—that fuel them: the niche, or subculture, which the Internet as a medium has both invigorated and transformed.
2.
ANNUALS
EXPERIMENT: STOP PETER BJORN AND JOHN
SUBCULTURES OF NARCISSISM
In June 2004 a twenty-nine-year-old prosecutor named David Lat, who spent his days working at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark, New Jersey, began a hobby that eventually elevated him as an icon of both his profession and his time. Adopting a persona called “Article III Groupie,” a drink-addled female devotee of constitutional law, he began writing a legal blog—Underneath Their Robes—which promised, in its first post and de facto manifesto, to apply the methodology of celebrity magazines (Lat listed as his models People, Us Weekly, Page Six, The National Enquirer, and Tiger Beat) to the rarefied culture of appeals-court juristry. In an early series of posts, Lat selected the “Superhotties of the Federal Judiciary,” male and female; of Supreme Court justice David Souter he wrote, “Certiorari is GRANTED to that hot, lean body!” Lat encouraged readers to send in anonymously sourced “blind items” on high-ranking judges, whose identities would be left to the reader’s best guess, e.g.:
This southeastern