And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [2]
Likewise, when this sort of transient attention falls on people, we tend to describe it as someone’s “fifteen minutes of fame.” But is celebrity really what is at work here? The majority of the tens of millions of people who pondered the story of Blair Hornstine never knew what she looked like, or cared. What they knew, instead, was how she fit handily into one or more of the various meanings imposed on her: the ambition-addled generation, the lawsuit-drunk society. Most people who remember Blair Hornstine today will recall her not by name or face but simply by role—as “that girl,” perhaps, “who sued to become valedictorian.” No name need even be invoked for her to do her conversational work.
In keeping with the entrepreneurial wordsmithery of the times, I would like to propose a new term to encompass all these miniature spikes, these vertiginous rises and falls: the nanostory. 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 was born. The gift we so graciously gave Blair Hornstine in 2003 was her fifteen minutes not of fame but of meaning.
VIRAL CULTURE
On May 27, 2003, during the same fitful weeks, I made up my mind to create a nanostory of my own. To sixty-three friends and acquaintances, I sent an e-mail that began as follows:
You are invited to take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.
More precisely, I forwarded them this message, which, in order to conceal my identity as its original author, I had sent myself earlier that day from an anonymous webmail account. As further explanation, the e-mail offered a “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) section, which consisted of only one question:
Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob?
A. Tons of other people are doing it.
Watches were to be synchronized against the U.S. government’s atomic clocks, and the e-mail gave instructions for doing so. In order that the mob not form until the appointed time, participants were asked to approach the site from all four cardinal directions, based on birth month: January or July, up Broadway from the south; February or August, down Broadway from the north; etc. At 7:24 p.m. the following Tuesday—June 3—the mob was to converge upon Claire’s Accessories, a small chain store near Astor Place that sold barrettes, scrunchies, and such. The gathering was to last for precisely seven minutes, until 7:31, at which time all would disperse. “NO ONE,” the e-mail cautioned, “SHOULD REMAIN AT THE SITE AFTER 7:33.”
My reason for sending this e-mail was simple: I was bored, by which I mean the world at that moment seemed adequate for neither my entertainment nor my sense of self. Something had to be done, and quickly. It was out of the question to undertake a project that might last, some new institution or some great work of art, for these would take time, exact cost, require risk, even as their odds for success hovered at nearly zero. Meanwhile, the odds of creating a short-lived sensation, of attracting incredible attention for a very brief period of time, were far more promising indeed. New York culture, like the national culture, was nothing but a shimmering cloud of nanostories, a churning constellation of “important” new bands and ideas and fashions that literally hundreds if not thousands of writers, in print and online, devoted themselves to building up and then dismantling with alacrity. I wanted my new project to be what someone would call “The