And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [20]
This well-known circuit court judge . . . has issues concerning the appropriate treatment of female clerks in his chambers.
The dark joke underlying Lat’s antics was obvious: take the lowest form of cultural analysis (celebrity gossip), apply it to one of the more intellectual and obscure reaches of American life (appellate law), and what you get is comedy gold. Except it didn’t play as comedy, or at least not just as comedy. Appellate judges really were a sort of celebrity to a certain—if small—segment of the population, namely those lawyers who, like Lat, worked in that corner of the profession. These lawyers all avidly read Lat’s blog. Few of them had previously thought of their profession as a hotbed of salacious gossip, but once a site had bothered to collect it all and present it in a jaundiced tone, the evidence was indisputable. During the two years that Lat kept up his blog (before he was exposed and stepped down from his day job), Underneath Their Robes not only tweaked its profession but on some level transformed it. The lofty reaches of constitutional law had become infected with the media mind.
So it has gone with other subcultures in our viral age, when the Internet—with its worldwide accessibility and infinite capacity for segmentation—has allowed us to connect with farther-flung people who are more and more like ourselves. Much of the emergent Internet culture is in fact a collection of a wide array of niche cultures, in keeping with the “Long Tail” argument put forward by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his book of that name: “People are re-forming,” he writes, “into thousands of cultural tribes of interest, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests.” But what the Internet has done is arguably less to form such tribes than to change how they see themselves. Think about the offline publications that have traditionally catered to subcultures: many of them can still be found lining the magazine racks of one’s local Barnes & Noble, those rows of sleepy titles devoted to individual professions, sports teams, musical genres, political preferences, ethnic communities, and so on. The very way we find these publications, each tucked among a slew of unrelated others, makes us keenly aware of their narrow purview, and one can sense in their pages that they realize this too. The difference online, where subcultures converse incessantly among themselves in an intense, always-on, inwardly directed banter, is that every crowd comes to talk and think about itself as if it were the center of the entire universe.
The most obvious symptom of this shift has been the online democratization of fame—what the technology writer Clive Thompson has dubbed “microcelebrity.” Just as David Lat treated the 877 members of the appellate judiciary (and sometimes even their clerks!) as celebrities, and just as some flash-mobbers wanted to make “Bill” into a movement luminary, so does each subculture online tend to coronate its own small claque of mini-stars. On the Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag, readers follow the exploits of the young founders of Google and Facebook (and of far lesser business figures such as Jakob Lodwick, a marginally successful young web entrepreneur whose chief occupation seems to be seeking microcelebrity) in the same manner that Us Weekly stalks Tom Cruise. Even within user-run communities, fame finds a way of attaching itself to the most provocative members. The New York Times reported that when “DaShiv”—a photographer and popular commenter on the group blog MetaFilter—came to visit New York, three different parties were given in his honor by online associates.
But such nanofame is just part of a larger move toward nanostories—toward more narratives, and more perishable narratives—that has taken place within online subcultures. The reason for this larger shift is simple: the blinding speed and vast capacity of the medium essentially requires