And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [36]
What spreads we then imitate, amplify, anatomize, satirize; and some of what we thereby create spreads as well, providing us with more data to analyze and giving other meme-makers one more example to emulate. Together we are engineering a meme-making machine, which hour by hour entertains and even enriches us as its ultimate effects on our culture remain unclear.
THE CONTAGIOUS FESTIVAL
For just over a year, there was a curious monthly contest that embodied precisely this emergent vision of culture. It was called the Contagious Festival, although “festival” was decidedly euphemistic, because what happened each month was a rather hard-nosed competition. Its rules were simple: create the website that gets the most visitors, and win $2,500. A second “jury prize,” of an equal amount, was also given out afterward, but the popularity contest was the marquee event. The contest’s sponsor, the left-leaning news site the Huffington Post, provided the server space for free. Entries could be launched anytime during the month; entrants could promote their site, or not, in any way they so chose (short of sending out spam). And the winner, quite simply, was whichever site got the most visitors. All that mattered was your number—no matter how sophisticated or mawkish or juvenile your site, no matter which type of media it was plying.
Over the course of the year, top-ten finishers ranged from simple drawings to music files to videos to elaborate combinations of every medium. Most entries tended to be stabs at humor, but some successful sites took stridently dark or somber tones—one antiwar song had garnered more than 500,000 views. Because of the Huffington Post’s politics, most entries tended to include a left-wing message, but not all: in the Festival’s first month, one of the top-ranked sites was “Awwwwstrich,” a quick-cut music video of rapping ostriches. Some of the entries were funny, or at least clever and well put-together, but quality clearly did not determine a site’s performance. The primary criterion was that it hit, i.e., compelled a reader to pass it along, and isolating this ineffable quality was the goal toward which the competitors strove.
The mastermind behind the Contagious Festival was Jonah Peretti, the Huffington Post’s technology director and one of its founders. Jonah, at thirty-two, embodied precisely those qualities that this decade has conspired to produce in its high-status young men: savvy in matters technological, and yet charismatic, articulate, fashionably dressed, nice teeth. He wore distressed blue jeans and chunky designer glasses. Late one July, just before the start of the August competition, I visited him at the Huffington Post’s offices in SoHo, and even the space displayed his blend of tech-company informality and fastidious début de siècle style: in one room, Warhol prints lined the wall, even as the desks were crammed together uncomfortably along the perimeter to make room for a pool table. My intention was to cover the Contagious Festival for the month of August, in order to witness, in real time, the blowup of a manufactured Internet meme; to observe some new advancement, however small, in the emergent science—and sport—of cultural manipulation. I wanted to meet with Jonah beforehand, not only because he was the contest’s ringmaster but because he himself was a memetic engineer of the highest order.
Jonah had fallen into the world of meme-making somewhat by accident. After college, he taught for three years in New Orleans and then shipped off to graduate school at the