And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [37]
After consulting Webster’s Dictionary, I discovered that “sweatshop” is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: “a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions” and its origin dates from 1892. So my personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email.
Your web site advertises that the NIKE iD program is “about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.” I share Nike’s love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that “If you want it done right . . . build it yourself.” I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision.
At the end of the exchange, what Jonah had in his possession was not, sadly, a pair of SWEATSHOP Nikes, but something arguably better: the e-mail exchange itself, which wittily exposed Nike’s promotion as the soulless sham it was. He forwarded the exchange to roughly a dozen of his friends, and was shocked when, within weeks, he was receiving inquiries from national media about it. His e-mail exchange had spread to literally millions of readers around the world. He was invited to appear on the Today show to debate a Nike executive.
Now Jonah was not so interested in his thesis anymore. “All of a sudden, I was spending all my time walking around MIT, asking people about how media spreads through networks,” he recalled when we sat down to chat on a stylishly modern sofa at the Huffington Post. At the Media Lab, he was perfectly situated to put some hard science to this question. The first relevant discipline, Jonah discovered, was the science of networks—“how many connections you need between each node for it to be possible for something to become contagious, how do different network structures affect the spread of information, and questions like that.” The second was cognitive science: “When an individual who’s a node in the network encounters a piece of media, how do they make a decision? How do they decide whether they pass it along to all of their friends, whether they’re outraged, whether they’re inspired, whether they’re sad, whether they take action, or don’t take action?”
After graduating from MIT, Jonah moved to New York and embarked on further contagious adventures. In collaboration with his sister Chelsea, a stand-up comic, he created the Rejection Line, a Manhattan telephone number that New York singles could hand out to undesirable suitors, who would call to receive the bad news from an automated recording (in Jonah’s voice): “Welcome to New York City’s Rejection Line. The person who gave you this number does not want to talk to you, or speak to you, again. I would like to take this opportunity to officially reject you....” They also created a site called BlackPeopleLoveUs.com, which purported to be the home page of a white couple, Sally and Johnny, boasting about how many black friends they have. As evidence, the black friends have left testimonials. “Sally loves to touch my hair!” one says. “Johnny calls me ’da man!’ ” says another.
Jonah’s central insight was that sites spread when they speak to the particular relationships between people. There needs to be, in Jonah’s words, “a social hook