• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 830 0

to the media.” At the time of our interview, for example, the number-one most e-mailed story on the New York Times site was entitled “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” and in it the author applied the techniques of a dolphin trainer to understanding and controlling her husband. The piece had spread, Jonah pointed out, because it had an obvious social hook. “People are going to send that to their spouse—ha-ha, right?—or they’re going to send it to their girlfriend if they’ve been talking about relationships, et cetera.” Black People Love Us was the same way: “It’s about race relations, so black people are going to share it with their white friends, or vice versa. There’s a social imperative to it, and so that social imperative makes you share it with other people, because you want to talk to them about it.”

EXPERIMENT: THE RIGHT-WING NEW YORK TIMES

Jonah and I agreed that I would cover the August competition, tracking the twists and turns of the tally and getting to know some of the contestants along the way. Often the entries were made under pseudonyms, and so he offered to help put me in touch with the real meme-makers behind the sites. There was, however, one dimension of my project that I did not disclose to Jonah, or to the contestants I would interview: so as better to understand the dynamics of the competition, I had decided to enter it myself. For a pseudonym, I settled on “Will Murphy”—not a flat-out lie, I reasoned, since “Murphy” is my wife’s surname and “Will” is a fair substitute for “Bill” (one I had even considered adopting in college, during an unfortunately preppy phase).

Using Jonah’s advice, I set out three basic conditions that my entry needed to satisfy. First and most crucially, it should speak directly to the primary audience, the group of people who would be the first to see it—in this case the readers of the Huffington Post, which provided the first-line viewership for the whole competition. Any entry that hoped to spread would need to excite these core readers, creating a conversation that fit within their community, because outside readers were unlikely to find it in great enough numbers to build critical mass. And because the Huffington Post community, like those that have organized around the Daily Kos or Atrios or other left-leaning blog sites, existed entirely for the amplification of left-wing (or, more precisely, anti-right-wing) sentiments, a winning entry would have to dip at least a toe in that particular pool.

Second—and here was where things got a bit more complicated—the entry would eventually need to break out of its primary audience in order to truly blow up. It would need, that is, to show some crossover potential, so it could speak to a larger audience when the time came. The history of the competition was littered with third- or fifth-place finishers that had ignited the base but lacked a broad enough appeal to gain wider Internet celebrity. Jonah had made basically this point during our interview: “The question is, when do you make something that breaks out of the community that’s supposed to react to it?” Black PeopleLoveUs.com had been aided in its spread by links on white supremacist sites, of all places.

As the subject for my own site, I chose the right wing’s contempt for the New York Times, a hatred that had just then thickened to Homeric wrath after the newspaper had played a hand in uncovering two questionable Bush administration programs of domestic surveillance. For weeks right-wing pundits and bloggers had been in the throes of anti-Times apoplexy. My thought was: What if one could, as if through some magic psychological power, show what conservatives thought as they read the Times? Over the course of an afternoon I wrote it out. The premise was simple enough: the website would look just like the Times’s, but when a reader moved his mouse over a story, it would transform into a paranoid right-wing reading of the same article. For example, mousing over this story—

QUESTIONS SURFACE ABOUT

U.S. SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM

Sources at the NSA and