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By Root 816 0

Internet meme? One has created, at negligible cost and in minimal time, something entirely new—a gag Amazon review or a Photo-shopped hoax image; a new song for one’s MySpace account or, for one’s blog, some new and cleverly contrarian line of political argument. One has laid it at the doorstep of literally the entire world, rung the bell, and run. Who will answer? In the bushes, giddy, one watches who, and how many, take the bait—by way of hit counters, server logs, comment threads, Google and Technorati searches for links. Two viral marketing experts I met both (literally at once) used the phrase “crack cocaine” to describe how it feels to track the stats on a contagious project, and during the Contagious Festival, I immediately saw what they meant. I took many hits from that particular pipe myself.

The drug metaphor is perhaps more apt than anyone would realize. Since the mid-1990s, psychologists have begun to identify some web-obsessed patients as sufferers of “Internet addiction disorder,” which is believed to affect some 2 percent of Internet users worldwide; a 2007 Stanford study indicated that one in eight Americans may have a level of Internet use that is, if not a sign of addiction, at least “problematic.” Much of the compulsive behavior centers around multiplayer online games, the most prominent of which, World of Warcraft, has more than ten million active subscribers. Nick Yee, a social scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center, surveyed more than three thousand such gamers about how their play had affected their lives. The results were startling. “I have played the game for 10 hours continuously or more”—more than half of players in all age ranges, male and female, said yes to this statement. “I would consider myself addicted to the game”—more than two-fifths overall, and two-thirds of boys aged twelve to seventeen, agreed. “I become anxious, irritable, or angry if I am unable to play”—more than 15 percent of the gamers copped even to this. One can appreciate why the government of China, always at the forefront of authoritarian social engineering, sends its young Internet fiends to military-style boot camps for detox.

To my knowledge, there are no scientific surveys as of yet on the addictiveness of Internet meme-making. But one might make a comparison to compulsive gambling, another pursuit in which a wager is made and the results are then obsessively tracked. On this subject, mental-health professionals have compiled extensive research. Robert Breen, a psychologist at the Rhode Island Hospital, has conducted multiple studies to demonstrate that machine gamblers—betters on slot machines, video poker machines, etc.—become pathological far more quickly than do devotees of other types of gambling. Indeed, his intriguing discovery was that games of chance seem to be more addictive in direct proportion to the rapidity and continuity of their “action”—how quickly, that is, a gambler is able to learn the outcome of his wager and then make another:

FIG. 3-2—AVERAGE TIME TO BECOME A PATHOLOGICAL GAMBLER (R. BREEN, 2004)

Based on this insight, I fear that meme-making may be every bit the “crack” it is alleged to be. Certainly that was my own experience during those early days of August. With $2,500 on the line and visitor totals updated nearly in real time, I found myself refreshing the results page as often as every ten minutes. Between frantic reloads of that page, I of course had to check Technorati, too, to see if any blogs had linked to my site and, if so, what they had to say. Then there was the e-mail address listed on the site, which had to be checked too, for the torrents of fan mail I expected to pour in. At work, I kept a window open for each of these so I could easily refresh them. At home, I found myself straying constantly toward the laptop. If I woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, one thought would suddenly pierce my grog: check the stats. They moved slowly, but even small numbers were mesmerizing to watch creep up. By August 2, already 104 people had visited my site, and by