And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [41]
WEEK ONE
My first pang of competitive anxiety arrived on August 3, when I noticed the appearance of a new entry by none other than Ava Lowery, whom I knew by her formidable reputation: a media-savvy, fifteen-year-old antiwar wunderkind from Alabama, whose websites, which generally consisted of mournful slideshows of dead Iraqis set to music, came with a built-in and enthusiastic following. She had gotten death threats from her neighbors and an interview on CNN. Her new site for the competition, entitled “Letter to America!,” was essentially a polemical mix tape: an indictment of the Bush administration in words and images, accompanied by catchy clips of pop songs. In my capacity as a professional journalist, I called Ava and talked to her about how she got started in meme-making.
“During the 2004 election,” she told me, in the astonishingly precise, self-possessed tone that some TV-ready children are somehow able to muster, “I decided to start my own website and blog so that I could start voicing my opinion. You know, I’m a kid”—she pronounced this “kee-yud”—“and I was a lot younger at the time.” Now, though, she dreamed big. “I think that online blogging and animations and that type of thing are becoming the new media,” she said, by which she meant replacing the traditional media of television, print, and such. “It’s by real people! It’s not made by people who are getting paid to do what they do.”
Like a Southern politician (which, I kept thinking as we talked, she may very well become someday) she offered a homespun analogy to explain why Internet media-makers had a vitality that their offline counterparts didn’t. “You know, down South we’re really into football. And like they say: once you go to the pros, people don’t have the passion that they had in college.” She was so sweet about it, I didn’t even (as a self-declared professional journalist) take offense at it. What did offend me was my suspicion that her entry was going to wipe the field with mine.
This fear was confirmed on August 4, by the end of which I was in seventh place to her sixth. Even worse, the competition also saw its first case of bona fide contagion, which left both of our entries reeling far below. A short video lampooning the Bush administration’s anti-marijuana policy—“Get Off the Pot, George”—began to move, and kept going over the next few days:
FIG. 3-3: AN EARLY LEADER EMERGES
By August 7, “Get Off the Pot” had won more than twice as many viewers as the nearest competitor, and nearly ten times my own. In my journalistic capacity, I called Jeff Meyers, the creator of “Get Off the Pot,” and found a man rather pleased with himself.
“I never expected to be in first place, and so I’m not complaining,” he said. Jeff was sixty and lived in Southern California, where for years he had worked a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times. In the late 1990s, he began suffering from arm and wrist pain—brought on, he said, by “the hunt-and-peck method of typing”—which led him to a political cause.
“I would go home at lunchtime and get high,” he recalled. Not only could he then work through the pain, but he suddenly had all this energy—“I didn’t get tired in the afternoon. So I became a real medical marijuana advocate.” He took a buyout to retire from the Times in 1996, and a few years later codirected, with a fellow marijuana activist who made TV commercials, a pro-pot documentary entitled Emperor of Hemp. “Get Off the Pot” was in part an advertisement for the film, and when I asked him which goal was driving him—political change or product promotion—his answer seemed as noble as one could possibly expect.
“I wanted to get the political message out there, and inform people of the facts as I see them. My main goal was definitely to get the word out there. But did I think I might sell a few DVDs out of it? Maybe.”
Have you sold any? I asked.
No, he said.
The spread of his Festival entry, though, did seem