And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [44]
In the left-wing political echo chamber, one significant date loomed during the month of August that year: August 8, when Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman was set to face his antiwar opponent, Ned Lamont, in the state’s Democratic primary. The moderate Lieberman was, and remains today, the greatest symbol of the internecine fight over the direction of the Democratic Party, an ongoing argument about how confrontational in tone, if perhaps not in actual policy prescriptions, the party’s leaders should be against their Republican opponents. Heading into the Contagious Festival that month I was well aware that August 8 lurked as a, or perhaps the, crucial inflection point in the competition: a moment when a truly on-the-news entry could appear and overwhelm all opponents just on the basis of its timeliness. This had happened before, during the Festival’s first month, when—just as an apolitical entry was poised to walk away with the contest—the vice president of the United States suddenly, and with no advance warning, went on a hunting trip and shot another man in the face. Progressives erupted in a unanimous howl of pleasure, muffled at first as mock indignation but then (once it was clear that the shootee would survive) yawped with untrammeled glee. Feverishly did the Internet elves set to work, and within days the Contagious Festival had been entirely transformed. One brand-new entry, “Quail Hunting with Dick Cheney,” offered a Flash-animated game in which players tried to have a cartoon Cheney shoot a quail; in all cases he would miss the quarry and hit one of his hunting party instead. Another was Paul Hipp’s “Cheney Plays Folsom Prison,” a parody of the Johnny Cash song in which the narrator “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Both of these entries quickly swamped the totals of the previous leaders, attracting more than a hundred thousand visitors each. It was inevitable that August would see some Lieberman entries emerge, and in some ways this was dangerous precisely for its being predictable. That is, wise meme-makers knew that the conversation would be dominated by Lieberman for those weeks in August, because the date had been set in advance.
The August 8 date represented what the old media call a peg, and indeed awareness of pegs is just one example of the democratization of the media mind. Media people see the world through a filter of pegs, in part because of practical considerations: all stories take time to research, to write, to edit, to be produced or printed, and to be distributed. So both reporter and editor are forced to do mental math, asking themselves not, Is the story interesting now?, but rather, Will the story still be interesting after the researching, writing, editing, and printing have all run their course? The solution is the use of pegs. If one knows that a book by an author is to be released in a certain month, then one can prepare a major profile of that author for that same month. If one knows, for example, that a documentary featuring Al Gore is to emerge in a certain week, then one can, as New York Magazine cannily did, produce a cover package touting the “Al Gore boomlet” about a possible 2008 presidential run on his part. (Of course, he never showed any intention of running.)
The Lieberman primary was the perfect peg, and, as I would soon discover, one Festival entrant had in fact played it to the hilt. Sometime in the early hours of August 8 it arrived: “Joe & Dub’s Fabulous Wedding,” a Flash-animated fantasia in which Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush are wed in an elaborate ceremony, with various Republican heavies serving as attendants. It was a great viral idea not only for its peg, but for the simplicity and immediacy of its conception: just a phrase in an e-mail accompanying the link—e.g., “Bush and Lieberman get gay-married!”—would suffice to make a receptive recipient click. And sure enough, by the following day the site had pulled away to a clear lead:
FIG. 3-5: NEW LEADER PULLS AWAY
“Joe & Dub’s Fabulous Wedding” was created by Gary Lee Stewart, a fiftysomething