And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [48]
Contemplating the viral successes of amateur memetic engineers, one could see very vividly the revolution in media that Internet boosters believe to be taking place. Here were individuals casting off their individual (sub)cultural blinders in order to analyze, unsentimentally, what spreads online and how. Instead of remaining passive members of a mass-media audience, they were burrowing inside the media machine, divining the rules behind the behavior of that audience and, ultimately, themselves as media-consuming individuals. As in a flash mob, the participants had become their own show. They were wresting down the idols of the corporate cultural overlords, so as to install a glorious new order run by the many, not the few: a thousand points of buzz.
But if a subculture of meme-makers is emerging, the mentality on which it is converging is a dispiritingly familiar one: it is the mind-set of the marketer, drunk on numbers, single-mindedly obsessed with gathering attention, engineering sudden spikes. Rather than destroying the idols of mass culture, we are merely melting them down to forge a million pocket-sized replicas. Our mental transformation mirrors the shift in the corporation when, through the poll and the focus group and market research during the twentieth century, it made its crucial quantitative turn. In the twenty-first century, in the thrall of the media mind, ordinary Americans are learning how to focus-group-test themselves.
This canny awareness does create a challenge for corporations, though not at all the revolutionary threat that our apostles of people power would like to believe. As consumers have become conscious of just how they are induced to buy, companies have attempted to refine (and in some cases rethink) their own tricks of mass culture to take this awareness into account. One obvious gambit along these lines has been the snarky meta-irony of so much contemporary advertising, which unctuously winks at its own manipulative power. But more recently, in their turn to so-called viral and word-of-mouth marketing, corporations are attempting to enlist consumers as unpaid salespeople of sorts, responsible for the creation and propagation of the marketing message. Where advertising and focus groups and direct marketing, as experiments, hid the science from the subjects—leaving the consumer on the opaque side of the one-way mirror—these new word-of-mouth methods of marketing are exploring the idea that consumers can be confederates: secret agents for the corporate cause.
It is this phenomenon, its promise and its perils, that we explore in chapter 4.
4.
AGENT ZERO
EXPERIMENT:
BILL SHILLER
DESPERATION
More than three years after flash mobs were a nanostory, they became a viral marketing campaign. I first read about it in a Financial Times column, e-mailed to me by a friend. A “series of flash mobbing events,” the FT reported, was “being staged by Ford Motor with Sony Pictures Digital to promote the launch of the new Ford Fusion car.” The events were called “Fusion Flash Concerts.” Weren’t you always concerned about this? my friend had written in the subject heading. In fact, I had never been concerned about it but rather had expected and even welcomed it, since appropriation of the flash mob by the nation’s large conglomerates would, I reasoned, be its final (and fatal) phase. Up to this point, the only sign of pilferage had been a 2004 episode of CSI: Miami, the nation