And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [58]
Since The Tipping Point, more books have become bestsellers on the promise of revealing hidden patterns and systems undergirding everyday life; most notable among them is Freakonomics, in which the University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt, with the aid of his coauthor Stephen J. Dubner, tours through the counterintuitive conclusions he has reached about many different questions—from real estate to school cheating to baby names—through the judicious use of statistical analysis. Underlying the success of The Tipping Point and its literary progeny is, I would argue, the advent of a new and enthusiastically social-scientific way of engaging with culture. Call it the age of the model: our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself. We have lived with mass culture long enough, understand it well enough, to see that it is formulaic and constructed, to know that it plays upon us systematically. And so we see the real vigorish is in learning not about what is cool than about how cool works: we want to understand the process, abstract it out to steps and charts. What Gladwell, Levitt, et al. are selling us is the demystification of ourselves. And in a sunny inversion, these books invoke notions of mystery, of discovery, of intrigue, to describe the pinning of us to the specimen paper. Here, from Freakonomics, is Steven Levitt’s “underlying belief”:
that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.
Gladwell, in a similar vein:
[T]he Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.
These books are able to sell manipulation as magical because they hold out to readers the hope of employing these models in their own lives—The Tipping Point, for example, promises to show readers how “to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of [their] own,” while the goal of Freakonomics is vaguer but no less ambitious: “You might [after finishing the book] become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite what they seem; perhaps you will seek out some trove of data and sift through it, balancing your intelligence and your intuition to arrive at a glimmering new idea.” Readers are supposed to fancy themselves epidemiological entrepreneurs, or actuarial adventurers: Raiders of the Lost Spreadsheet.
For decades, cultural critics have warned against a future where giant, centralized organizations (the government, or huge corporations) learn how to ply the predictability of humankind to create an effectively totalitarian society: it is such fears that have given rise to the popular (indeed, overused) adjective “Orwellian,” after George Orwell, the author of 1984. In this decade’s viral culture, by contrast, we find ourselves in a similar and yet entirely different situation, where individual consumers are learning and refining the tricks of manipulation for themselves—where they serve as secret agents inside their own crowds, totaling up mentions and page views, sifting through their troves of data in a scurrilous