And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [63]
This, indeed, was how the campaign had gone for its entire two-year run. New story followed on new story, each consuming attention for a day or two and then receding into the distance. A few of these stories touched on actual, if trivial, questions of policy (would Barack Obama meet with the leaders of rogue states? does Ron Paul actually think the United States deserved 9/11?) but the vast majority involved irrelevant foibles (John Edwards’s $400 haircut), slender second-order connections (Obama’s dinner parties with former Weather Underground members), past peccadilloes (Fred Thompson’s lobbying career), or campaign-trail gaffes (McCain saying the Iraq war had “wasted” the lives of U.S. troops). There were literally hundreds of these tiny, irrelevant narratives, stretching out over seemingly endless months. Each nanostory followed the same pattern observable in the case of Seamus Romney—the quick, breathless uptake and a slightly slower but inexorable decline into oblivion:
FIG. 5-1—“SEAMUS ROMNEY”
The ephemerality of our political narratives is nothing new, of course. The historian Daniel Boorstin, in his masterful 1961 book The Image, explored the corrosive effects of the “extravagant expectations” that TV-besotted Americans held for the world around them. Boorstin bemoaned the rise of what he called “pseudo-events,” by which he meant so-called news that in fact “is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it.” The pseudo-event ne plus ultra is the staged PR happening—the ribbon-cutting, the press conference, the gladhand at the New Hampshire diner. But Boorstin’s broader meaning of the term was any “news” created purely to be news, from a televised debate to a government leak to a premeditated revelation in an interview.
The realm of the nanostory is a somewhat different country, founded on the revolutionary promise of our “new media”: that everyone, paid and amateur alike, can be his or her own pundit. As the mass conversation has begun to move onto the Internet, where amateurs are allowed to shape it, we are beginning to learn just what happens when the narrators exponentially multiply. When our pundits are numbered not in the hundreds but in the hundreds of thousands, all of them looking not merely to parrot stories as they hear them but rather to herald new twists and turns themselves, then by necessity there are more twists, more turns, more stories told in ever shorter form.
THE MICROTREND AND THE NANOSTORY
At the peak of the Democratic primary contest, Mark Penn, pollster and chief strategist to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, took time from the trail to make a public appearance at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan. He had come to promote his book Microtrends, which isolated seventy-five growing demographic groups that, he argued, “are forging the shape of America and the world.” In the mid-1990s, while working on Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign, Penn had coined the phrase “soccer moms” to describe the cohort he predicted would decide that election; but now, he told his audience, “the era of big trends is over.” For the book, he and his researchers had combed through voluminous polling data to pull out not one but scores of tiny demographic shifts. Penn’s microtrends ranged from the genuinely insightful (militant illegal immigrants, women in physical blue-collar jobs) to the commonsensical (long-distance commuters, interracial families) to the frankly dubious (“shy millionaires,” “aspiring snipers,” and “pro-Semites”; concerning this last group, Penn writes, “Today in America, Jew-loving is a bit of a craze. Jews are in demand everywhere”).
At the Strand, Penn took pains to stress that Microtrends was not just about politics, but given who he was, and when he was speaking, discussion naturally turned to the implications of his ideas for the current campaign. In the rise of Barack Obama, Penn saw at work the malign influence of one of his book’s microtrends, a group he called “impressionable elites”: upper-middle-class Americans