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By Root 785 0

of data, combined with the ability to assume anonymity or pseudonymity—i.e., to act without one’s identity influencing the results, which is another crucial prerequisite of science—is establishing the Internet as an unprecedented medium for cultural experimentation. As more and more Americans become aware of the patterns and forces that shape culture, they begin to develop their own hypotheses about what will spread and what won’t. Online, with minimal cost or risk, they can test these theories, tweaking different versions of their would-be viral projects and monitoring the results, which in turn feed back into how future projects are made. In viral culture, we are all driven by the ratings, the numbers, the Internet equivalent of the box-office gross.

It is with trembling anticipation that I welcome our new generation of cultural scientists, to whom I dedicate this book and for whom I hope it might serve as both primer and cautionary tale. In its pages I survey the various precincts of viral culture, from politics and literature to marketing and music, in locales throughout the virtual world (blogs, chat rooms, MySpace, YouTube) and the real one (New York, Washington, Minneapolis, Santa Monica). In each chapter, I also detail the results of one of my own admittedly modest experiments in viral culture. But before those nanostories can be told, I need to return to that e-mail of May 27, 2003, and reveal what it portended for Claire’s Accessories, and for me.

1.

MY CROWD

EXPERIMENT: THE MOB PROJECT

BOREDOM

I started the Mob Project because I was bored, I wrote above, and perhaps that explanation seems simple enough. But before we proceed to the rise and fall of my peculiar social experiment, I think that boredom is worth interrogating in some detail. The first recorded use of the term, per the OED, did not take place until 1852, in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, chapter 12. It is deployed by way of describing Lady Dedlock, a woman with whose habits of mind I often find myself in sympathy:

Concert, assembly, opera, theatre, drive, nothing is new to my Lady, under the worn-out heavens. Only last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay—. . . encompassing Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard, card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate—only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in spirits.

Psychologists have been trying to elucidate the nature of boredom since at least Sigmund Freud, who identified a “lassitude” in young women that he attributed to penis envy. In 1951, Otto Fenichel described boredom as a state where the “drive-tension” is present but the “drive-aim” is absent, a state of mind that he said could be “schematically formulated” in this enigmatic but undeniably evocative way: “I am excited. If I allow this excitation to continue I shall get anxious. Therefore I tell myself, I am not at all excited, I don’t want to do anything. Simultaneously, however, I feel I do want to do something; but I have forgotten my original goal and do not know what I want to do. The external world must do something to relieve me of my tension without making me anxious.”

In the 1970s, researchers developed various tests designed, in part, to assess the boredom-plagued, from the Imaginal Processes Inventory (Singer and Antrobus, 1970) to the Sensation Seeking Scale (Zuckerman, Eysenck & Eysenck, 1978). But it was not until 1986, with the unveiling of the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), that the propensity toward boredom in the individual could be comprehensively measured and reckoned with. The test was created by Richard Farmer and Norman Sundberg, both of the University of Oregon, and it has allowed researchers in the two decades since to tally up boredom’s grim wages. The boredom-prone, we have discovered, display higher rates of procrastination, inattention, narcissism, poor work performance, and “solitary sexual behaviors” including both onanism