And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [77]
By the end, Ashong is in total command, as he bids to convert his (now genuinely impressed) interviewer to Obama’s cause. When the questioner doubts how much a president can really do (“Congress makes the laws,” he points out), Ashong moves in for the sale.
“I’m so glad you asked that,” he says. “That’s the key thing. And this is why I support Obama over Clinton. I feel like Clinton is too partisan. In order to make this happen, you’ve got to have [leaders] who are willing to pursue the national interest instead of just their party’s interest.”
The video had a clear metaphorical resonance, one that explains, I think, the overwhelming appeal it had for the one million people who would view it on YouTube in the weeks after its release. To Obama’s nervous fans, Ashong embodied a sort of stand-in for the candidate himself, and through his response under pressure he salved some of our fears about Obama. Here was a young, charismatic supporter who proved himself, against all prejudices and fears, a man of almost unbelievable substance, and succeeded—as we hoped Obama would—in not only countering the worst of what an enemy threw at him but making that enemy, implausibly, a friend. The video was a five-minute daydream of how the general-election campaign (and an Obama administration) would go.
There was another metaphor that struck me, though: I could not help but think about the video as an allegory for the Internet-era conversation as a whole, for how it might clamber up out of the murk somewhat, past the petty meme warfare, past the empty enthusiasms for microcelebrity, and past, even, the urge to manufacture meaningless nanostories. Derrick Ashong had not rushed to play pundit but was instead a patient advocate, waiting to hear out his opposition before launching a counterattack. He had immersed himself in facts but kept his mind open about their interpretation. His goal was a pragmatic one: he deployed both his charm and his arguments not to stir up sensation but to change a mind and win a vote. The question is whether enough of us will care to follow his example.
CONCLUSION
NOTES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Early in the general election, Obama’s campaign unveiled a novel strategic weapon in its war against nanostories. Called FightTheSmears .com, it was a website that gathered together all the most scurrilous, contagious rumors about the candidate and supplied specific rebuttals to each. That Michelle Obama had said “whitey” at a public event; that Barack’s birth certificate had gone missing, or was a forgery; that he was actually a Muslim; that he had refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance—all these false statements, which had spread for months through chain e-mails and right-wing websites, were aired and refuted on the campaign’s new site. It is unclear how successful this effort actually was, of course, considering how much these and other smears dogged Obama up until Election Day.8 But the strategic appeal of Fight the Smears was undeniable. The site was the equivalent of a Google bomb, in that its debunkings soon showed up in the top results for any search (e.g., obama muslim) made by any skeptical voter. And for dealing with the press—which tends to fuel nanostories by asking the candidates for comment, and then printing their denials as news, further propagating the story—the site was a master stroke, in that it allowed Obama and his handlers to respond to rumors without doing so on air. Check the website, they could tell reporters, right before changing the subject.
Personally, I could not regard FightTheSmears.com as anything other than a shameless violation of my intellectual property. For what was the site if not OppoDepot, except distilled down to a single candidate and turned on its head? The reversal made perfect sense, really, once I saw the principle at work. To see all these nanostories lumped together, as nanostories, somehow defused them, made them more mundane. Alongside