Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper's magazine, has been conducting social science experiments on the side for several years now. He's best known for creating "flash mobs," wherein a large number of participants follow emailed instructions to converge on a designated public spot for a few minutes of inexplicable mayhem. Here Wasik answers quesions about his entertaining new book which describes his experiments and sheds light on how ideas spread in our viral culture.
How did you feel about viral culture before you masterminded the Flash Mobs and your other independent research experiments? Were you skeptical or maybe even a little disdainful of it, or were you just interested in learning more about it? Are you still just as interested in fleeting "nanostories" as the rest of us, or do you resist?
I felt the same way about it then that I do now: I viscerally love it, and am drawn to the thrill of it, even though I also see how hollow it can be. In a lot of ways, the flash mob was a metaphor for how I felt about viral culture. You try to get to the center of things, to the place where everyone else is, to the middle of the mob. But the closer you get, the better you understand that there's nothing at the middle-the mob is just about itself. (Not coincidentally, that's also the way I feel about New York City, where I live.)
And yes, I still love nanostories and find them irresistible.
Your critique of The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, et. al. is very interesting - that social scientists want so badly to define rules for behavior, to the point where we all lose sight of the content of the ideas or behaviors they are teaching us how to spread. What are one or two key points that you hope social scientists take away from your book?
My critique of The Tipping Point and Freakonomics isn't so much about social scientists themselves, but about the ways that popular journalism uses social science. We've created this giant industry of-pardon the expression-social-science porn, where readers are led to believe that psychologists, neuroscientists, and (worst of all) economists have magically unlocked the hidden mysteries of life, of happiness, of human behavior, etc. As if the grand issues that have animated human history and literature for thousands of years can finally be dispatched with a spreadsheet and a couple of brain scans. In my experience, the scientists themselves tend to be a little more modest about their results than that, and a little more humble before the persistent mysteries of mankind.
What do you hope non-scientists will take away from the book?
I hope that people will see all the noise and distraction around them for what it is. And I hope that people will reflect on the role that novelty plays in their own lives. Because the culture will keep supplying you with novelty, if that's what you crave-new celebrities, new bands, new technologies, new ways of thinking about the world. But underneath all that, there are big problems and big forces that shape our own personal lives and also the world around us. I'd like to convince people to shut out some of the former in order to focus more on the latter.
Do you think that in our viral culture, there is still truth to the adage, "cream rises to the top"? Should writers, for example, continue honing their craft and deepening their ideas or should they just pay [viral marketing expert] Jonah Peretti to promote them? Will you be using your hard-won knowledge of how viral stories spread to promote your book?
One misimpression people might get from my book is that I think succeeding in viral culture is easy. To the contrary, it requires being very talented and very disciplined. But the question is, talented at what, and disciplined how? You have to be talented at coming up ideas (or writing, or videos, or songs, etc.) with instant appeal-where just seeing the first few seconds, or even just the title, immediately gets people to take notice; otherwise, they'll have clicked along to the next thing. By the same token, you have to be disciplined about coming up with lots of ideas quickly (since not all of them will succeed), generating lots of content, whether it's for your blog, your Twitter, your YouTube channel, etc.; and you also have to be disciplined about marketing, about spreading your ideas to people you know.
Unfortunately, some of our more conventional ways of measuring worth-honing your craft, as you put it-don't have nearly as much currency in this climate. That isn't to say there's no longer any audience that appreciates craft. But between the one long well-crafted piece of writing and the barrage of short, immediately appealing and digestible notes, the latter will tend to get far more attention and acclaim. Over time, that's creating a feedback loop where one set of skills is elevated while the other atrophies.
I was a little surprised at how the Politico journalists you spoke to seemed to have no qualms about always going with the "most-emailed" stories. They argue that those stories are also the most substantive and interesting (i.e., they don't come out of pre-planned, information-less press conferences.) But generally aren't "most emailed" stories also the most scandalous ones? Did you walk away from those interviews feeling down about the future of our democracy?
I was surprised too, but I can also see where they're coming from. This idea of a news "conversation" is so seductive-newspapers have been in decline for decades, and so editors are so inspired to see the rise of this online readership that does genuinely engage with news. With politics in particular, we've seen the rise of a new class of politics junkie, who wants to know about (and then opine about) any development in the world of politics that seems like grist for argument. So that often does include genuinely substantive stories, especially where there's some new piece of reporting that can be used in the ideological struggle. But of course, it also includes a host of "gotcha" stories, little scandals, etc.
If I walked away from those interviews (and my politics reporting more generally) feeling down about the future of democracy, it wasn't so much because of the scandal stories as it was because of (again) this insatiable thirst for novelty that everyone displays. All this cable-news and talk-radio airtime, all these politics websites, all these newspaper columns-it all has to get filled with something "new," all the time. And since there isn't enough real important news to fill it, it gets filled with non-news and argument, which in turn starts to seem like the substance of public policy, rather than a distraction from it.
Your experiments -- or at least your descriptions of them-- are very amusing. Which was your favorite and why?
Well, the flash mob is still the most fun thing I've ever done, and I could never have written this book if I hadn't experienced the power of that-the way a completely tiny and simple and self-mocking idea could fan out through the Internet to become a worldwide sensation. As much as I meant the mob as a social experiment, as a joke, at a certain point it took off far beyond what I ever could have imagined, and suddenly, like everyone else, I was on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what it was all about: the joke was on me.
