Viral culture shock

To understand the complex, important message of Bill Wasik’s book, it helps to reflect upon Seamus, the late Irish setter of Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and White House aspirant.

In June 2007, The Boston Globe published a series about Romney the presidential candidate. The series included an anecdote about the Romney family’s 1983 automobile journey from Boston to a Canadian vacation spot. Seamus made the journey inside a dog carrier attached to the roof of the station wagon. The dog became ill, but Romney continued the transport arrangement after attending to Seamus’s discomfort as best he could.

Wasik, an editor at Harper’s magazine, explains how a passing reference to Seamus embedded in the fourth part of a seven-part newspaper series rebounded around the nation 16 months before the presidential election to damage Romney’s candidacy, “fanned by a wide network of political bloggers.’’

The blog Divine Democrat published the headline: “Mitt Romney - Compassionate Conservative? Ask Seamus.’’ The blog Wonkette chimed in: “Mitt Romney will be a great Commander-In-Chief of Abu Ghraib,’’ equating torture of alleged international terrorists with apparent cruelty to a dog. Commenters inclined toward parody created the blog Dogs Against Romney, “sporting pictures of scared pups and their fervent testimonials.’’

Obviously, the speedy reach of the Internet punished Romney’s presidential campaign. But Wasik draws two other, less obvious, lessons from the Seamus affair. One is its “forgetability, how indistinguishable it seems in retrospect from the idiots’ parade of meaningless stories that came to define the campaign.’’ The other is the consequence of the messy democracy characterizing the viral culture. Wasik explains, “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.’’

Wasik himself is more than just another commentator about digital culture. He distinguishes himself in two ways in his book: as a big thinker using language that less brilliant thinkers can easily grasp, and as a provocateur running experiments to test his hypotheses.

The accessibility of Wasik’s big-idea book is reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestsellers “The Tipping Point’’ and “Blink.’’ (Not incidentally, Wasik comments on Gladwell, trying to parse why the attempts in his books to reveal “hidden patterns and systems undergirding everyday life’’ have resonated so enduringly.)

Comparing Wasik and Gladwell seems logical to me. But for readers who find Gladwell’s theories fascinating yet facile, it seems important to note that Wasik’s experiments give “And Then There’s This’’ a heft missing from “The Tipping Point’’ and “Blink.’’ One of the experiments received widespread attention when Wasik published the results in Harper’s magazine, his employer. His use of the Internet to create what came to be known as “flash mobs’’ proved - at least to me - that the digital culture can manipulate the innate herd instinct of humans in ways both beneficial and destructive.

The other online experiments, revealed chapter by chapter in Wasik’s book, involve trying to diminish the popularity of a music group; creating a Web site meant to draw as many visitors as possible, despite its false content; posing as a consumer of material goods to see how far corporations producing those products would go to seduce buyers online; and devising a Web site spreading untrue information about political candidates.

Fortunately for readers mostly unfamiliar with viral culture, Wasik patiently explains how it is derivative of what came before. Three of viral culture’s key attributes are simply extreme versions of television culture - speed (conferring success, or at least fame, rapidly); shamelessness (success defined entirely by attention, whether positive or negative); and duration (the ephemeral nature of success, when the next big thing comes along).

It is the fourth attribute that forms the backbone of Wasik’s book, an attribute he labels “sophistication.’’ Wasik notes that “where TV success was a passive thing, success in viral culture is interactive, born of mass participation, defined by an awareness of the conditions of its creation. Viral culture is built, that is, upon what one might call the media mind.’’

What remains to be seen as 2009 becomes 2010 and beyond is whether individuals creating and consuming information dizzyingly available online will become better informed or informed primarily by rumor meant to inflame instead of enlighten.

Wasik seems cautiously optimistic that the viral culture can be harnessed to create a more just society. That will require, however, distinguishing between dependable and undependable information. It will mean ignoring the online or combating the political smears, meaningless fads and momentary celebrities in favor of greatness in art and reason in politics. “We must learn to neuter our nanostories, or at least to cut off their food supply,’’ Wasik says.

Steve Weinberg is the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently “Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.’’