New book on viral culture: And Then There's This

Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

My friend Bill Wasik has a book out now that should appeal to Boing Boing types, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. Several years ago, Wasik started the Mob Project, which launched flash mobs as an insanely popular fad in New York, then globally. We interviewed him in Stay Free! about it a while back.

Wasik's book looks at how ideas spread online through social networks and other media channels. In each chapter, Wasik, who is an editor at Harper's magazine, conducts some sort of prank to explore the ways single messages can evolve and have massive ripple effects. I especially dug his observations on how the internet and mp3 swapping have affected indie rock (since, as a clueless middle-ager, I haven't kept up): with bands and their careers now playing a much smaller role than individual songs and musicians.

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6 Comments

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amyconnor | July 29, 2009 6:40 AM | Reply

Wasik is a smart guy. I know this book - witty and very enlightening.

biffpow | July 29, 2009 6:58 AM | Reply

Ok, I think we need to make it a law: no more using the word "viral" on the interwebs, people.

IWood | July 29, 2009 7:33 AM | Reply

You're not making any sense. Can you rephrase that idea as a caption and put it on a funny picture?

Doomstalk | July 29, 2009 7:35 AM | Reply

Biffpow: What's wrong with it? It's a fairly apt metaphor.

RedShirt77 | July 29, 2009 7:58 AM | Reply

I could tweet about this, or i could ignore it and it will be off the BB front page in a day and forgotten.

Doomstalk | July 29, 2009 8:18 AM | Reply

I do find it ironic while some of them people in the audience whine about a pernicious obsession with currency, you can hear someone in the background getting messages on their iPhone.