Viral culture shock

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.