An entertaining and eye-opening look into the new frontier of idea making.
Breaking news, fresh gossip, tiny scandals, trumped up crises— every day we are distracted by a culture that rings our doorbell and then runs away. Stories spread wildly and die out in mere days, quickly replaced by more stories with ever shorter shelflives. How we participate in these stories has changed, too. No longer do we sit on the sidelines waiting for monolithic media giants to tell us what's happening. Anyone on a computer in his or her local Starbucks can spread a story almost as easily as The New York Times, CNN, or People—in fact blogs are now often the source for journalists working in big media.
And Then There's This is Bill Wasik's journey along the unexplored frontier of our churning and rambunctious viral culture. Covering this world—watching new bands promote themselves at South by Southwest; reporting on a Web site contest while secretly entering it; and creating a site that aggregates all blog smears against the presidential primary candidates—he ends up conducting six experiments himself. He doesn't always get the results he expected, but along the way he meets a cast of characters who are capable of getting their information into our brains—and they're not who you think.
And Then There's This reveals how our culture is now created from the ground up. Wasik proves that any one of us can cause a small ripple that can turn into a tsunami. Anyone involved in journalism, business, or information technology—and those who want to be—must read this book. And for the rest, Wasik's tour is great, eye-opening fun.
'Bill Wasik is a guerrilla mischief-maker, a mad scientist of the meme. Irreverence is not a bad starting point for making sense of the web, and Wasik takes full advantage, pushing buttons and pulling puppet strings. The combination of his restless mind and the explosive new medium yields insights that are provocative and, often, hilarious.'-Ted Conover, author of Newjack
'What if the revolution was what Bill Wasik calls a 'nanostory'? It would begin with a flash mob disrupting business as usual and then die the following day, at a Ford Motor Company 'flash concert' echoing through Boston's New Brutalist downtown. And Then There's This is a deeply troubling book. Fortunately, it's also the wittiest; an ingenious and, in the end, hopeful response to the sound and the fury of our twittering times.'–Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Family and Killing The Buddha
'This is an exceptionally smart, witty, subtle, enlightening book about our daffy, discombobulating cultural moment. Bill Wasik plunges headlong into the 21st century media funhouse, yet manages to keep his moral compass in good working order. Bravo.'-Kurt Andersen, author of Heyday and host of NPR's Studio 360
'This book will last far longer than its allocated fifteen minutes of fame. It's well-researched, funny, irreverent and addictive. Useful, too. One of those rare books that dissects a cultural phenomenon in a way that resonates.'-Seth Godin, author of Tribes
'I was that guy who got Bill Wasik's first email inviting me to a flash mob, but I was too lazy to put on pants and go. It was a mistake. Bill understands not just how viral culture spreads ideas and scams and energy-drink-purchasing opportunities: it's also a completely new way to tell--and experience--stories.'-John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
'As to the engenderings of the new and newest media -- when to YouTube and how to viral, where the microtrend begins and why the nanostory ends -- I know of no more reliably informed source than Bill Wasik's AND THEN THERE'S THIS. An epistemological wonder to behold.'-Lewis H. Lapham
