And Then There's This by Bill Wasik

The Moment: You're bored by everything

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Jun 10, 2009

by Bill Wasik

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You might have seen Bill Wasik's byline in Harper's, where he's a senior editor. Or maybe you don't recognize his name but remember one of his Web projects: a satirical one-off called The Right-Wing New York Times, the short-lived buzzkill blog Stop Peter Bjorn and John, or the political-smear repository OppoDepo. But, as his publisher has realized, Wasik's most notable as the guy behind 2003's flash-mob craze.

In And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Wasik connects the dots between the overstimulation that we perceive as boredom and our Internet-driven culture's short attention span. He covers multitasking and memes, compulsive clicking and corporate co-optation of viral ads, and the sped-up news cycle that turns nonentities into microcelebrities and nanostories. (How's Jon and Kate Gosselin's marriage today?) And he makes keen points about what our tastemakers' relentless appetite for the next big thing means for artists and creators as their efforts are disseminated out of context and with more emphasis on novelty than on talent or importance. Witness the backlash that starts almost as soon as a band's been discovered. (Of one indie-rock group's debut album, Wasik quotes a DJ saying, "This is a great movie — I hope there's not a sequel.")

Unfortunately, Wasik's projects are more engaging than his prose, and like a link-heavy blog, the connections he makes are often more illuminating than his observations, which are largely self-evident to anyone who has one foot in the world and the other on the Web. As short as it is, the book can be kind of a slog. If The Right-Wing New York Times were the perfect length for checking out while your co-workers took a smoke break, And Then There's This works best when your network connection's going to be down all day.

Viking, 208 pp., $25.95, June 11

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