In his new book, “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture,” Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s, takes the reader on a tour of viral culture—the combination of the Internet and popular enthusiasms that results in everything from the “macaca” moment to the Susan Boyle phenomenon to the overnight ubiquity of indie-rock bands favored by Pitchfork—and of the stories we create to invest them with meaning. Wasik organizes his chapters around a series of experiments that he conducts, each intended to go viral; the most famous of these was the so-called flash mob, in 2003. We caught up with Wasik to talk about the book.

One of the first points you make in the book is about boredom. Before you started the Mob Project, you explain, you were bored; you scored high on a test called the Boredom Proneness Scale, designed by researchers in 1982. Many of us would score high on this test; it includes such symptoms as being bad at waiting patiently and worrying about other matters while you work. How has boredom helped feed the creation of viral culture?

To me, it’s almost straight-up math: the more of us who are out there trying to create novelty, the more novelty that gets created. I write somewhat playfully about boredom as the spur for much of that creation, because in my mind it’s often boredom that’s the mother of invention. Sometimes we create because we have some large idea to express or some lofty ideal to promulgate, but just as often we create out of a vague desire just to make something new. One would think, with everything the Internet offers us, that we’d all feel we were already up to our eyeballs in novelty every day, and so our own contributions to the pile would be unnecessary. But of course that isn’t our response at all. The more manic conversation that’s out there, the more people want to join it. And the more people who join it, trying to add their own twists and turns, the more tiny narratives we create.

One feature of the viral age, it seems, is a certain breathlessness about each new meme that becomes huge—every political anecdote, pop song, or YouTube video. Your experiments, on the other hand, were playful, often using the weight of the crowd’s enthusiasm against itself, or against the very idea of the next big thing. When you created the Stop Peter Bjorn and John site, which aimed to derail the careers of the whistling Swedish pop trio, people who posted comments thought it was in earnest, and supported or attacked it as such—or they thought that it was viral marketing by the band itself. Few, if any, seemed to consider the idea that it was all a joke.

Yes, and the book seems to be having the same problem at times. A few people have been asking why I take such a lofty and world-historical tone when writing about a topic as silly and ephemeral as Internet memes. Answer: because I think that juxtaposition is funny! It’s boring to write about kinetic things breathlessly; it’s harder, and weirder, and to my mind far more fun, to attempt to write about them magisterially. Also, in this case I think the tone is apt: the more I’ve reported on these phenomena, the more I’ve come to see serious culture and politics as being bound up in the same media dynamics as memes. So I really do believe there is a genuine problem underlying all the froth. A lot of this book consists of me carrying out online jokes and then explaining them in an overly intense, almost baroque fashion. It doesn’t sound like a winning formula! And maybe it isn’t. But I think it works because it parallels the wider discourse, where a giant social dysfunction is being created through millions of individual acts of entertainment.

Your chapter about viral marketing has your alter ego Bill Shiller, “the ideal viral consumer,” joining online communities for devotees of various grills, cars, sodas, and hair-care products and making a MySpace profile that friended only corporations. You also became something called a BzzAgent, which resulted in your bringing Ziploc bags to a barbecue and attempting to market them to your friends, then filing a report about it, which in turn gave you BzzPoints for your trouble. How long do you think corporations will try to sustain such efforts? Are most of them too silly to survive?

I do think it’s ridiculous the extent to which corporations today seem to imagine that they’ll create a “community” around their product. In some ways, it’s a reaction against the opposite criticism of “viral” marketing projects: that by making little ads designed to spread on their own, they’re casting consumers not as real people but as unwitting dupes in their marketing schemes. So now they set up “communities” with the idea that people can be people and have their say! But if it’s insulting to see the Suave hair-care user as a passive host to viral messages, it’s equally insulting to imagine that he or she will become an active “brand evangelist” for a shampoo. That’s because trying to game what people do with their personal conversations, online or offline, is inherently insulting. I expect that corporations will keep trying to do it, because we’ve reached such saturation with advertising that it’s hard to get consumers’ attention, especially since many of us have now learned to tune out ads entirely. Luckily, most of the online marketing doesn’t seem to be working either—but maybe they just haven’t gotten innovative enough. Maybe in the near future, all video-game characters will wear sandwich boards.

One of your more successful experiments was The Right-Wing New York Times, which managed to appeal to liberals and conservatives alike. Can you describe that briefly and talk about the role of “conversation” in viral phenomena?

In the book’s third chapter, I write about a competition—hosted every month for a year by the Huffington Post—where the simple goal was to create the entry that gets the most visitors. I cover it as a journalist, interviewing the various participants over the course of the month, but then I also surreptitiously enter the competition under a pseudonym. My entry was called The Right-Wing New York Times, and its premise was to show what looked just like a front page, but when you mouse over each story, it changes into a paranoid right-wing version of that story. Anyway, I tried purposely to put in jokes that wouldn’t just appeal to a liberal audience (even though that naturally was the HuffPo’s core audience) but also to a conservative audience, so it might cross over and get more traffic that way. This probably seems like an obvious point, but the ideas and content that go viral are the things where an especially large percentage of the population has a compelling reason to forward them around, and specific people they want to forward them to. If you think your liberal brother will want to see a video but your conservative uncle won’t, then that dynamic multiplied out over the whole Internet could cut your traffic in half. What spreads is exactly what prompts “conversation”—that’s the word I kept hearing, whether from people in the marketing world or in the politics world. It’s an incredibly seductive idea, this “conversation,” especially as it pertains to the media, because it whitewashes the process of simply capitulating to popular demand. Twenty years ago, if you told a newspaper editor that he or she should simply run the kinds of stories that will make people buy the paper, you might have been called crass, or worse. But today, if you tell the newspaper editor that he or she should run the stories that make readers “engage” with the newspaper in “conversation” over “social media”—well, then you’re called the V.P. of online development!

Where would you say, after all this, you rank on the Boredom Proneness Scale?

I’m the Pronest of them all.

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