Two pages I chose out of the text, “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project” focused mainly on the idea of the Bandwagon Effect. The Bandwagon Effect is defined as a large mass of people conforming to each other, doing the same thing, behaving in the same way despite what they personally believe. Within the crowd experiment, it became a Bandwagon itself even if that was what the Mob Project was supposed to mock and make fun of. There are real-life applications to the Bandwagon Effect as well. The text mentions Google and Amazon, two technological powerhouses that most everyone has heard of. These two sources use the knowledge of the Bandwagon Effect to their advantage in order to boost their sales (in Amazon’s case) and stock sales (in both of their cases). They have handy “most bought lists” and “most popular” pages that in essence make it so that everyone is actually looking at the same product. They allow the people to give their own opinion and “rate” the product which makes potential buyers more comfortable with the deal. They even go as far as deleting the “bad comments,” the ones that gave a negative review, in order to save face. This brings in a lot of questions about how society controls us and if we really have as much free will as we think.
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Because of the internet, Bill Wasik was able to orchestrate, or organize, this movement of sorts out of regular, ordinary people. Wasik had access to everything he needed right in front of him and because that was so, he was able to “extend” himself into the lives of others. He would not have ever had contact with all of the people he ended up emailing had he not started the “Mob Experiment” and because of the internet, all of this was possible in the first place. The internet has connected everyone (or at least most people in the world) in some way. The internet has shaped the course of where our society is headed. Part of the downside to this is also what is so amazing about the internet. Because we are all connected, we all have see the same shared ideas, events, and it even shapes our opinions and what we decide to place more value on. When Wasik talks about the Bandwagon Effect he talks about how even when we go onto a common search engine like Google, the search results are catered to what has been popularized. Searching “giraffe” will bring up the most popular pages and pictures of said animal. It is the same thing with online shopping sites: There will always be a “most-bought” or “items customers also looked at” lists because that is how they get more sales. This is in essence the Bandwagon Effect.
I think that Wasik means to write with purpose in the sense that he wishes to explain his experiment. The experiment (at first) really had no purpose sense it was done out of boredom as he explained. Because of this, there seems to be an almost accidental purpose, which is completely fine. I believe his purpose was to explain how people act when put in uncommon or odd situations. When one has several hundred people all acting in unison in broad daylight, and there are others around who have no clue what is happening, it could seem very bizarre. Just imagine, one day someone is walking along a popular street in downtown New York City, then all of a sudden everyone around stops and starts screaming at the top of their lungs. Personally, I would be close to terrified! Wasik has a different take on it though. He looks at it from the “insider” point of view. Wasik says it’s more about the fact that the participators only use the rest of society and the world as a back drop for their modern interpretation of art. Because this was very thoroughly explained in the essay, I think in a way Wasik did pursue and found meaning and purpose in his project which is reflected in the essay.
