A few days ago one of my friends on Facebook posted to her wall a list of books (see below) supposedly from a BBC article and noted that “The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?””
I usually check articles like this to make sure that they are what they are claimed to be but in this case, as it was only about books and it was just the basis for conversation, I waded in … interestingly, as it turned out, the “BBC list” is a fiction that somehow came to life derived from the BBC’s “The Big Read“, an April 2003 project to “search for the nation’s best-loved novel”.
The winner, it transpired, was “The Lord of the Rings” with the rest of the top 10 being:
2. “Pride and Prejudice”, Jane Austen
3. “His Dark Materials”, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Douglas Adams
5. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, JK Rowling
6. “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Harper Lee
7. “Winnie the Pooh”, AA Milne
8. “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, George Orwell
9. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, CS Lewis
10. “Jane Eyre”, Charlotte Brontë
On Facebook the circulation, commenting, and republishing of the false list in my circle of friends made a noticeable spike in activity and out of the exchanges I wound up with two new Facebook “friends”.
It’s interesting to consider the behavior of this almost viral meme … I say “almost” because it seems to have reappeared over many groups and over many years, each as separate, chained events, rather than doing the explode-into-popularity-then-fizzle arc which is more common for viral content. And in the passing along, the message has morphed in both its pitch (“the nation’s favorite book” to “you probably aren’t well-read”) as well as what books are in the list being changed.
What is so powerful about this meme is its apparent robustness. Even though it isn’t what it is claimed to be that doesn’t matter, it has no consequence other than being something that gets a social focus that engages people and so it has been carried on for the better part of seven years.
What’s really interesting is that this is the kind of engagement mechanism that marketers dream of. Imagine a list of top sodas or cars or makes of jeans getting this much visibility and discussion — the companies that sell the products on the list would have to be thrilled at the free exposure which is why many people are tracking memes and researching for clues as to why something like this goes viral.
A recent conversation with another friend got onto the topic of the ethics of this kind of engineering of content. My friend contended that this is manipulation of the worst kind because we’re now attempting to engage people through their hidden desires and biases (hidden to them, that is) and so we’re tugging on the strings of their psyches … no longer trying to “sell” them but rather trying to “playing” them through their biology to do as we wish.
I rather agree, there’s something truly creepy about the idea of being manipulated through direct appeals to our more primitive, non-logical minds. It’s one thing to have traditional advertising try to work on us using its normal hit-and-miss methods but when you can “engineer” people to respond, it would appear that you could be crossing an ethical line.
We all think that we are nowhere near to that kind of manipulation becoming a science but you’ve got to wonder how far off we are from being able to generate effective commercial viral content.
So, my questions to you: Where does it become unethical to engineer rather than persuade people into paying attention to your message?
Addendum: The Supposed “BBC Required Reading List”
1 “Pride and Prejudice” – Jane Austen
2 “The Lord of the Rings” – JRR Tolkien
3 “Jane Eyre” – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 “To Kill a Mockingbird” – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 “Wuthering Heights” – Emily Bronte
8 “Nineteen Eighty Four” – George Orwell
9 “His Dark Materials” – Philip Pullman
10 “Great Expectations” – Charles Dickens
11 “Little Women” – Louisa M Alcott
12 “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” – Thomas Hardy
13 “Catch 22” – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 “Rebecca” – Daphne Du Maurier
16 “The Hobbit” – JRR Tolkien
17 “Birdsong” – Sebastian Faulk
18 “Catcher in the Rye” – JD Salinger
19 “The Time Traveler’s Wife” – Audrey Niffenegger
20 “Middlemarch” – George Eliot
21 “Gone With The Wind” – Margaret Mitchell
22 “The Great Gatsby” – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 “War and Peace” – Leo Tolstoy
25 “The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – Douglas Adams
27 “Crime and Punishment” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 “Grapes of Wrath” – John Steinbeck
29 “Alice in Wonderland” – Lewis Carroll
30 “The Wind in the Willows” – Kenneth Grahame
31 “Anna Karenina” – Leo Tolstoy
32 “David Copperfield” – Charles Dickens
33 “Chronicles of Narnia” – CS Lewis
34 “Emma” -Jane Austen
35 “Persuasion” – Jane Austen
36 “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” – CS Lewis
37 “The Kite Runner” – Khaled Hosseini
38 “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” – Louis De Bernieres
39 “Memoirs of a Geisha” – Arthur Golden
40 “Winnie the Pooh” – A.A. Milne
41 “Animal Farm” – George Orwell
42 “The Da Vinci Code” – Dan Brown
43 “One Hundred Years of Solitude” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 “A Prayer for Owen Meaney” – John Irving
45 “The Woman in White” – Wilkie Collins
46 “Anne of Green Gables” – LM Montgomery
47 “Far From The Madding Crowd” – Thomas Hardy
48 “The Handmaid’s Tale” – Margaret Atwood
49 “Lord of the Flies” – William Golding
50 “Atonement” – Ian McEwan
51 “Life of Pi” – Yann Martel
52 “Dune” – Frank Herbert
53 “Cold Comfort Farm” – Stella Gibbons
54 “Sense and Sensibility” – Jane Austen
55 “A Suitable Boy” – Vikram Seth
56 “The Shadow of the Wind” – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 “A Tale Of Two Cities” – Charles Dickens
58 “Brave New World” – Aldous Huxley
59 “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” – Mark Haddon
60 “Love In The Time Of Cholera” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 “Of Mice and Men” – John Steinbeck
62 “Lolita” – Vladimir Nabokov
63 “The Secret History” – Donna Tartt
64 “The Lovely Bones” – Alice Sebold
65 “Count of Monte Cristo” – Alexandre Dumas
66 “On The Road” – Jack Kerouac
67 “Jude the Obscure” – Thomas Hardy
68 “Bridget Jones’s Diary” – Helen Fielding
69 “Midnight’s Children” – Salman Rushdie
70 “Moby Dick” – Herman Melville
71 “Oliver Twist” – Charles Dickens
72 “Dracula” – Bram Stoker
73 “The Secret Garden” – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 “Notes From A Small Island” – Bill Bryson
75 “Ulysses” – James Joyce
76 “The Inferno” – Dante
77 “Swallows and Amazons” – Arthur Ransome
78 “Germinal” – Emile Zola
79 “Vanity Fair” – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 “Possession” – AS Byatt
81 “A Christmas Carol” – Charles Dickens
82 “Cloud Atlas” – David Mitchell
83 “The Color Purple” – Alice Walker
84 “The Remains of the Day” – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 “Madame Bovary” – Gustave Flaubert
86 “A Fine Balance” – Rohinton Mistry
87 “Charlotte’s Web” – E.B. White
88 “The Five People You Meet In Heaven” – Mitch Albom
89 “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 “The Faraway Tree Collection” – Enid Blyton
91 “Heart of Darkness” – Joseph Conrad
92 “The Little Prince” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 “The Wasp Factory” – Iain Banks
94 “Watership Down” – Richard Adams
95 “A Confederacy of Dunces” – John Kennedy Toole
96 “A Town Like Alice” – Nevil Shute
97 “The Three Musketeers” – Alexandre Dumas
98 “Hamlet” – William Shakespeare
99 “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” – Roald Dahl
100 “Les Miserables” – Victor Hugo
