1. Marginal Notes: Where can they lead?

Below is a link with three photos of annotated and highlighted text from Bill Wasik’s article “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project”.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j7TYC46wPigIykJWZxrC3_P6rn1QrdB-3V9EMq4S43E/edit

  • From the first picture, this comes from the page 475 from Wasik’s article. In this page, Wasik talked about the scoring system that was use to tell how bored people are. I annotated him saying the average score was “10” because I felt it was important to know what the base line of the test was. I also made questions such as “does Wasik think that technology is meaningless”? All of this due to his seemly harsh tone when talking about free time and the lack of it he seems to have.  I also discussed how people seem to be losing their motivation and their free time due to the increase in technology. The drive for people wanting to create new projects and new activities seems to be diminishing when we are around a stimulating tech based object. On this page, Wasik also introduced his idea on the mob project and his ideas behind it.

2. Reading with Purpose: Using the Internet as a tool

  • The Internet extends to Bill Wasik when he talks about having no free time, due to the accessible technology that seems to take up all of our time.  Wasik claims “but such has been true for me only since the start of this viral decade, when my idle stretches have been erased by the grace of the internet, with its soothingly fast and infinitely available distractions…” (475). Wasik then goes to explain how he can be engaged by what surrounds him. “… engaging me for hours on end without assuaging my fundamental boredom in any way”(475). Wasik believes that Internet is a huge influence on our lives and can make us into bandwagoners that force us to want to be like one another. Wasik believes that common interests are what people focus on rather than the unique qualities and interests that we all share.  Wasik’s way of showing how we are here compared to why we are here is an example of the MOB projects he came up with. He was able to globally reach out to other people. He never had to worry about boundaries because the Internet is able to reach many people no matter the distance. Wasik took advantage of the technology that was available to him to test how people reacted to the mystery of what the newest trend/fad was.

3. Reading with Purpose: Using the Internet to pursue purpose

  • Honestly, throughout this essay I was highly confused to what Wasik’s purpose was. To me it sounded that he was playing a sick mind game with those who just wanted to be in on the biggest trend. He gained popularity and loved every second of it – so he continued to do it even though his trials disrupted the peace. His MOB projects reached across the world and people continued to feed into his heinous instructions. I understood that Wasik wanted to produce a test to see how people responded to certain ways of directions, but I felt that after a while his results were predictable and became ridiculous to continue experiment with. In terms of Wasik believing that he “accomplishes” what he was set out to do, I think that he feels successful in what he did. Although I may not agree with what he produced as he continued with his MOB projects, he did produce interesting results that could support an an argument about crowd control and bandwagoners.