In the last couple of weeks, I've been following the growing impact of Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
It's already been published in Canada, and now in the UK, and will be out in the US September 18. At Amazon Canada it's been ranked #1 for a week. Amazon UK lists it at #68, and three days before US publication Amazon.com ranks it at #125.
With a Google alert for "shock doctrine," it's been easy to track the spread of response to the book. It comes with its own six-minute trailer, a video that has been shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and transmitted across the Web to many blogs and sites.
I've published my own review of the book on The Tyee, and we'll doubtless see many more reviews and rebuttals of it. "Shock doctrine" has clearly become a meme—an idea that transmits easily from person to person, either changing the way a person thinks or provoking a severe immune reaction.
The movement of the video is the most striking aspect of this meme transmission. It helps that it was made by Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican filmmaker who directed Children of Men. It helps even more than it's a vivid dramatization of the book's thesis, making points in six minutes that the book requires 560 pages (plus references) to establish.
On a more modest scale, I see a similar "videomeme" moving across Flublogia: A 90-minute documentary by the BBC called Pandemic.
It appeared on Bird Flu News Flash, and then on Scott McPherson's blog, and of course was picked up on Bird Flu Breaking News. Now the videomeme has infected me, and here I am, passing it along.
Ninety minutes is a long time to sit watching a documentary on a computer screen. I've watched the first 25 minutes or so, and found it very good at dramatizing how a pandemic could emerge, but a little too heavy on the ominous music, hand-wringing narration, and red-tinted shots of H5N1 loose in the bloodstream. I expect to watch the rest sometime this weekend.
But if the Klein phenomenon teaches us anything, it's that a short video clip, done well, can make an impact well beyond that of mere text.
