A while back I did a Q&A over tea with AdAge’s Simon Dumenco, but only yesterday did he post it to the magazine’s website. No doubt because of his very artful arrangement (a numbered list of “truths about viral culture”), it’s currently the #1 most-read piece on AdAge.com!  What, slow week in the ad biz? Hasn’t someone made a blockbuster new spot with a talking panda in it or something?

I have only one edit I’d make to the Q&A, if I could. Here’s the second “truth”:

2. On the internet, as in life, forget the white-hot center; the margins are what matter.

Wasik, in conversation: “The other fundamental metaphor of the flash mob was the idea of, like, people are going to come together for no reason at all other than that other people are coming together there. I mean, that was sort of always how I felt about New York. The idea that, Oh, I’m in New York, and I’m gonna get as close as possible to the white-hot center of things. But then the closer you get to it, the more you realize that the white-hot center of things is, like, a bunch of middle-aged fat people in a room sipping vodkatinis, and they’re not talking about anything interesting, because the actual work is being done a little further to the margins by people who are still trying to get closer to the center.”

My point wasn’t quite that “the margins are what matter.” Really, what I meant was that the desire to get closer to the center, the act of striving for that center — even though we find the center, when we get close enough, to be essentially hollow — is what matters.

On some level, my book (like my recent Times op-ed) is an extended meditation on the Internet as the new locus for ambition.  That’s a loaded word, of course, and I don’t mean it in an especially pejorative way.  Day by day we all do what we do, creatively and otherwise, for a whole host of different reasons. But over the long haul, there’s a little kernel of something that makes us — some of us, that is — want to go out find an audience, and then to find a bigger audience once we’ve got a small one. That little something is what gets us to New York, instead of someplace more hospitable, or makes us send out pitches and do open mics and put together bands etc. Today, it’s easy to see that little something is sending us online. It’s where the excitement is, where the audience is.

So much of our discourse about the Internet tries to make our participation in it about everything besides ambition: connection, belonging, love, “self-expression,” etc. Obviously the Internet is about all that stuff, too. I wouldn’t bother to focus so much on ambition in online culture if it didn’t seem like there were a conspiracy to elide its role. All these technology pundits — who are nothing if not hyperambitious themselves — look out into the sea of users and see them all as earnest naïfs longing for simple, human connection, or as puppyish fanboys eager to toil anonymously for days on end in a “remix” culture; as anything except ambitious, as people who want to make a name, who want fans, who want basically the same things that the tech gurus want.

Are all the participants in Internet culture like that, or even a majority? Certainly not. But I’d argue — and I do argue, in the book — that the ones who succeed in winning an audience online tend to be precisely those who do so with old-fashioned drive.