ELLEN HORNE: Hi there. I'm Ellen Horne. I'm one of the producers of Radiolab. The recent CNN-YouTube debate reminded us here at the 'Lab of the last national election season, when the question of the influence of the internet in politics was still shiny and new. This was back before Robert Krulwich was part of the 'Lab, back before the 'Lab was a national show, back before there even was such a thing as a podcast. We thought you might get a kick out of it. Take a ride in our Audio Wayback Machine, and have a listen to our episode called "Contact" from January of 2004. Oh, and before we get started, just a warning. There's one part of this podcast about halfway through the program which uses pretty explicit language about sex. We just wanted to let you know. And now to the show.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Technology is changing our world. Take the Touareg. You may have heard of them. They recently joined the ranks of ethnic groups with their own line of cars: Mazda Navajo, the Jeep Cherokee, and now Volkswagen named their new SUV after the Touareg.

AARON CLARK: Touaregs are traditionally nomadic. Traditionally, they lived in the Sahara and they had salt caravans. So they would go between, like, North Africa and West Africa, thousands of miles.

JAD: According to Aaron Clark, the days of the salt caravan are long gone and the Tuareg are settling into villages. Aaron is a freelance journalist, and he spent the summer in Niger. He was traveling with a sociologist, studying changes in Touareg society. While he was there, he became friends with this one guy, Rabadin.

AARON CLARK: Rabadin is sort of this—you know, he looks like he just walked out of the desert. He's very old school. He always wore, you know, the long, flowing boubous, which is the traditional dress. The only part I ever saw of him was basically his eyes. Traditionally, Tuareg men, they wear a turban.

JAD: So it's a turban that covered their whole face?

AARON CLARK: Their whole head and their face. Yeah. Except for their eyes and maybe their nose.

JAD: So Rabadin invites Aaron to join him at his family reunion way out in the Sahara Desert. And they're talking, and Rabidin tells Arona, that's Aaron in Arabic ...

AARON CLARK: He was like, "Oh, Arona, what did we do without cell phones?" And I was like, "I don't know, Rabadin, what did you do without cell phones?" He's like, "Oh, life is so much easier with cell phones. Before we had cell phones, if I wanted to say hi to Boodlié, I would have to get on a camel and go for three days just to visit him, you know, in Agadez. But now I can just text message him."

JAD: It's so strange to think you had this conversation in the middle of the desert.

AARON CLARK: Well, it's interesting to me because I don't even know how to text message.

JAD: [laughs]

AARON CLARK: You know, it kind of seems like anachronism, but it's really not. I don't know if it surprised me as much as it just made sense. I mean, maybe it makes more sense for them than it does for us.

JAD: Well, we had this big idea. We would demonstrate the collapse of geography through technology by sending Rabadin a text message right here in the studio.

AARON CLARK: I mean, it can't be too hard, right?

JAD: Or so we thought. First we tried Aaron's phone, but it wasn't international. Then we walked down the hall and borrowed Jim Colgan's phone. He works at the Brian Lehrer show. Jim is Irish, and text messages back home all the time.

AARON CLARK: So this is actually kind of a fancy phone. It's got a whole keyboard on it, which it's kind of confusing to me. But it says "Send error." I'm gonna try and retry it.

JAD: Maybe ...

AARON CLARK: It just said error. It can't send it at this time. It might be the reception, like maybe if we took it outside.

JAD: Message sent! All right.

AARON CLARK: Message sent. Yes. Now we wait. [laughs] Well, I'm just checking the phone again.

JAD: It's been about what, two minutes?

AARON CLARK: It's been three minutes.

JAD: God, this is a long three minutes.

JAD: Rabadin never did write back. But as we stood there freezing for 20 minutes staring at the phone, Jim got an interesting message. It was from an Australian friend.

AARON CLARK: Read that message.

JAD: "Just woke up fully clothed and the taste of kebab." [laughs]

JAD: The message read, "Woke up fully clothed with the taste of kebab in my mouth." It wasn't what we'd hoped for, but actually it was kind of fitting. So you set out to demonstrate what a small world it is, to learn a little bit about how the lives of people half a world away are changing, and you end up with the taste of kebab in your mouth. I have no idea what that means.

ELLEN: It seems pretty sophisticated. I wonder if he can forward them to you as emails or something.

AARON CLARK: He probably can. He could probably forward them to my phone somehow.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today's program is about techno-social interaction, and with our first story about how the internet is changing politics and possibly a lot more, Radiolab's Ellen Horne.

ELLEN: I'll tell you flat out, I want Howard Dean to win. Not because he perfectly represents my views, but because of his methods, what they represent. It's Wednesday night. We're at an extremely crowded bar on the Lower East Side. There's about 200 people here for Howard Dean. His crowd is mostly young, mostly white, like this guy.

ANDERS RAMSEY: My name is Anders Ramsey. I'm a web developer. I think Howard Dean is doing the smartest thing because it's a grassroots effort. It's completely brilliant.

ELLEN: What initially attracted me to Dean was his healthcare plan. But it was reading about it on his website that really sealed the deal. He's got this decidedly populist tone, but not in a hokey way. It's more creative, more like Unix, open source-y collaborative. I've been hearing about the Dean meet-ups from my West Coast friends. They said it was easy. You go to this website, Meetup.com, enter your zip code, check off the topics you like. When five people in your area are interested in the same thing, the system automatically schedules a meeting. And that's how it works. But I find out from Anders, Dean is just the tip of the iceberg.

ANDERS RAMSEY: I go to a German language meetup. I go to an amateur writers' meetup. I go to an electronic musician's meetup. The only thing about those two is they meet on the same days. So it kind of drives me a little crazy.

ELLEN: Maybe this new brand of community isn't limited to Howard Dean. Maybe this is the beginning of a new day in social organization. And that would be welcome news to Robert Putnam.

ROBERT PUTNAM: In 1975, the average American went on five picnics. And last year, the average American went on two picnics. So there's been a 60 percent decline in picnics in America. America is facing a little-recognized national picnic crisis.

ELLEN: Don't get the wrong idea. Putnam's not some coleslaw crazed fiend. He's a professor of public policy at Harvard, and he's been studying the social trends of the last century.

ROBERT PUTNAM: From 1900 to, roughly speaking, 1965, 1970, every year, more and more people were involved in the Scouts and the PTA and the Moose Club. And then suddenly, silently, mysteriously, sometime in the late '60s or early 1970s, all of those trend lines reversed and began to go downhill.

ELLEN: He says we stopped joining things. We don't go to church as often. We're less likely to eat dinner with our own families. Crime rates increase and voter turnout plummets.

ROBERT PUTNAM: And we trusted one another less, too. During that same period, levels of trust of other people began to decline.

ELLEN: Now we're not just talking about an empty Elks Lodge here. Picture the neighborhood bar, a where-everyone-knows-your-name kind of place. Just plain hanging out at bars, drinking beer is down by 35 percent. Where did everybody go? To work. And it's not just more women in offices since the '60s. Putnam says we're all spending more time commuting. But there's another culprit: TV.

ROBERT PUTNAM: Most Americans watch, you know, Friends rather than having friends.

ELLEN: What if you like watching Friends? What if you'd really rather watch Cheers than hang out at an actual bar? Does it really matter?

ROBERT PUTNAM: Your chances of dying over the next 12 months are cut in half by joining one group. Social isolation is as big a risk factor for death as smoking. So if you smoke and belong to no groups, it's a close call as to which is the riskier behavior.

ELLEN: How can this be? Well, Putnam says it has to do with social support—having a ride to the doctor's office and so on. But it also turns out that being alone is physically very stressful. Being alone has a price, biochemically. Maybe the story of Meetup is bigger than the presidency. If it succeeds in changing the way that groups organize, the evidence suggests, wild as this sounds, that a database program might save lives. Is it working? On any given night, there are four or five meetups in New York. We decided to see how many meetups we could hit in a week.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Monday, 8:00 pm.]

JAD: What brings you here tonight?

MAN: I'm a little curious to see whether or not something like Meetup will coalesce something in the way that the Dean presidential campaign changed the dynamic of a community.

ELLEN: While Jad is talking to the British expats at a tiny Greenwich Village pub, Jenny's uptown at the Hard Rock Cafe.

JENNY: It is eight o'clock, and there is not a Bon Jovi meet upper to be found yet.

ELLEN: Forty blocks downtown ...

MAN: A few bricks short of a load there, I think. [laughs]

ELLEN: ... we find the British expat Meetup in full swing, with about a dozen people. Back uptown ...

JENNY: 8:25. I have a sinking feeling these people are not coming.

ELLEN: Still no one.

JENNY: It's 9:00. No one's here. Well, people are here, but no one's here for the Bon Jovi meetup. And I think the moral of the story is Bon Jovi fans just don't care.

ELLEN: Our first discovery? All meetups do not have equal merit.

JENNY: They would rather sit at home on their computers on the fan club message board.

ELLEN: After all, Bon Jovi fans can find each other at Bon Jovi concerts. But for someone from Nottinghamshire living in New York, it'd be hard to spot a fellow expat on the street.

WOMAN: It's great. I mean, you instantly have something in common.

ELLEN: And harder still to befriend them.

MAN: It's the ability to relate to each other very, very quickly.

WOMAN: Which means it gets a bit feisty. And we all talk about football and all the TV programs that we miss.

MAN: And just basically talk about England and all that's wrong with England.

MAN: And all that's wrong with England. And not actually get arrested for it, which is pretty amazing.

ELLEN: A lot more was going on the next night.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Tuesday, 7:00 pm.]

ELLEN: On the Upper West Side, Jad sits at a table with five young Republicans.

WOMAN: But Clinton hasn't caught anybody while he was President. We got 42 out of 55 captured or killed.

ELLEN: And while they argue about Clinton's record on terrorism, across town ...

MIYUKI: I love to travel by myself.

ELLEN: ... Miyuki is swapping backpacking stories at the travel chums meetup.

MIYUKI: But if you travel with a friend, I just think that the friend is gonna hold you back.

ELLEN: Back uptown, while Jenny's at the poker meetup, I'm down in the West Village where the Brits were. Same bar.

MAN: I think that's where a lot of philosophy has gone wrong.

ELLEN: Different crowd.

MAN: But when you say they're wrong, you can't throw the baby out with the bath. I think Nietzsche was saying that out of all of this time ...

ELLEN: Tonight? Atheists.

MARTIN LEWISON: My name is Martin Lewison, and I'm an analyst on Wall Street. I left—I was an academic, I was a college professor and decided to sell out to the man.

ELLEN: And as this soulless night bore on, Martin and his fellow atheists argued philosophy, questioning their own beliefs.

MAN: You know, void or nothingness is not exactly a rallying point.

ELLEN: It was fun. It reminded me of college.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Wednesday, 7:00 pm.]

ELLEN: Jad got stood up at the goths meetup in Dumbo, while Miyuki went to a bowling alley for the French meetup.

WOMAN: I'm here to speak French because as years have gone by, I'm losing my French.

ELLEN: Meanwhile, Jenny and I both went to a bookstore for the knitting meetup.

ELLEN: I don't know how to knit.

ELLEN: 20 women with long needles sat clustered around the store's cafe tables. They admired each other's yarn and patterns. Beginners got advice.

WOMAN: The first step is really a series of loops.

ELLEN: They talked about their early days.

WOMAN: Both my mom and my twin knit, and I used to watch them and think they were crazy. It looked so boring. And I'd rather stab myself with the needles than actually knit with them. And then I went to a craft store, and I just saw a wall with all different textures and colors.

ELLEN: Later, it got rowdy. To quiet the group, the manager came over like a stern librarian.

MANAGER: Is there an organizer here?

WOMAN: Not really. This is like a flash mob.

MANAGER: Is there like a group spokesperson?

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Thursday, 7:00 pm.]

ELLEN: Two Meetups were scheduled for the same east side location. And Jenny waited for two hours. No one showed up for either.

JENNY: You don't happen to be here for either one of the meetups that are happening tonight, are you? No? Okay. Are you here for a yoga or a singles meetup, any of you? Does anybody know if there's a group of people here who's here for a singles meetup or a yoga meetup? Okay, thank you.

ELLEN: Just a few doors down the street, Miyuki's learning about German beer and culture.

MAN: It might seem oh, you just all speak German. Well actually, there are all kinds of cultural references and associations and I really miss Germany.

ELLEN: She ran into the guy that we'd talked to at the Dean meetup.

ANDERS RAMSEY: My name is Anders.

ELLEN: But here among his fellow German speakers, he pronounced his name differently. At the Dean meetup ...

ANDERS RAMSEY: My name is Anders.

ELLEN: But tonight ...

ANDERS RAMSEY: My name is Anders.

ELLEN: Now you might imagine meetups are packed with only guys like Anders—Anders. Fresh from chatroom, tech-savvy, 20-somethings. That's just not what we found. Most people were older, 40s and up. Many were retired, like this fellow from the Atheists.

MAN: I was looking for something to do for myself. I recently widowed. A widower less than two years ago. And I've been looking for some way to develop a new life for myself, make new companions.

ELLEN: All these older people meeting new people who share their interests made me think of my parents. They do use email, visit websites, but I'd hardly call them techies. I told them about Meetup. I asked them to sign up. And I get really excited thinking about how this can help them meet people.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] Hello stranger. Put your lovin' hand in mine.]

ELLEN: Meetup might really be on to something. Well, maybe not the goth or Bon Jovi or Bridget Jones meetups, but just take the last Monday of every month. There's a night shift meetup. I find that incredibly sweet. If you're working all night alone in your taxi cab or guarding an office building or baking bagels, maybe Meetup offers something that you might have a hard time finding: new friends. The other reason I think Meetup might just work is because of something we heard over and over again as we talked to people.

MAN: Well, I mean, to me 9/11 was the pinnacle of religious stupidity.

ELLEN: Did you know that you were an atheist before 9/11?

MAN: Yeah, I knew, but I hadn't sought out any others.

ELLEN: It truly pains me to say this because it's been said so many times, but maybe in this case it's true. Something did change on 9/11. So many people brought it up as a reason they'd come to a meetup. Take this knitter.

WOMAN: I think after 9/11—I'm a police officer, and I think all of us were—I don't know if it goes back to basics or whatever, but I mentioned, I said, "You know, I turned 40. A lot of changes. I want to learn to knit."

ELLEN: Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman.

SCOTT HEIFERMAN: A lot of smart people in the internet world, they said for years, "Oh, you know, the internet takes away the need for geography." But, you know, here after 9/11, you realize, wow, local means something. And how does that fit into this context of the internet? And so I came upon this book called Bowling Alone.

ELLEN: By Robert Putnam. A book which had struck a nerve. In fact, that fellow Martin at the athiest's meetup had also read it.

MARTIN LEWISON: The Harvard sociologist, he wrote this book called Bowling Alone. When I first saw Meetup, I actually—I emailed it to the author.

ELLEN: At the time, Putnam says he didn't give Meetup a second thought.

ROBERT PUTNAM: I now think that was a mistake, actually. I now think that it's a really big deal.

ELLEN: He's hoping that Meetup will work. So is Howard Dean. And so am I. But here's what I'm worried about: on my train to work, the car is packed with all kinds of people. This morning, a guy in work boots is reading a Korean newspaper. Beside him, a bearded man sleeps. By the door, a blonde woman has headphones and she's wearing funky blue bowling shoes. The girl seated across from me wears a gold necklace that spells Shakisha. Meetup might help you meet some of these people, but which ones? I'm guessing, and so is Robert Putnam, that Meetup is going to help me meet Ms. Blue Bowling Shoes. She probably went to the same kind of college as me. In other words, we already have something in common.

ROBERT PUTNAM: Even more important for a democracy are ties to people, unlike you, people of a different race or a different gender or a different generation.

ELLEN: In Bowling Alone, Putnam tells a story about two guys on a bowling team. Now it turns out, bowling alleys are surprisingly diverse, so these two guys were from different class backgrounds and different races. One day, after years of drinking beer and throwing strikes together, when one guy needed it, his teammate gave him his kidney.

ROBERT PUTNAM: In order to get to the kidney donation from these two people in Ypsilanti, it wasn't enough that they just once sat in the same semicircle of benches at the back of the bowling alley. They, in effect, had built trust and solidarity and a sense of affection and so on over weeks and weeks and weeks of bowling together. And that requires not just your one passing meeting with the J-Lo folks, but it requires that you develop a chapter of J-Lo fans. If that happens, if the Meetup model can be extended to supporting continuing connections, then yes, it could be real.

ELLEN: And whether they return ...

JENNY: It's 8:10.

ELLEN: ... or show up at all ...

JENNY: It's 8:30.

ELLEN: ... only time will tell.

JENNY: It's 8:40, and they're not here. And you knew they wouldn't be because this is the pattern we have established. No singles, no yoga, no meetups tonight. And I am running out of stupid observations.

JAD: That piece was produced by Ellen Horne with help from Miyuki Yokiranta and Jenny Schneier. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Today we're talking about how technology is changing social norms. Seems like online dating has reached a new level of social acceptability. And it's no surprise, really. Sex has always been a driver in promoting technology, whether you're talking about the printing press or the home video camera. Always on the cutting edge, pornography is available online discreetly and anonymously. And in fact, it's estimated that about 12 percent of web pages are pornographic. But it's the interactive potential of sex online that caught the attention of radio producers Kara Oehler and Ann Heppermann.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Welcome.]

LUCY: I suppose what led me to internet dating was primarily curiosity. My name is Lucy. Actually it's not, but I'll use that name for now. And I felt like I was seeing this trend among my friends and peers of, you know, it was the kind of thing that suddenly everybody was talking about at parties in the, you know, have you tried it kind of way.

SEAN: At the start, dating from the internet seems as simple as walking through the grocery store and seeing the perfect box of cereal. This is the one I'm looking for. This is it. This is gonna—this is gonna do it. Sexual needs fulfilled. Emotional needs? Check. My name is Sean. I moved here several years back with a girlfriend. She and I broke up recently, and after dating somebody for six years, I didn't know how to go about meeting people. So I thought the internet might be something.

LUCY:I was doing this through Salon.com. And the format that it's in now is "I am:" and then I type in "a woman." "Looking for:" "a man." Interested in: friendship, dating, serious relationship play. Age 29. Location, Chicago, Illinois. Height, 5'3". Weight 135 pounds. Star sign, Capricorn. Relationship status, single. The questions they ask are so stupid. For example, the five items I can't live without? Wooly slippers in winter. Something to swim in, ie. the lake, not the bikini. Those blue bags for recycling. The cat box. Earl Grey tea.

SEAN: I tried to make my ad as funny as possible—or at least it's funny to me. For occupation, I put halitosis. For star sign, I put cover hog. My favorite on screen sex scene was anything in General Hospital. The celebrity I resemble most, Martin Amis covered in bees.

LUCY: The celebrity that I resemble most? Matt Damon. Which is actually true, but you know, really, I look more like Matt Damon from the side.

SEAN: I just wanted to find somebody who read it, laughed at it, and immediately responded.

LUCY: My first internet date was actually really fun. And the man that I met was so incredibly funny and seemed so normal and like somebody that I already knew. He was very visibly nervous, which was very charming to me, and chain smoking, which was kind of repellent to me, but in a strangely charming way. But I think mostly because it was the first one, I had that sort of sense of, well, I can't meet someone good now.

SEAN: My first date turned out to be my encounter with a serial internet dater, because the first things out of her mouth were, "You know, I don't mean to be disingenuous, but you're the second date that I've had this week and I'm gonna go on another date later tonight." And I spent the next hour listening to her talk about her previous internet dates, carefully realizing that anything I told her about myself, she would repeat to the next person in sort of an uncommitted chain letter that she was forming. And at the end of two hours' time, we put down our beer, we got up from the bar, we walked out, she gave me a big hug and said, "It was wonderful to meet you" and walked away. And that's when I entered the world of Internet dating.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: According to Net Nielsen ratings, nearly 17 million people visited online personal sites in April, 2003. The number of successful dates arranged through the internet is still unknown. Some internet daters say it's difficult to recreate the chemistry they felt online when they meet people in real life.]

SEAN: There's nothing more awkward than going two or three weeks exchanging messages with somebody and finding out they're a terrible kisser. There's nothing worse. You're just thinking, "When will this stop?" And they're thinking something completely different. [laughs] And just because you've emailed back and forth, you've just decided based on the words you've traded that yeah, it'd be a really great idea to have sex.

LUCY: I never actually did have any hookup or really any other kinds of physical interactions with any of the people that I met this way. I didn't encounter anybody who I felt like was looking for sex.

SEAN: I was interested in a lot of wild sex at first. Somebody sent me pictures once, emailed me nude photographs. When you disrobe before somebody, that's a very singular moment. When somebody sends you a picture of their crotch, that's the moment where you immediately look over your shoulder to see if anybody is standing behind you. Something you wouldn't do in private. Normally. There's this weird myth that you are gonna get it on and it's gonna be white hot once you sign up. [laughs] And even if it's not white hot, there's gonna be a lot more of it, so maybe that'll balance out. [laughs]

LUCY: The internet dating sites all have the instant messaging built into them, which is something that's very creepy and stupid to me. There were many times I was completely caught off guard. But, you know, I'd see the little thing blinking and I'd click on it, and it would be somebody saying something disgusting and overtly sexual. And to me, that felt more sinister and unsettling than somebody coming onto you in a bar because that you kind of expect. You know, like, drunk guys in bars just sort of do that. But you feel you ought to be safe sitting at your own computer.

SEAN: I decided to stop internet dating when I realized I really didn't know the people I was getting to meet. I went at it with the tack of, "Okay, I'm gonna have it, I'm gonna get it on. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna have a lot of sex." And I was really interested in meeting somebody, making a connection with somebody, falling in love again. And the internet just wasn't having it.

LUCY: I would say before the internet, dating was hard and sex was easy. And after the internet, dating is still hard and sex is still easy.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Internet dating isn't always a disaster. Some people have found lasting relationships through the internet. Isaac Leung met his boyfriend online five years ago. They both lived in Hong Kong, but then Isaac moved from China to the United States to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. The long distance led him to experiment with online sex. For his senior thesis, Isaac wanted to explore the idea of sex in a fluid-free environment. Warning: Isaac's story contains graphic descriptions of sexual activities. Some listeners may find the material offensive.]

ISAAC LEUNG: My name is Isaac Leung, and I did a project called the Impossibility of Having Sex with 500 Men in a Month. I'm an Oriental Whore. The main reason I did the project was I wanted to question whether the internet space is private or public, and if cybersex is virtual or real.

ISAAC LEUNG: So this is my room, and what I usually do is pull my bed towards my table first, and then I would log in online to all these programs which allow people to meet each other by web camera.

MAN: Hi. Where are you from?

MAN: Liverpool.

ISAAC LEUNG: It's a really funny experience because when you meet some people, like, you know, on the street or whatever, you usually see the person's face first and introduce yourself. But what you see online is usually you see the body first.

MAN: You have a sexy chest.

MAN: Thanks.

ISAAC LEUNG: I would use a fake identity online. I would say, you know, I'm 18 years old, slim, smooth, Asian boy. And then I would set up my web camera, and I would start to, you know, chat with people.

MAN: What are your stats?

MAN: 18. Japanese.

ISAAC LEUNG: You never really trust people when they're chatting with you. They always tell you they have the longest [ding] of the world. They always tell you they're handsome. When we get comfortable with each other, then I started to, you know, push a little bit more. So I would ask them to do something sort of crazy for me. You know, I would ask them to wear specific clothes and to use certain objects. Sort of like asking them what they really want and explore the fantasy they have in their mind, but they never really try it in real life.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Isaac had the people he had sex with online fill out a questionnaire. He asked them about their age, their race, and their sexual preference.]

ISAAC LEUNG: One thing, you know, I found really funny about the internet was more than half of the people are either bisexual or married, which is really amazing to me because before, you know, all these guys, maybe their whole life, they don't have the room to experience anything with male.

ISAAC LEUNG: Here is the journal I write every day after I had sex with my webcam sex partners.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "October 28, 2001. All about sex. All excited about sex. Can't really believe that I'm going to have sex with 500 men in a month. Can't believe that I'm going to masturbate every night for a project."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "October 30. I masturbate with 34 people in two days. Isn't it amazing? I had sex with guys from 18 cities in two days, including 10 guys from Hong Kong."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "November 5, 2001. I'm so tired since I've been non-stop masturbating for seven hours tonight. I hope I'm not being abnormal. Oh well, I guess I wouldn't do most of the things in the real life so far.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "November 10, 2001. I had sex with an extremely ugly guy tonight. It was so nasty. I somehow start to question myself how I could get a hard on with these people.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "November 23, 2001. So sick of my project. So sick physically and mentally.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "November 26, 2001. Tomorrow will be the last day of my research. I always thought people shouldn't call internet a virtual space because I thought everything I had experienced on the internet was so real. But I guess I have to take that back now.]

ISAAC LEUNG: So it's a complicated feeling of like you kind of feeling it was, you know, real emotionally. And some of the people, they would say, "Oh, I'm going to get you a ticket and fly over and we are going to be lovers." And at the time I really feel like I was involved. But next morning you wake up and you just feel like you didn't get anything. Everybody is lying online. You can just so easily create your own persona, your own identity. You can be a girl, you can be a guy, you can be anything.

MARK PLEASANT: My name is Mark Pleasant and I pose as typically a young teenage female.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Mark is an investigator with the Lake County Illinois Attorney's office. For the past three years, he's created fake internet profiles in order to catch sex offenders online. So far, Mark has made 50 arrests.]

MARK PLEASANT: I will cruise the internet—chat rooms, message boards, any place where people may congregate on the internet to talk with minors.

MARK PLEASANT: It's not necessary to go into a chat room and advertise the fact that you're in there and that you're a 15-year-old girl. Quite often you can just enter a chat room, not say a word, and others within the chat room or outside of the chat room may have the capability to check various profiles. And they may initiate conversation just based on what they've seen in your online profile.

MARK PLEASANT: You let the suspects set the tone, and at some point a meeting may occur. So then the meeting is arranged, and they show up and they're what we would call taken down or arrested. They typically will try to claim that the person that they were going to meet was much older than they really are. They may say, "Oh, she told me she was 18." I know that's not true because I'm the person that they've been talking to. I know they were told that I was well under the age of 17 by many years.

PATRICIA FIX: Before the internet, I think some sex crimes were more difficult to prosecute because with the exception of child pornography, they always involved a live child victim. And it's very difficult putting a seven, eight, nine, ten year old on to testify about what happened to them that brings them to court on that day.

PATRICIA FIX: After the internet, the indecent solicitation offenses are easier to prosecute because your witness is, in almost every case, a police officer. My name is Patricia Fix. I'm an assistant state's attorney in Lake County, Illinois, and I run the cybercrime unit here. And that involves prosecuting a variety of criminal offenses, including child pornography on the internet, indecent solicitations, cyber stalking, and also a variety of financial crimes.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: In 1998, the Illinois Attorney general's office created the Internet Child Exploitation Task Force. So far, they have arrested more than 300 online sex offenders.]

PATRICIA FIX: It's hard to tell if there's more sex offenders out there. Within the last five years, with the explosion of the internet, it's difficult to comprehend that society has swung so much in one direction that all of a sudden there's this explosion of sex crime that didn't exist five years ago. The anonymity of the internet or the perceived anonymity of the internet puts people in a situation where they actually open their self up to potential prosecution a little bit more and potential law enforcement activities.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Scientists do not know if the internet is creating sexual criminals. Since the invention of pornography, there have always been people who could not control their sexual urges. However, many sex researchers believe sex on the internet can also be beneficial. Some couples use it to enhance their sex life. Others use it to try out new ideas. David Berg lives in Chicago. Because of the internet, he was able to take his idea for a sex toy and turn it into a business.]

DAVID BERG: My name is David Berg, and I am owner, inventor of the Bone Clone personal pleasure kit. The Bone Clone is a kit that reproduces a man's penis up to 9 inches in 100 percent silicone rubber. Included in each kit are easy to follow instructions, skin tone matching colors, and with additional options available, the Bone Clone offers a unique sex toy for different tastes and desires.

DAVID BERG: You know, I spoke a lot with friends just to get their response. I would say, "Hey, I have this great idea." And someone else would say, "Well, what is it?" I was like, "Well, I figured out a way that I can create a sex toy that will enable someone to make a replica of the self, a man, and leave behind for their spouse, partner or whatever, and they can do it in the privacy of their own home." And I think it would be a great product because psychologically it is appealing to the woman because it's something familiar. And for the man, it kind of gets away with the fear of replacement.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: There are an estimated two million retail sites on the web. The United States Department of commerce reports that in the Last quarter of 2002, eCommerce rose by more than 30 percent. Retail sales on the Internet equaled more than $14 billion.]

DAVID BERG: Right now, my virtual office and real office is just in the corner in my house, in the living room, actually. I think one of the nice things about setting up a business like this is the internet, as everyone is pretty familiar with, allows people who have interesting ideas for starting a business to enter the marketplace rather easily. There's not a lot of overhead and not a lot of startup costs. And I'm welcomed every day by that little tune.

DAVID BERG: First we'll go into the flash site.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Welcome.]

DAVID BERG: That is just a voice that kind of welcomes a recipient. We have features, community and frequently asked questions. And of course, there's the 'buy' button which is also met with a comment.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Thank you.]

DAVID BERG: There's also an area if you want to listen to a little soundtrack, you can. There's three to choose from. Just have a little fun, you know? Keep it—keep it grooving. For me, one of the most surprising things is the immediate contact you have with people through this order fulfillment process of people you would never even see or talk to or even, like, strike up a dialogue. There was one email where the response was they wanted a shorter tube to deal with the man's own feelings of inadequacy.

DAVID BERG: I think the great thing about the internet with discreetness is the fact that someone can easily go in the corner of the room where their computer is with complete privacy and buy something that interests them but they would be a little apprehensive to go to a store and do.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: According to Net Nielsen ratings, nearly 29 million people visited adult websites in April, 2003. 73 percent were male, 27 percent were female. Experts believe that the revenue potential of adult websites will continue to grow.]

DAVID BERG: Right now we're going down to the basement. Some people start things in the garage. We started in the basement. Pretty typical basement. A lot of different stuff—tools and clone kits. Every day I come down here and I'm, like, bagging these vibrators with templates and filling material. And I just think to myself, what am I doing? But you know what? It's very liberating because for the first time I feel as though from nothing I've created something.

DAVID BERG: You know, I look at it in the days when I was going through the first stages of liking girls and everything. And sex before the internet was how do I get images or whatever that satisfies being a young boy growing up? And, you know, obviously a bunch of guys get together, they pass around their material. But after the internet and also growing older, you realize that it's much more attainable. Everyone can get it. And it also seems to change what those offerings are, because what you see on the internet reflects so many different types of desires. Maybe it's our acceptable red light district so to speak.

JAD: That came to us from Kara Oehler and Ann Heppermann as part of WBEZ's Speaking of Sex series. After the break, flash mobs, lynch mobs, peaceful protests, human nature and locusts. In short, the woo effect. I'll tell you more in a minute.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Earlier in the show, we heard a story about a website, Meetup.com, which is creating sort of a group joining craze and helping Howard Dean raise money and possibly saving the universe. We thought we'd take it a step further now and put the group itself under our faulty microscope. Crowd behavior. Crowd behavior is fascinating for a variety of reasons. Take something as simple and perplexing as the woo.

BRIAN MCCANN: And I don't understand where the woo has come from in society, but, like, if you mention Fabio in a room full of 250 people, you're gonna get at least 10 woos. And I've yet to come across someone in an individual conversation—because I mention Fabio a lot, and never have I gotten a woo.

JAD: That's Brian McCann. He is a comedian. And before we get too far with him and the woo factor, first let me explain how he became interested in this whole subject to begin with. Imagine this: you're at a posh hotel downtown. You're in the lobby. You just happen to watch the minute hand on the clock tick from 6:25 to 6:26. As it does, a mass of people swarm the place. In only a few seconds, they are everywhere—300 people at least. And they're doing some sort of strange ritual which consists of hugging each other over and over.

JAD: That lasts for two minutes until someone shushes. And with that, the entire crowd at once curls up on the marble floor and falls asleep. The floor is covered with bodies. Another two minutes go by and the entire group gets up, stretches, and walks out.

JAD: Okay, smart mobs can seem frivolous on paper. But if you see it happen—as I did in San Francisco—it's oddly mesmerizing the way all these individuals come together quickly to form a unit, almost like a biological reaction, like bees swarming. The premise, that basic cell phone technology, that's how it works, text messaging can gather hundreds, maybe thousands of people instantly in a room or on a street corner. Well, that idea right now, not surprisingly, is being studied by the military. It's in use right now on the ground in Nigeria to organize boycotts. And three years ago in the Philippines, smart mob street riots brought down the government.

JAD: But for all the hoopla, smart mobs aren't really that different than this right here—broadcasting. I could broadcast a call right now. "Meet at City Hall Monday, bring a kazoo. At precisely 4:17 pm we'll play Ave Maria." You see, sending out directions to a mass audience is hardly a new innovation. Far more intriguing, we think, is the crowd itself. What laws govern crowds? What rules? Is there an inherent character that is born when people assemble? What is the nature of the crowd? We wanted to know. We figured who better to talk to than people who engage in crowd control? First stop, the Conan O'Brien Show.

JAD: Crowds take on personalities, moods. Let's take that as a given. And TV producers, perhaps better than anyone, know that these moods are contagious. That's why they use laugh tracks. And it's also why the 250 people in Conan O'Brien's studio audience tonight are very important. They will unduly influence the millions of TV viewers at home. Which brings us back to Brian McCann.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. Come on! Woo hoo! Thank you for coming out. My name's Brian. I'm the warm up guy.]

JAD: A half hour before every show, Brian takes the stage.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: And welcome. Is everybody good? Yeah? Excellent.]

JAD: His nightly task is to unify the crowd.

BRIAN MCCANN: That's the job.

JAD: Which he admits is a bit of a guessing game.

BRIAN MCCANN: There's nights I could go out there and tell people to take their clothes off, and the whole crowd would do it and think it was great. And yeah, we're all part of something. And then there's other nights I can't even get everybody to applaud the fact that they're about to see a TV show.

JAD: But Brian has noticed a few things. For one, days when the weather is bad ...

BRIAN MCCANN: Like rain or like horrible snow.

JAD: ... the crowds tend to bond automatically.

BRIAN MCCANN: It's a great crowd.

JAD: Other nights he has to resort to this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: No, where else are people from? Well yes, you raised your hand.]

JAD: The state game.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Alabama. Wow. And you seem very sophisticated.]

JAD: The state game allows Brian to single people out. That's useful because he's found no quicker way to connect a crowd than to do it at the expense of someone.

BRIAN MCCANN: It's pretty sweet.

JAD: Typically a foreigner.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Any foreign countries or anything? Ecuador. That would qualify.]

BRIAN MCCANN: It's fun to get them in the room because they have no idea who he is.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Do you have any idea where you are? Do you know what this show is?]

BRIAN MCCANN: And I'm like, you have no idea? And they're like, no. And I'm like, "Well, he's a little Black guy. He comes out here, he says, 'What you talking about, Willis?'" And then the rest of the audience, we all sort of laugh at the foreigner because then they see the big tall albino guy come out and they're shocked.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Are most of you from New York?

JAD: There's a flip side to that coin. In addition to the people Brian singles out, there are those who are willing to single themselves out.

BRIAN MCCANN: I am drawn instantly to the loudest.

JAD: Because apparently the loud guy can color a crowd the way a small drop of dye can tint a whole bowl of water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Where are you from?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, audience member: Queens!]

BRIAN MCCANN: In a crowd, like for our show, you have to kind of shut up the loudmouth.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: What part of Queens are you in?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, audience member: Conanville.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Brian McCann: Conanville. Yeah. Okay, we're done talking to you. Fantastic.]

JAD: It was only at our next stop, Washington, DC, that we realized that shutting up the loud guy has become the dominant philosophy of crowd control. Except here they go by a different name.

STEPHEN SUND: Sometimes they're referred to as opportunists.

JAD: DC police lieutenant Stephen Sund.

STEPHEN SUND: They use the opportunity of a large group of people to protect them, and they'll try and do things to get publicity to get their cause known under the auspice of the main forming group.

JAD: As we stand on Pennsylvania and 13th watching 50,000-some odd anti-war protesters float by, only about 12 meet Sund's description of an opportunist, which of course entails the ski mask, black T shirt, anarchist A. Yet just a dozen is enough to worry Commander Kathy Lanier. But not today.

KATHY LANIER: They didn't cause too much trouble in the main group. What they did was they broke off on their own away from the main body of the march, which was permitted, and run down streets. And I'm not really sure what the purpose of that is. We keep somebody with them when they do that. There's been times in the past where those groups have broken windows and done damage in different places. I'm gonna have to run. They're calling a priority down the mall. I will come right back.

JAD: Okay.

KATHY LANIER: I gotta go take care of those priorities.

JAD: Should I—should I just meet you there?

KATHY LANIER: Right here on the corner.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: She zooms off to the other side of the city in hot pursuit of an opportunist. Meanwhile, we head to Brooklyn in hot pursuit of Alex Vitale.

ALEX VITALE: My name's Alex Vitale, and I'm a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.

JAD: In his dingy office, Alex shows us footage from the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Well, right now we're blockaded the entranceway where most of the delegates are trying to get in.]

JAD: Ask most people about the Seattle protests, and they'll probably mention anarchist groups and broken windows. But Alex is eager for us to see a different picture.

ALEX VITALE: The footage that we see here is people sitting in the street, arms locked, being shot in the back with rubber pellets, having tear gas sprayed right in their eyes.

JAD: It's a surreal scene. On the monitor, a police officer in riot gear and gas mask approaches a protester seated on the ground, leans down close to her and squirts pepper spray directly in her face. She lurches forward in pain.

ALEX VITALE: That shows how much we still have to learn about group psychology.

JAD: Speaking of group psychology, I'm amazed at what happens next—or rather, what doesn't happen. On the screen, tear gas settles—a thick fog. We hear coughing, but don't see people. Simply watching, I feel panicky. If I were there, I think I would just run. But through gaps in the smoke, we can see that running is not what these activists do. They stay where they are, seated, Indian style on the ground, arms linked, heads down. Why? The point Alex is trying to make is not about the police, not about anarchists. It's about the choice those demonstrators made. Every crowd, he says, has that same choice at every moment between two extremes.

ALEX VITALE: Reason and emotion.

JAD: A crowd will choose reason when it has information. And that day in Seattle, he says, the crowd pulsed with information. In a way, it may have been the precursor to the smart mob.

ALEX VITALE: There were walkie talkies, people on bicycles who rode back and forth to inform groups at different intersections about what the situation was.

JAD: As for the police, all he will say is this ...

ALEX VITALE: They tend to focus on the worst case scenarios.

JAD: But perhaps that's at least partially understandable. History is littered with examples of worst case scenarios. Panic. 1941, for example, in a small village of central China, an air raid siren sends a whole community running to the shelter. As the community was leaving, the siren goes off again. 4,000 people were trampled to death. Anger. The lynch mob. In our country, in the years between 1882 and 1968, 4,724 Black Americans, it is estimated, were lynched. That's the other kind of crowd, the one where emotion rules. And that's what you'll find if you go back just 50 years in the history of crowd theories, descriptions of the dark interior of the human mind. Listen to this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elias Canetti: There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. Man will always avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security.]

JAD: This is a reading from Crowds in Power, written in 1960 by Nobel laureate Elias Canneti. It is one take on group behavior where reason plays no part.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Elias Canetti: It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. The crowd he needs is a dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other, the greater the relief from the fear of being touched.]

STEPHEN SIMPSON: And what we found is that the critical stimulus was being touched. So it's physical contact that really causes the change.

JAD: That's entomologist Stephen Simpson of Oxford University, and what he's talking about are locusts. An interesting analogy, it turns out, to Canetti's theories. Here's why. Believe it or not, locusts are actually antisocial. They usually try to avoid each other. Steve says they spend most of their lives completely alone. But then something happens. A genetic switch flips, they change color. They start to swarm. And as we know, when they do that, they eat a lot.

STEPHEN SIMPSON: As much food in 24 hours as the entire population of New York would do in a week.

JAD: Steve and his colleagues at Oxford wanted to know what created the change.

STEPHEN SIMPSON: We did a series of experiments where we sat for four hours tickling locusts on various body parts with a paintbrush.

JAD: And what they found is that there is a place on the locust's hind legs ...

STEPHEN SIMPSON: The hot spot, if you like.

JAD: ... that is sensitive to touch.

STEPHEN SIMPSON: If you stroke that just one leg for a period of a couple of seconds every minute over a period of a few hours, you evoke the change. The animal switches from avoiding other locusts to being attracted by them.

JAD: Is there something similar that happens in humans? Probably not. But when I told Ellen, who works at Radiolab, about this, she offered this anecdote.

ELLEN: I was coming home from work in San Francisco a few years ago, and I was on the Muni subway, and we slid through a subway station. Like, the driver put the brakes on, but they didn't catch. And we went right through the Powell Street station. And you know how it is to be on a train. Like, everyone's ignoring each other and trying to defend your personal space. And when the train lurched, the woman in front of me was just, like, pressed up into my chest. I was thrown back, like, bounced into the guy behind me. As soon as the train stopped, everyone kind of readjusted themselves, and there's this sort of really awkward moment. And then all of a sudden, the whole train just kind of broke out in laughter and everyone started talking to each other and conversation erupted everywhere.

JAD: People sometimes talk about social norms as if they come from somewhere in the universe outside ourselves, and we just have to live by them. But really, it's just us looking around at the world and each other for clues on how to behave. Sometimes the clues come from the loud guy, other times from our own instincts or the police or the weather, logic, emotion, history, politics. A million different variables on any given day, all of which makes crowd behavior incredibly difficult to predict.

ALEX VITALE: We tend to do a lot of armchair quarterbacking afterwards, look back and say, "A-ha. This is the reason why it turned out that way."

JAD: As a case in point, Alex Vitale compares the recent blackout to the Lakers victory a few years ago.

ALEX VITALE: There was no way to predict exactly what would happen. There was a fear that the blackouts would cause fires, and the Lakers victory might just mean a celebration. But we had the exact opposite in both cases. Human behavior doesn't work so neatly.

JAD: Or maybe it does. When warm up guy Brian McCann's studio audience at the Conan O'Brien show gets too feisty, he has one surefire solution.

BRIAN MCCANN: Give them stuff. I always keep in my pocket a—I can show you. I have a big stack of White Castle gift certificates in case things get to a real lull and I have to stretch. I have a feeling if there was a mob of angry citizens, like, marching on the White House, if the Secret Service went out there and gave everybody a crappy CD and a Coke, they'd disperse and just be like, "Well, you know, we didn't get our point across, but check it out, man!"

JAD: I wish we had free stuff to give you. Thanks for listening. This week's show was produced by Ellen Horne, with help from Jenny Schneier and Nada Parang. We'd also like to thank Ramsay Allen, Bill DeMaio, Karina Cronin, Rachel Dornhelm, Stephanie Kaye, Rachel McCarthy, Bill O'Neill for his kazoo, and Jenny Schneier appearing on kazoo, courtesy of Refrigerated Jerome. Andy Lancet, Brenna Farrell, David Margulies for providing the voice of Elias Cannetti, Curtis Fox, the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, Ann Hepperman and Kara Oehler. I'm Jad Abumrad, and you've been listening to Radiolab on WYNC.

ELLEN: Thanks for listening. The episode you just heard called "Contact" led us to think a lot about group behavior, inspiring another Radiolab episode called "Emergence." That's also available for download. And if you haven't heard it, I recommend you go straight to iTunes or our website, Radiolab.org and download that one. It's one of my favorites. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. Thanks for listening.

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