Maybe there really is hope that Facebook and Twitter won't completely fill up with corporate attempts to go viral all over us — we've got enough problems just fighting the social-network addiction.

Harper's senior editor Bill Wasik, creator of the flash mob, conducts enough experiments in his new book to give us a clue about the emerging next stage of networking: social capitalism. Via James B. Arndorfer's Ad Age piece on Wasik's And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Wasik writes:

Wasik, says Arndorfer, "dives into a variety of corporate efforts to tap into viral culture at a time when traditional advertising is losing its effectiveness." He creates a MySpace page, and he friends only corporations. He goes to a Ford Fusion "flash concert." Maybe Wasik will wind up being the McLuhan of the viral media.

Social networking is just marketing, but of yourself. So does it really make sense for corporate marketers to jump in and try to do their marketing amid millions of people marketing themselves? Maybe not. Arndorfer quotes Wasik: