Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (28 page)

Moreover, people are not engaging with one another over Twitter and Facebook about elves who make cookies or bears who soften laundry. They are not telling stories in 140 characters or less, but sharing facts. Updates concern things that matter in the present tense: What’s really in this cookie? Did you hear what I found out about the factory they’re made in? Do the chemicals in this fabric softener get absorbed through a baby’s skin? When people are concerned with questions like these, brand mythologies cease to have any relevance—except when they serve as ironic counterpoint to the facts on the ground. Instead, people compete to provide one another with valuable information or informed opinions as a way of gaining popularity, or
social currency
, in their networks. They feedback not just to companies or governments, but to one another.

So, as we have seen, narrative has collapsed, branding has become irrelevant, consumers see themselves as people, and everyone is engaged in constant, real-time, peer-to-peer, nonfiction communication. All the while, companies are busy trying to maintain linear, call-and-response conversations about brand mythologies with consumers. In such an environment, it’s no wonder a tiny gaffe can overtake many years and dollars of strategy. Amplified by feedback and iterated ad infinitum, a tiny pinprick of truth can pop a story that took decades to inflate.

And corporations are not alone. Political campaigns, governments, foundations, and religious institutions—which have all adopted the communications and operational styles of corporations—face the very same vulnerabilities in an everything-is-everything cacophony.

Those who think they are hip to the shifting ground rules invite their constituencies inside, but only to participate in more myth creation. For example, Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential run was characterized chiefly by faux efforts to incorporate feedback into her campaign. She began with a “listening tour” through the nation—during which she sat and nodded sympathetically while regular people told her what was wrong with their lives. This had nothing to do with creating policy and everything to do with creating the appearance of responding to feedback. As a result of all she heard, she “decided” to run for president. Then, pounding on the feedback theme still further, she invited her constituency to choose her campaign theme song by “voting” for one of the selections on her website. Her campaign ventured futilely into the era of feedback by aping the democratic integrity of
American Idol
. (She later announced the winning song in a misguided and much-ridiculed parody of
The Sopranos
—as if to demonstrate facility with the everything-is-everything resonances of a self-reflexive mediaspace. All she succeeded in doing was to equate the Clinton dynasty with that of a fictional mob family. Even if she wasn’t fractalnoid, her audience was busy making the connections.)

Corporations are attempting to enter the feedback loop as well—or at least trying to create limited opportunities for controlled feedback to occur. Crowdsourcing is really just a corporation’s way of trying to focus the otherwise random feedback from consumers onto a particular task. Unfortunately, they’re doing so without fully considering the liabilities. General Motors, for example, invited consumers to make commercials online for one of its SUVs. The company developed a very sophisticated set of Web utilities through which users could select footage, edit, add music, write title cards, and create special effects. It was a supreme statement of trust and consumer empowerment. But instead of making commercials for the vehicle, more creative participants produced videos criticizing the gas-guzzling Chevy Tahoe and the way they saw GM equating machismo and patriotism with wasteful energy consumption.
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Web visitors quickly voted these to the top of the favorites list, where they garnered the attention of television news shows. Indeed, the campaign went more viral than GM could have hoped.
Screech
.

To GM, who eventually pulled down the website, this must have seemed like an assault, some sort of activist prank or media terrorism. Why was everyone attacking GM, when all the company had done was offer people the chance to make some videos? Wasn’t this how crowdsourcing is supposed to work? For their part, the people who made the videos were simply using the tools GM provided and beginning the conversation that the company said it wanted to have. Again, the limits of openness had been reached, feedback iterated spontaneously and instantaneously into screech, and another company rethought whether it wanted to have a social media strategy at all.
⁵

Of course, in a landscape where everyone is connecting and feeding back to everything and everyone else, there is no such thing as not having a social media strategy. People inside and outside every organization—even clandestine ones—are still engaging with friends, colleagues, competitors, and strangers online. They are happy or unhappy with their jobs, purchases, representatives, schools, banks, and systems of government. Except for the few who are paid to do otherwise (professional online shills), most are telling the truth—or at least revealing it through silence, subtle cues, or their data trails. Things stay open, anyway.

An official social media strategy, executed by a professional PR firm, may help an organization deal with explicit complaints about its products. There are filtering services that can scour the net for comments made to almost any feed, giving clients the chance to answer complaints or accusations appropriately within minutes. That a company in a presentist universe must be always-on and ready to respond to critique instantaneously should go without saying. As long as these Tweets, updates, and posts are limited to a few thousand a day, this remains a manageable proposition.

But this approach is still a carryover from the days of broadcast media and easy, top-down control of communications. Back in the era of television and other electronic communications technologies, a “global media” meant satellite television capable of broadcasting video of the Olympics across the globe. This was the electronically mediated world Marshall McLuhan described as the “global village”; he was satirizing the hippy values so many thought would emerge from a world brought together by their TV sets, and in his way warning us about the impact of globalism, global markets, and global superpowers on our lives and cultures. With the rise of digital media, however, we see the possibility for a reversal of this trend. Unlike the broadcast networks of the electronic age, digital networks are biased toward peer-to-peer exchange and communication. Instead of big institutions responding to (and, in some cases, mitigating) the feedback of a world of individuals, those individuals are feeding back to one another. The institutions aren’t even in the conversation.

Instead of simply responding to feedback from consumers or constituents, institutions contending with a peer-to-peer mediaspace must stop “messaging” and instead just give people the facts and fuel they need to engage with one another in a manner that helps everyone. This means thinking of one’s customers, employees, shareholders, and competitors a bit more holistically. Social media is still social, and users move between their various identities interchangeably. The off-duty computer repairperson may be telling people more about the relative durability of laptops than the technology-review website does. Prospective shareholders engage with customers, customers engage with employees, employees engage with competitors, and competitors engage with suppliers and partners. And not all their communications will have an organization’s name in the subject field. Anything and everything that everyone is doing right now may matter. There is no damage control or crisis management. There’s just what’s happening now.

The only real choice is to give up and make that “now” as truly beneficial to an organization’s goals as possible. As strange or even naive as it may sound, this means abandoning communications as some separate task, and instead just
doing
all the right things that you want talked about. The sheer volume, constancy, and complexity of communications are too hard to consciously manage anymore. They must be regarded as the expressions of a living culture whose growth and fertility are inextricably linked to one’s own.

This is easier said than done. I regularly receive calls for help from companies and organizations looking to become more transparent. The trouble is, many of them don’t really do anything they can reveal to the public. An American television manufacturer that wanted to “get more social” with its communications strategy didn’t realize this would be impossible now that it no longer designs or makes its television sets. (It outsourced both functions to others.) Who is left to represent the company through its online interactions? Likewise, a politician wanted to become identified through social media as more of a “hometown hero”—even though he had lived in the district where he was running for only a few weeks!

In 2004 Congress authorized the funding of an international cable news channel called Alhurra (“the free one”), headquartered in Virginia but broadcast in Arabic throughout the Arab-speaking world. Launched in the wake of 9/11 at a cost of over $100 million per year, the US government’s channel was supposed to help forge better relations with viewers in these potentially hostile parts of the world. In spite of this massive effort for Alhurra to become the trusted, balanced news channel for Arabic-speaking countries, the target audiences immediately realized the propagandistic purpose of the channel and the true culture from which it emanated. Meanwhile, the English-speaking version of Arab station Al Jazeera became an unintentional hit in the United States during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street—simply because it broadcast its continuous coverage live online and showed journalistic competence in the field. (Hundreds of thousands of Americans still watch Al Jazeera, and talk about it, and interact with its broadcasters—and will likely continue to do so until a major American cable news channel figures out how to get around cable carrier contracts limiting net streaming.)

In a nonfiction, social media space, only reality counts, because only reality is what is happening in the moment. A company or organization’s best available choice is to walk the walk. This means becoming truly competent. If a company has the best and most inspired employees, for example, then that is the place people will turn to when they are looking for advice, a new product, or a job. It is the locus of a culture. Everything begins to connect. And when it does, the org chart begins to matter less than the fractal of fluid associations.

The employees and customers of the computer-game-engine company Valve are particularly suited to experiment with these principles. The privately owned company’s flagship product, the video game platform Steam, distributes and manages over 1,800 games to a worldwide community of more than 40 million players. They approach human resources with same playfulness as they do their products, enticing website visitors to consider applying for a job at the company: “Imagine working with super smart, super talented colleagues in a free-wheeling, innovative environment—no bosses, no middle management, no bureaucracy. Just highly motivated peers coming together to make cool stuff. It’s amazing what creative people can come up with when there’s nobody there telling them what to do.”
⁶

This is both a hiring tactic and good publicity. Customers want to believe the games they are playing emerge from a creative, playful group of innovators. But for such a strategy to work in the era of peer-to-peer communications, the perception must also be true. Luckily for Valve, new-media theorist Cory Doctorow got ahold of the company’s employee manual and published excerpts on the tech-culture blog BoingBoing. In Doctorow’s words, “Valve’s employee manual may just be the single best workplace manifesto I’ve ever read. Seriously: it describes a utopian Shangri-La of a workplace that makes me wish—for the first time in my life—that I had a ‘real’ job.”
⁷

Excerpts from the manual include an org chart structured more like a feedback loop than a hierarchy, and seemingly unbelievable invitations for employees to choose their own adventures: “Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions. . . . Employees vote on projects with their feet (or desk wheels). Strong projects are ones in which people can see demonstrated value; they staff up easily. This means there are any number of internal recruiting efforts constantly under way. If you’re working here, that means you’re good at your job. People are going to want you to work with them on their projects, and they’ll try hard to get you to do so. But the decision is going to be up to you.”
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Can a company really work like that? A gaming company certainly can, especially when, like Valve, it is privately owned and doesn’t have shareholders to worry about. But what makes this utopian workplace approach easiest to accept is the knowledge that one’s employees embody and exude the culture to which they’re supposedly dedicated. They are not responding to game culture, but rather creating it.

The fractal is less threatening when its shapes are coming from the inside out. Instead of futilely trying to recognize and keep up with the patterns within the screech—which usually only leads to paranoia—the best organizations create the patterns and then enjoy the ripples. Think of Apple or Google as innovators; of Patagonia or Herman Miller as representing cultures; of the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Amnesty International as advocating for constituencies; of Lady Gaga or Christopher Nolan as generating pop culture memes. They generate the shapes we begin to see everywhere.

In a social world, having people who are capable of actually generating patterns is as important for a church or government agency as it is for a corporation or tech start-up. They do something neat, then friends tell friends, and so on. If an organization already has some great people, all it needs to do is open up and let them engage with the other great people around the world who care. Yes, it may mean being a little less secretive about one’s latest innovations—but correspondingly more confident that one’s greatest innovations still rest ahead.