Marketing, as it has been taught for the last couple of decades, involves identifying prospects by their preferences, demographics, and psychographics along with a host of other factors to try to craft the perfect message to reach them. The prospects are split off from their homogenous groups into market segments to be carpet bombed with logos, ad copy, videos, offers, coupons, radio and television ads with the fervent hope they will purchase something from us.
If there is one lesson from the rise of social networking, it’s that people don’t care about brands anymore, they are brands. They sell to us as much as we sell to them.
Time Wave Zero
Terrence McKenna developed an idea called ‘Time Wave Zero’ that says there will be so much novelty, that everything is so constantly changing and new, that time itself will collapse into a black hole of novelty, changing reality and human existence in permanent and profound ways. This, coincidentally, is set to occur around the same time that Mayan long count calendar, the trip wire of THE END, is set to expire.
Disclosure: McKenna developed this theory while sojourning with transdimensional beings. He was also a total acid head.
In my experience, and its one view point, I actually see less novelty and more repackaging. I call this ‘Brain Wave Zero’. I believe that the results will be essentially the same as McKenna’s theory, but the collapse will occur because we have run out of new ideas.
Most new discoveries are derivative work. They are filigree in the existing design of human understanding. With the exception of quantum physics, which sometimes appears to require LSD to comprehend, most efforts in arts, sciences and letters have to do with the further refinement of established knowledge. In my lifetime I can think of few things that have been discovered that were truly novel or required a huge shift in what is known or believed. Actually, I can’t think of any that weren’t derivatives of existing ideas.
An interesting effect of the lack of new input is that the measurements of things, markets, events, science actually change the perception and meaning of the events they are measuring, sometimes making them more important than the things that they are measuring.
The stock market is a great example. Intended as a method to concentrate and distribute capital to create industry and power business, it has become a casino. Major corporations run by playbooks instead of business plans, attempting to drive results quarter by quarter.
The reasons for price/earnings ratios, market capitalization and the like were to let investors know the state of a company from the outside so they could make informed decisions about investing in them. Today, these measurements are manipulated by the corporate management with the cooperation and collusion of investment banks, media and government agencies to assure the continued flow of cash based on ‘Q’ factor instead of real strength. The Dow Jones Average, the S&P 500 have become the sirens Wall Street uses as part of its informercial ‘ Let’s Buy Stock!’ (hosted by Maria Bartiromo). The underlying businesses are more important as buzz generators than value creators.
Collective Cluelessness
I’m a big fan of Facebook. Facebook, in a microcosm, is a perfect example of ‘Brain Wave Zero’. Facebook was positioned in the early going as a competitor and replacement for MySpace. The target audience was college students. Yet, several years on a different environment has emerged. One look at a newsfeed will instantly reveal what Facebook has become, an open outcry marketplace of ideas.
Like the old New York Stock Exchange, people call out their beliefs, observations, and causes. They post results of hours of effort toiling in Yo’Ville and FarmVille. The sweetest grandmothers you know are killing by the score in Mafia Wars. Against this backdrop are other people worried about global warming, Afghanistan, sex tourism, corporate corruption, the ailing economy, capitalism, Marxism, nihilism, revisionism, racism and the erosion of family values. I believe Facebook, and social networking in general, is a huge social advance, because of its potential not its realization.
Right now, it’s chaos. It’s at the intersection of market segmentation and individuality. It’s the Jell-O we keep trying to nail to the wall. It is both ubiquitous and meaningless. A friend once said to me, “Where’s the million dollar story involving Facebook?” meaning how can anybody make money using it? My answer was, ‘There isn’t one’. Facebook and other social networking media aren’t about making money. They’re not about anything while being about everything.
Carl Jung spoke extensively about a shared collective unconsciousness, where the thoughts of one were accessible by all. His theory was that all of us have all the knowledge of human experience because we all share a collective experience. You know what this feels like. Just think of the last time you met someone and the two of you just ‘clicked’.
Facebook is that experience, amplified repeatedly. Depending on the number of friends you have, your news feed ranges from newly discovered Abu Ghraib photos to video of a toddler’s first steps. Eloquence and stupidity play out in one post after another, filling your consciousness with the profound, banal and random thoughts of other people.
The collective result of repackaging and branding, a logo fest at once brilliant and grindingly trite; a marketplace with no product but lots of selling, human contact being the primary draw with the only cost being the most precious commodity any of us has, our time.
On December 21, 2012, will Facebook collapse into a black hole of infinite postings as we all become one Borg like mind? Will the gravity of Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, MyLife pull our reality into an infinite news feed? Would we view that as an apocalypse or another day at the keyboard?
Dispatches From The Front 