And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [61]
It was a natural fit, I realized: evangelical product evangelists. I thought about the kind of person who might play Cali’s CD to more than fifty people—as “chillout music” at the Wednesday youth group meeting, perhaps, or background pop for a report to the Sunday congregation about the teen mission trip to New Orleans, with the audience unaware all the while that the kid was earning ten or more sweet points in a marketing campaign. The kid would be someone embedded in a real community, one where people trusted one another precisely not to be secret agents on behalf of anything other than their own, honest taste. The person with no community to betray has nothing left to sell out.
We often forget today that a self-conscious, role-playing breed of secret agentry used to be an integral part of our culture; indeed, it once coexisted with real community. I am referring to a host of formerly iconic organizations that are now all dead or nearly so: the Masons, the Elks, the Eagles, the Moose, the Odd Fellows, the Order of the Eastern Star, and so many more. For his seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnam tallied up historical membership numbers for these fraternal groups up to the present day, and the declines were unsurprisingly grim. As of 1997, the Masons were down 71 percent, the Elks down 46 percent, the Odd Fellows down 94 percent to near extinction; and no doubt the numbers have continued to slide since then, as the Internet has increasingly promised us that “community” is something to be found not together but alone, online. It is easy to look at the tens of thousands of consumers who have signed up for word-of-mouth marketing programs, as “agents” or “insiders” or “evangelists” shilling for things, and to imagine how in an earlier time such urges to secrecy and obedience might have been more naturally, humanly, and even rewardingly channeled into a secret handshake or a solemn oath swearing eternal brotherhood in the Loyal Order of Moose.
Does word-of-mouth marketing have a future? The question is difficult to answer, because the very shift in consumer consciousness that companies are hoping to harness—our understanding of ourselves as embedded in social networks—opens us to marketing but inoculates us against it too. Just as the “meme” concept makes us think like economists, reducing ideas to free-market-style constructs, the very notion of a “social network” makes us think like marketers, stripping down our sense of community, segmenting ourselves self-consciously into niches, reducing the unknowable richness of group relationships down to barren trees of links and nodes. This is not to say that real human relationships don’t flourish online: of course they do, just as real ideas can flourish there too. But they flourish despite our consciousness of their networked characteristics, not because of it; we no more find friendship by “friending” people than we find love by attempting, in the second grade, to be the kid who gives out the most valentines. Instead, what we learn in these moments when we amass friends and update profiles, boiling down the interpersonal to numbers and charts, is a sense of ourselves and our social circles as products on display. We hone our sense of what’s hot, and among whom; we look out for tipping points, with little care as to what is tipping or whether it deserves to do so. In such a milieu, word-of-mouth marketing is destined to be both ubiquitous and useless, for when one has developed the media mind—which is, at heart, a marketing mind—one can never stop selling, but neither can one be entirely sold.
The deeper, and more vexing, question is how a populace in the thrall of the media mind can hope to govern itself. It is to this question, finally, that we turn in chapter 5.
5.
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