But the Earth reached its maximum state of openness, at least so far, on September 10, 2001. The next day, we learned how all this openness can be turned on its head, lending the explosive impact of jet liners and the population density of modern skyscrapers to a few guys armed with box cutters. That’s when the dream of a connected world revealed itself rather as the nightmare of a world vulnerable to network effects. Whether it’s a congressman losing his job over an errant Tweet, a State Department humiliated by the release of its cache of cables on WikiLeaks, or a corporation whose progressive consumers just learned their phones were assembled in Chinese sweatshops, connectedness has turned every glitch into a potentially mortal blow, every interactor into a potential slayer.
It may seem glib to equate a terrorist attack with a public relations snafu, but from the perspective of the institutions now under seemingly perpetual assault, it is the same challenge: how can they better respond to the crises emerging seemingly from anywhere and everywhere, all the time? How can they predict and avoid these crises in the first place? When everything is connected to everything else, where does this process even begin? Any action from anywhere may be the game changer—the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil that leads to a hurricane in China. And all of it happening at the same time, because cause and effect seem to have merged into the same moment.
Welcome to the world of feedback and iteration, the cyclical processes on which fractals are based. In a normal situation, feedback is just the response you get from doing something. It’s the echo that comes back after you shout into a canyon, the quizzical looks on the faces of students after you tell them a new idea, or even the size of the harvest you get after trying a new fertilizer. You take an action and you get feedback. You then use this feedback to figure out how to adjust for the next time. You shoot an arrow; it lands to the left of the bull’s eye; you adjust by aiming farther to the right; and so on. Each time you adjust is another iteration of the feedback loop between you and the target.
For feedback to be useful there must be some interval between the thing you’ve done and the result you’ve created. You need time to see what happened and then adjust. In a presentist world, that feedback loop gets really tight. Feedback happens so fast that it becomes difficult even to gauge what’s happening. You know that feeling when you’re holding a microphone and the speakers suddenly screech, and you don’t know which way to move to make it stop? That’s actually feedback you’re dealing with and trying to control. Normally the microphone simply hears the sound of your voice and passes it on to the amplified speaker. When you get too close to one of those speakers, however, the microphone ends up listening to its own noise. Then that noise goes back through the amplifier and speaker, at which point the microphone hears it again, and sends it back on through—again, and again, and again. Each iteration amplifies the sound more and more, thousands of times, until you hear the combined, chaotic screech of an infinite and instantaneous feedback loop. Only we don’t hear a cyclical loop; we just hear the high-pitched whine. That’s the way the world sounds right now to most governments and businesses. Everything becomes everything.
Fractals are really just a way of making sense of that screech. Deep inside that screech is the equivalent of one of those cyclical, seemingly repetitive Philip Glass orchestral compositions. We just don’t have the faculties to hear it. Computers, on the other hand, work fast enough that they have time to parse and iterate the equation. Like a kid drawing seemingly random circles with a Spirograph, computers track the subtle differences between each feedback loop as it comes around, until they have rendered the utterly beautiful tapestries that evoke coral reefs, forest floors, or sand dunes, which are themselves the products of cyclical iterations in the natural world.
The fractal is the beautiful, reassuring face of this otherwise terrifying beast of instantaneous feedback. It allows us to see the patterns underlying the seeming chaos, the cycles within the screechy collapsed feedback of our everything-all-at-once world.
Feedback used to be slow. A company might upgrade a product and put it out into the market, and wait a full season to see how it did. Feedback came in the form of inventory reports and returns. The way a product sold was the feedback a company needed to plan for the next season. In traditional politics, feedback came every few years through the voting booth. It eventually tightened to polls conducted weekly or even daily, but at least there was some control and sequence to the process: leak a policy, poll the public, then either announce it or not.
When feedback comes instantaneously and from all sides at once, it’s hard to know how people are reacting to what we are doing—or what we’re doing that they’re even reacting to. Social media lets people feed back their responses immediately and to one another instead of just back to the business or politician concerned. Then other people respond as much to those messages as they do to the product or policy. They are feeding back to one another. In a landscape with instantaneous lateral feedback, marginal box office on the opening night of a movie—even if it has nothing to do with the movie—ends up being Tweeted to the next day’s potential viewers. The negativity iterates, and the movie fails, even if it got good reviews from the traditional channels of feedback.
Businesses attempt to adjust in real time to the comments about their products emerging on bulletin boards, update feeds, or anywhere else, and often don’t even know whether the feedback is coming from someone who has seen or touched the actual product. Brand managers know they’re in a world where companies are expected to be present in all these venues, responding and adjusting, clarifying and placating—but it’s hard to do when everybody is talking at once, feeding back into one another and the product and the competition and the shareholders. Thanks to feedback and iteration, any single Tweet can mushroom into a cacophony. Ideation, corporate culture, development, production, branding, consumer research, and sales all become part of an iterative, circular equation where causes and effects can no longer be parsed. When feedback comes through the cycle in that uncontrollable way, it’s like putting that microphone next to the speaker amplifying its own signal. All you get is screech. You don’t know where to stand to make it stop. The speakers are everywhere. Everything is everything.
Traditional corporate communications don’t function in such an environment. Remember, corporations themselves were born to counteract the peer-to-peer, every-which-way connectivity of the bazaar. As we saw earlier, the corporate brand emerged as a stand-in for the community member who may have once provided the goods that are now being shipped in from some faraway place. The company doesn’t want us dwelling on the factories where our cookies are being made, especially when they could just as easily have been baked by a friend in town without the need for long-distance shipping or unhealthy preservatives. So instead of telling us the true story of the factory, the corporation tells us the story of how elves baked the cookies in a hollow tree. This is what is known as brand mythology; it was not developed to enhance the truth, but to replace it.
Now this all worked well enough in an age of print and broadcast media. Those media were themselves developed largely to promote this sequential, back-and-forth style of communication between corporations and their consumers. In fact, the whole notion of balanced reporting by newspapers—itself a mythological construct if ever there was one—emerged in response to the advertising needs of corporations, who did not want their ads appearing next to editorial copy that might alienate any potential customers. Television, similarly, served as little more than electronic wallpaper for advertising. Difficult ideas were left for the movies, PBS, and, later, HBO.
Until quite recently, companies enjoyed exclusive dominion over the vast majority of messaging that reached people. This allowed them to craft the stories they wanted to, control their dissemination through the media, and then respond to the orderly sales feedback or controlled sentiment studies. The rise of interactive technologies, which finally gave consumers a way to feed back directly to th
eir screens in real time, encouraged many companies to begin thinking less in terms of story than in those of “conversation.”
As Kevin Roberts, CEO of the once colossal Saatchi & Saatchi, explained to me, “The consumer is now in total control.” He waxed sentimental as he described the new empowerment. “I mean she can go home, she’s going to decide when she buys, what she buys, where she buys, how she buys. . . . Oh, boy, they get it you know, they’re so empowered at every age. They are not cynical; they are completely empowered; they’re autonomous. All the fear is gone and all the control is passed over to the consumer. It’s a good thing.”3
Many companies tried to take part in this conversation, under the impression that consumers really wanted to speak with them. What they failed to recognize is that consumers don’t want to speak with companies through social media; we want to speak with one another. We don’t even think of ourselves as consumers anymore, but as people. The great peer-to-peer conversation of the medieval bazaar, which was effectively shut down by the rise of corporate communications, is back. One advantage (or side effect, depending on your perspective) of being always-on is that we are never limited to just one role. Thanks to smart phones, we are available to our clients while vacationing with our family at the beach. We bid on eBay items from work and cruise for prospective mates from the safety of our own bedrooms. On social networks, we are at once consumer, producer, citizen, parent, and lover.
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.4 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!
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