Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Douglas Adams has pointed out that there three types of technology in the world:

1. Technology that already existed when you were born. This is not really technology at all, it is just part of the natural order of things.

2. Technology invented between your birth and your 30th birthday. This is cool, and wacky, and maybe you can make a career out of it.

3. Technology invented after you turned thirty. This is dangerous, evil and WRONG!

We all fall into those traps, but it is the first trap I want to talk about today. You might call  it the Amish trap, and do so fairly safe from provoking a Twitterstorm, as hardly any Amish people are on Twitter. In their determination to resist 'technology' the Amish simply ignored ploughs, scythes and axes, not seeming to regard them as technology at all. 

We make the same mistake when we assume that social media are new. Taking the long view, mass media are new. One hundred years ago there was no TV and no radio. There were movies – black and white and silent – and there were newspapers, mostly serving a single town and with Letters to the Editor as a major component. All other media were interactive and social.

We were all born in the age of TV, so we think it is normal, but it is just a phase, already coming to an end. The most popular regularly broadcast show in the UK – ie part of a serial, not a one off like a sports event or a royal wedding – was the last episode of To the Manor Born. In the US the top show was the last episode of M*A*S*H*. All the top ten shows in both countries were broadcast in the late 70s or early 80s. As I tell my students: "you were born in the age of TV, but it peaked before you were born". 

My father, as it happens, was born before the age of TV, and has lived well into its declining years. 

In 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson wanted to get Americans to take an interest in the war in Europe, he trained people to deliver four minute speeches in their local communities. Four minutes was the length of time it took to change the reels at a movie theatre. They were therefore taking advantage of the very early stages of mass media to interact directly with their audience. These "Four Minute Men" were all respected figures in their local communities: doctors, teachers or religious ministers. This was a social media campaign. What we think of as new – identifying influencers and through them, their communities, was once the normal way of communicating.

The age of mass media was a diversion in the course of human history. The command and control model of media – and thus of marketing, PR and political communications – is remarkably recent, and it is already dying. Broadcast technologies – including advertising and propaganda – dehumanise us. They enabled the rise of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and Gaddaffi. But as Gaddaffi came to realise and Assad must be realising now, the command and control model of media does not work any more. Human scale communication is reasserting itself. Government control of the media is over.

Given the terrible consequences of command and control media, we should welcome this change. Brandjackers everywhere – from Jeff Jarvis, to Dave Carroll to Greenpeace – are helping to bury the age of advertising.

So let us welcome back social media into our lives. Our grandparents would have recognised these principles, even if the specific platforms might have baffled them. 

The times, they are a'changin' back.