Future Now
The IFTF Blog
"The Lightest of Touches": Stephen Duncombe, Pt. 2
Since our first installment of interview highlights with Stephen Duncombe, there's been a big announcement concerning our interviewee. It seems that Steve will be leaving NYU to take become co-director of the the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT (the chair formerly held by Henry Jenkins). Congrats to Steve on this very prestigious post, and congrats to MIT for having the courage and foresight to grab one of the freshest thinkers (and doers!) out there.
We pick up our conversation around the topic of the rising social currency of everyday users and user generated content. Even though users are gaining a degree of internet "famo," it is not only fleeting, but uncontrollable. It is difficult to craft and control a message in the maelstrom of today's anarchic media sphere. How does a person or group communicate in this ungovernable space?
Duncombe: Billionaires for Bush for example, tried to inscribe the message into the meme itself. So, no matter what people did to the images and iconography, you were still getting something of the “Billionaires for Bush” message. But, it’s harder to have much more than a nugget of information more than three or four words that you can control. Everything is going to be flipped over, photoshopped, re-captioned, etc. When you enter into that media sphere you have to give up control of your message, because it is going to be taken away. You have to re-think how you design and release messages, you have to “bake-in” the expectation that your messages are going to be bastardized in the open media sphere.
One thing that any subculture, or political counter-culture, has to factor in is the expectation for their own co-optation by the mainstream. As Abbie Hoffman did, you have to plan in your own co-optation. Well now, you have to plan-in your own mutation. Endless mutation.
Dunagan: With this ecology of mutation and lack of control, are companies going to continue to try and work in this space, or are they going to run back to the safe confines of message control and reliable channels? Are they going to stop playing with us?
Duncombe: There are a couple of directions or models for marketers. First, you just keep going the way you’ve always been going—making sexy advertisements for Coke. You sell people the fantasy world that most people still want.
The second way is to try going down the social media, or alternate reality game, road, and as far as I can tell no one (at least no corporation) has succeeded in any meaningful way. But who did succeed was Nine-Inch-Nails. So you have to figure out, what did they do?
It is the lightest of touches. So if you can do these campaigns with the lightest of touches, and people know through buzz that this happened to be sponsored by Environmental Action, or whoever. And there’s just the hint of sponsorship, and only those who are very sophisticated and savvy can pick up on, and it becomes part of the game, then I think it could work. But I haven’t seen that happen, except in these rare instances like the NIN game.
Dunagan: So, there is this need to make things compelling in and of themselves (that’s the ‘art’), with the sponsorship or agenda smuggled in, and only visible to those who seek it out. You can’t hit people over the head with it.
Duncombe: Good work in this area opens up spaces that people have to fill in. The problem with things like the Mountain Dew “Dewmocracy” was that there was no space in there. Or the problem with the Chevy Tahoe campaign is that they opened up space, but they really didn’t want people to occupy it.
But if you ‘build-in’ space, and build into your messaging ideas for space, it means being open to the answers that people give you. This where it works very well for us in the democracy business, as opposed the selling business, because you ‘can’ create spaces for people to imagine.
So if we shift persuasion from persuading people to think "X," and instead simply persuading people "to think," then it’s a whole different ballgame.
Indeed it is.