020: Are we “post social?”
[After - Session 6] Creativity, Maintenance and Destruction rinse repeat
Midjourney prompt: “Trimurti as social media influencers in the future of advertising”
I’m still stuck on the notion of pivotal moments. Hard to see, perhaps, when you’re in the middle of one; but worth noting if you can stick your head up long enough.
This class I’m teaching, the Future of Advertising, is not a crystal ball exercise. Not a tips and tricks workshop. It’s probably more like, “Looks like it’s going to rain, so please pack your galoshes—and what might that mean?” A step forward yes, predicated on a long glance back at where we came from. I love the future, especially in context of the past.
I remember the visceral thrill of those first comments to my blog 16-ish years ago, which lead to actual in-person relationships and communities. The same feeling when building networks on Twitter, never mind MySpace, Orkut, Vine, Google+, Ping… Social media is hard to scale, much less sustain—especially for us humans using the new tech! (My apologies to Type.ai and Readwise for my not engaging enough. Thanks for the email reminders.) But I have this sense we will look back on the period of 1990-2023 as primarily social in nature. We’ll tout democratized access, and empowering technology, and inter-action. But the pivotal center will be one-to-many broadcasting at a global scale. And not just for the celebrated few.
Here’s a little sideways comparison, courtesy of the pandemic: The first century of office work was about physical proximity and its attendant politics. Full stop. Suddenly, a global, never-seen-before pivot suggested office work could be something else. Suddenly, the right hand of the queen or king could be one of those tiny thumbnail images on your screen.
And we can credit the relative maturity of social for some of that upheaval. Some people saw the coming pivotal moment social was suggesting, and got curious and got engaged. They were ready for Zoom. And now whatever comes next.
Way back in 2018 I borrowed from my Vedic meditation practice to write about “the death of the ad agency (as we know it)” …a scintillating clickbait theme for the times. In Vedic philosophy the “three forms” are Creativity—the birth of something, Maintenance—its maturation, and Destruction—necessary upheaval to allow for…[Insert the TikTok trick of ending so as to seamlessly loop back to the beginning]. Oh! Let’s be clear: “destruction” doesn’t mean obliteration. We didn’t destroy pens and pencils, their use just evolved. Also, the three forms are not centered in time. Birth, maturity or destruction could be moments, or eons, depending.
I think it’s likely we are pivoting from Social’s maintenance into whatever its destruction/evolution means. It won’t disappear; it’s become the foundation upon which the future of advertising will be born.