Ha-ha, Ah-ha and Oh-yeah: cultural irony and rediscovery

A lot of the cultural items we consume or partake of – hairstyles, shoes, tv shows, slang, professed values, bands, etc. – can be thought of as socially instrumental. That is, they can have a “symbolic value” over and above their use value, entertainment value or whatever. We often consume them not only because of what they do, but because of what we hope they add to our social identity in the eyes of those we esteem and those we despise, to our in-group and our out-group.

A while ago, I wrote a post illustrating part of this (intuitive? clichéd?) idea. I tried to show how the mutual interactions and reactions of three distinct cultural subgroups – trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes – can drive cultural items through their life cycle. This idea has occurred to a lot of us: many social groups’ preferences (for shoes, bands, styles, slang, etc.) respond – positively or negatively – to other groups’ preferences. Slang and cadence, for example, are often valuable signals and affirmations of group affiliation, so preferences for specific slang terms change rapidly with diffusion outside the group. We illustrated this as interwoven curves along the path from few partaking (o) to most everybody doing it (n).


But so far we haven’t really discussed the later part of a cultural item’s life cycle, the point after c in the graph. Frequently, cultural items just go away and are never heard from again. But sometimes they come back around. In this post I want to look at some late stage possibilities for trends, particularly cultural irony – imbuing cultural items with a different, more "self-aware" symbolic value than they originally had – and rediscovery – rehabilitating older cultural items for current use.

Irony and Rediscovery

First of all, some items never really go through the creep from fringe to mainstream. Agreed. The idea here isn’t to model the essential, inviolable profile of a trend. Rather, it’s just that in most collections of people presented with a cultural choice you can roughly define different subgroups by how their preferences change relative to others’ preferences. For example, within the regular joes there are likely to be different constituencies analogous to trendsetters and hipsters. That is, some regular joes will be a lot like hipsters in their preferences – ready to partake of items not quite fully mainstream. If we restrict n to regular joes, the preference profiles of the different types within this group might look something like our graph.

Anyway, cultural items that never go through the full cycle at the highest, all sub-groups cultural level – that take off in or are specific to one sub-group only – become particularly interesting when we consider irony.

Ironic embrace is cultural consumption that’s generally very aware of the consumed item’s cultural history. This awareness often becomes an explicit part of its new symbolic value. Consider the recent ironic rehabilitation of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rick Astley and ‘90s pop (Bell, Biv, DeVoe is suddenly on every hipster playlist). Faint nostalgia notwithstanding, most of the consumption of this stuff (like 70s and 80s ironic embrace before it) seems to be ironic.

Grossly simplifying, there are two big possibilities for ironic embrace. The first is when one sub-group appropriates a cultural item from another group after the latter has already abandoned it.

When this happens, we often get what I call ha-ha irony. An example – also illustrating my advanced age – might help. At a “noise” show back in the very early ‘90s (noise became fleetingly cool when “alternative” was mainstreamed by bands like Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction) the headliner’s lead screamer wore a New Kids On The Block t-shirt. At this point, NKOTB’s popularity had dried up even among their teen target. The contrast between a defunct teeny-bop group and the aggressive, self-consciously oppositional posturing of noise music was obviously the ironic point. This is a case of ha-ha irony. It’s just a broad joke or gag and in no way even remotely critical. In fact it even has the prototypical joke structure: an unexpected shift in reference or clash of expectations results in humor.

Obviously, this isn’t a full-blown new trend arising out of an old one. Rather it’s a cultural item that typifies the prefab pop trend previously popular among the mainstream appropriated for new symbolic purposes by a self-consciously opposed sub-group. Bearing this in mind, it could be graphed something like this:


This time we start at c, the point on the original graph where the item peaks for the regular joes, and proceed to n. After n the item starts to become a cultural liability for regular joes and the total population partaking plummets to m, which is much less than n. Now the trendsetters can claim the cultural item for ha-ha ironic purposes. The trendsetters, of course, will start to abandon if the hipsters pick it up at a’, that is, when the hipsters come to see it as a codified ironic strategy (see). But this case probably wouldn’t get past a’. (Although, an ironic mini-trend did occur in the early ‘90s when noise acts started appropriating the insipid graphics of those new-agey “Smooth Sounds” whale-song albums.)

The NKOTB case involves an item that never went through the full cycle from trendsetters to regular joes. Or rather, it’s an item that the hipsters at the noise show most likely never invested in. NKOTB more or less started out with the regular joes. My guess is that this is often the case with ha-ha irony: the items that get ironically rehabilitated by one sub-group tend to be yanked off the junk heap of another subgroup. In this case, it was the hipsters using teeny-bop detritus to highlight their aggressively oppositional stance to pop music. It was a joke that everybody – even the regular joes once into NKOTB– would get. As a sort of rule, we could say the greater the item’s one time value to a subgroup, the greater its potential to be used in a ha-ha ironic way by members of a self-consciously oppositional group.

The second possibility for ironic embrace is when one group ironically appropriates a cultural item from another while the latter group is still into it.

Not surprisingly, we usually get ha-ha irony here, too. Consider some clever hip-kids’ “love” of geeky sci-fi/fantasy conventions, like Dragoncon in Atlanta, Georgia where middle-aged IT professionals (that’s actually unfair... young IT pros dig it too) party all night in DIY Klingon armor. These fringe affairs are really, really popular among die-hard fans and represent for them a market for a very specific sort of symbolic capital. For the hip-kids, on the other hand, it’s a lark, a gag, a chance to ogle the arcane rituals of nerd-communion in their proper environs. The hip-kids’ intended audience – the group from whom they seek recognition of the value of attendance – is their buddies, not the group actually attending the convention. Also, the hip-kids' symbolic value comes from a completely different cultural and symbolic arena than it does for the earnest fan-boys.

It’s sort of like cultural poaching for laughs. Once a few ironic trendsetters start doing it, the very next year will see hipsters joining in. We can graph this second ironic configuration like this:



Under certain circumstances, this sort of value relationship can result in what I call ah-ha irony (as opposed to jokey ha-ha irony). We can illustrate ah-ha irony with a slight alteration of the noise band example. Suppose it had been a Nirvana shirt instead of NKOTB. At the time, Nirvana was wickedly popular and symbolized the mainstreaming tendency that allowed noise bands to arise as an oppositional alternative in the cultural marketplace. Nirvana had gone through the full cycle from trendsetter popularity on the periphery to mainstream pop adoration among the regular joes. Wearing a Nirvana shirt – the incarnation of the new ‘90s pop which many hipster fans viewed as a sort of personal cultural theft – would have been a really critical, really exclusionary (in the sense of in-group/out-group defining) statement that few would have gotten. After all, most of the kids at the show had been – or still were – into Nirvana. That ambiguity of intention is sort of the calling card of “good” or at least powerful irony: it should be sneaky or at least not intelligible to all and have some sort of critical quality.

What seems to distinguish these cases of ha-ha and ah-ha irony is closeness to the cultural item. In the ha-ha irony cases, the kids who were being ironic probably hadn’t been part of any of the groups involved in the item’s trend cycle. They were outsiders who could objectify the cultural item. However, in the ah-ha case, it’s trendsetters using something that most hipsters (and they themselves) had recently invested in as an ironic prop.

It’s probably not anything like a rule, but this specific example of ah-ha irony looks something like this:


The item went through the whole curve; the trendsetters and hipsters had been committed to it at one time. Needless to say, ah-ha irony is really rare (or maybe not and I just don’t get it). It’s usually used solely by fine artists, motivated by chronic self-awareness and cultural inferiority complexes, which drive them to theoretical, unaesthetic excesses. I know because I was one... probably still am.

Let’s look finally at “rediscovery,” earnest and ironic. Sometimes cultural items come back from the dead. Sometimes the folks doing the reviving are earnest (the Nick Drake revival about 12 years ago and the garage rock revival about 4-5 years ago). Sometimes they’re ironic (disco’s many revivals and Enoch Light). But most of the time, it’s a mix of both (the ‘80s synth-pop sound, particularly in contemporary French and West Coast alterna-pop) and it’s always with different intentions than when the item was actually culturally current.


This graph, like the irony graphs, starts at c and goes through the crash at n. After n there’s a period of cultural hibernation while all of the groups assume their original relative positions. At some point, the item gets picked up by the self-conscious cultural adventurers (earnest indie rockers for Nick Drake, the gay community for at least a couple of the disco revivals) and the cycle starts again.

So why is rediscovery sometimes earnest and sometimes ironic? Well, I think part of it might have to do with uptake among past cultural groups and the perceived genealogy of contemporary cultural groups. Contemporary groups that understand themselves as having “descended” somehow from traditionally oppositional subcultures often approach items from these “related” subcultures earnestly and items from “unrelated” or mainstream culture ironically. Regular joes, since they’re not quite as culturally sensitized or obsessively self-aware as trendsetters and hipsters, generally shoot for ha-ha irony unless the item has already gotten past b’. In that case, it’s no longer really “rediscovery”: the item has been “contemporized” or brought back into currency. (Regular joes that still dig the music they loved in high school – “it’s not about new or old...Aerosmith just made quality rock, man!” – aren’t rediscovering anything... they’re just frozen in a particular cultural period.)

A Last Note

But this whole graph-y, representational thing I have going skirts one obvious and over-talked point about contemporary culture: it seems to be moving faster. The trend circuit from hip to passé to rediscovery is getting quicker and quicker. So much quicker that the whole concept of rediscovery makes less and less sense every day. Something similar is happening to the idea of mainstream; it doesn’t really seem to have the old, easy to poke at stodginess it used to. Actually, it’s pretty hard to even locate in the first place. Why is this happening?

Just speculating here, but pervasive media probably helps. Modern user-tailored, user-driven media like the web is really good at getting stuff from the fringe to the center, from “hip” to “mainstream,” overnight. Stuff that used to take years to bubble to the surface through old media channels now zips up almost instantly in a process of accelerated mainstreaming that calls into question the whole idea of fringe and center, counterculture and mainstream.

But in the west at least we still seem to highly value the idea of oppositional individualism and the autonomy of our choices, of trendsetters, “mavericks” and nonconformists, out there marching to the beat of a different, etc. A significant number of folks in the west – most I’d say – have internalized this cultural value or ideal. Trendsetters and hipsters probably wouldn’t be our culture’s marketing holy grail otherwise.

You put these together – media that rapidly drains oppositional cultural positions of their “outsider,” “in the know” status and an internalized cultural admiration of the “individualist” or the “nonconformist” – and you get accelerating trend cycles. After all, if cultural items come larded with a symbolic value that is partially determined by the item’s prevalence, and modern media provide a fat but highly user-responsive channel to spread the word, then you’ll have to act quickly to stay relevant. In this environment, uptake and abandonment of trends is going to speed up.

Adding to the mix cultural industries like film and fashion, that, to a certain extent, have institutionalized in their marketing and business models ideas of constant opposition, innovation or nonconformity, and things really get moving. Taking just one example, the fashion industry is built on the idea of annual overthrow, of mainstreaming (i.e. making passé) last year’s line so this year’s can supplant it. It’s a business model founded on the idea of the incessantly new. Fashion marketing hinges on – and thus amplifies – the desire to be slightly ahead of the curve, to break with the currently mainstream fashion, to be more distinct and “original” (in acceptably fashionable ways) than your peers. In the present media context of almost instant diffusion and accelerated mainstreaming, their business model of providing “the new” and their marketing model of codifying, amplifying and creating a “need” for “the latest,” results in accelerating demand that outstrips their creative capacity. The result: unrepentant cultural recycling at a faster and faster pace.

Of Market Analogies and Ultimatum Games: the myth of web utopianism

Web utopianism is the idea that the web is somehow fundamentally or essentially a positive force. It’s not just that the web is more important, socially “impactful” or different than other media. Rather, it’s the claim that the web is, by its nature, for the greater good. Many futurists and web pundits seem to push utopianism as the web’s “brand,” effectively the set of concepts, assumptions, implications and preferences making up its popular conception. But if we buy into this brand, this idea that the web is in some way essentially good, we greatly reduce our responsibilities as designers and users. Once we take the web to be simply good in itself, we no longer really have to consider the potentially bad consequences of our creations or actions, by whatever standard.

Often utopianists frame the web as the ultimate market, where great ideas, unique voices, vital information and compelling products rise to meet the true and internally generated needs and desires of fully autonomous, choice-empowered, creative consumers. From this freedom of access and choice and the ease with which we can create, share and elevate content, they draw positive democratic and communitarian conclusions. As the story goes, the web is about cultural disintermediation on a grand scale: anybody can create the next video craze through YouYube or help build a surprisingly accurate reference work like Wikipedia. Powerful cultural gatekeepers, who for years perpetuated pernicious and self-serving social and informational hierarchies, are suddenly irrelevant. What’s more, nobody will miss them. As it turns out, claim the utopianists, markets are essentially better at arriving at truth, quality and beauty than experts ever could be. And markets coordinate on these desirable ends through the individual, undirected, autonomous choices of consumer-creators. Thus, the utopianists conclude, the web is a technically aided manifestation of Democratic ideals. And this is obviously good.

Perfect Markets Meet Imperfect Web

Unfortunately, this view is wrong in the same way superstitions are wrong: its evaluations and claims are based on shaky assumptions about mechanisms. I want to avoid the cultural politics of the issue and look at some of the utopianists assumptions. First of all, the positive evaluation of the web as a market seems to follow only by analogy to a specific sort of competitive market, what’s called a perfectly competitive market. This is an idealization of the conditions under which the price arrived at by interacting consumers and suppliers will match the “true value” of a commodity. The idealized conditions are pretty stringent and numerous. For example, you must have a large number of suppliers; no barriers to entry; everyone gets the same complete information; no one turns a profit; no one advertises or markets; each supplier’s output is pretty much individually negligible to the ultimate price; and each supplier’s output is intersubstitutable for any other’s. If these conditions are met, then prices will reflect the “true” value of the product.

The utopianists’ idea seems to be that the web is like a perfectly competitive market because it appears to meet somewhat analogous conditions.

• Anyone can contribute and huge numbers actually do.
• Consumers can access any information at will.
• They can find exactly what they want regardless of how niche it might be and can costlessly choose between options.
• They can state their opinions, create whatever they want or share their knowledge truthfully or “authentically” without the biasing influence of social pressure.
• There are few recognizable extrinsic incentives to contribute, which avoids the skewing of contributions associated with profits.
• Finally, any one contribution is as good as any other and doesn’t really affect the final information. In other words, no one opinion can skew the final collective result because there are so many and there’s always someone willing to refute anyone.

Obviously, it’s a strained analogy. Prices and evaluations are "true" in very different and hard to express ways. Settling true evaluations from masses of tastes and opinions isn’t much like setting prices from masses of tastes and desires. Still, something very close to this analogy is a pretty implicit assumption among many web utopianists (and almost explicit in Wikipedia’s “Jimbo” Wales’s public veneration of F.A. Hayek, father of modern equilibrium theory). To many utopianists, the web is simply structurally conducive to settling on true information or elevating true quality in much the same way perfectly competitive markets are conducive to settling on “true” prices.

But the web just doesn’t work this way. Perfectly competitive conditions don’t hold together on the web. There are many reasons the web's not a perfect market, but I’ll just look at one big one: the false assumption that people online aren’t subject to social pressure or influence that might skew the collective result. It’s based on the idea that people’s visible actions aren’t informational signals themselves; that people’s choices follow an ideal of narrowly rational, autonomous reflection. Duncan Watts’s much discussed recent research shows that social influence in cultural markets, e.g. an opinion market like a movie review site, actually leads to radically unpredictable (i.e. quality doesn’t predict success), highly unequal (i.e. huge difference between very famous and slightly famous) distributions for cultural items. In a nutshell, famous things get more famous and this is a contingent, path-dependent process which has very limited correlation with actual quality. In other words, the same items might show very different success or evaluation patterns depending on chance uptake events at earlier stages of the process.

Clearly, this suggests that the conditions for perfect competition aren’t met in markets with significant signaling, like the web. Markets like this won’t necessarily result in the “best” or "truest" rising to the top automatically because the assumption of autonomous decisions just doesn’t hold. As Clay Shirky has noted, the web makes socialization, communication and coordinated activity "ridiculously easy." I'd say it's more than easy, it's pervasive and inescapable. Stretching the economic metaphor a bit, whenever coordination and communication are cheap, information "cartels" form reflexively and not just when people are positively motivated to alter the competitive landscape to their advantage. People pool and align their opinions (and thus productions) whenever communication is possible, skewing the market. They look to others' actions – not just to their own fact based judgments of quality – to help them make decisions. If something starts to take off, this is “social proof” of value, an assumed signal of quality, and others follow suit. Seeing what does well, more of the same is produced. The social web is all about such signaling – sharing your actions and choices – and thus it's rife with social influence. It really can’t be a perfectly competitive market. (This effect is similar to, but distinct from, so called herd behavior and informational cascades, which also make perfect competition difficult.)

Also, the “Democratic ideal” utopianists claim the web promises is the political analog of the perfectly competitive market: the “best” or “truest” result arises when no special interests have undue influence, when tastes, knowledge and needs can aggregate, free from the distorting interests of profit, influence and pooled power. Utopianists point to knowledge aggregators like Wikipedia as prime practical examples of this idea. But Wikipedia is clearly not a perfectly competitive knowledge market or democracy. Rather it’s an oligopoly, or its political analog an oligarchy. A core group of contributors, the editors, has considerably more power and wields considerably more social influence (i.e. their actions are neither negligible nor intersubstitutable) than all other contributors. “Jimbo” Wales’s admiration of Hayek notwithstanding, Wikipedia is not a pure democracy. It’s an oligarchy. And oligarchies do not structurally result in the “truth” the way democracies or perfect markets supposedly do. Wikipedia is successful (to the degree that it is) not because of the nature of wikis or the web, but rather because of the oligarchy’s ability to manage the negative effects of social influence, informational cascades and bad behavior. And this is arguably the result of social influence used for positive ends, not just the structurally positive force of a perfect "knowledge market" or informational democracy (added April 8: the importance of "community" to the success of wikis is made very clearly by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody and by Cass Sunnstein in Infotopia).

Ultimatum Games and Two Types of Prosociality

Well, the utopianists respond, the relative success of Wikipedia’s oligopoly/-garchy suggests that maybe the web isn’t structurally good in the sense that truth, originality or the “best” stuff succeeds solely in virtue of the implementation. Maybe the web just helps people’s native goodness, prosociality and urge for reciprocal interaction to flourish. The web makes it easier for folks to coordinate, create and realize their intrinsic desire to be, not just social, but prosocial. So the necessary goodness of the web is its ability to amplify and enable user's intrinsic prosocial motivations.

However, this weakened, indirect argument – if used for utopianist ends – founders on something like social influence just as the stronger perfect competition argument does. When people are susceptible to social influence – informational cascades, herd behavior, Watts’s social signaling and conformity or esteem effects – bad behavior or lock-in of less than optimal norms often results. After all, there are two distinct ways to understand “prosociality”: as a desire to share, strive and be nice or as a desire to simply do as others expect you to do. Both ways are about deference to your social group. But only the former is automatically positive in the way web utopianists seem to assume. On the latter, if all of your friends are jerks, you think they expect jerkiness of their peers, and you want them to like and esteem you, then you’ll probably be jerky, too. You’re deferring to what you take to be the expectations of those you hang out with.

Against this less than estimable version of “prosociality” the utopianists often claim that research shows we’ve a hard-wired preference for good prosociality, that we're intrinsically motivated to be prosocial in the positive sense. In particular, they often point to results from Ultimatum games, which purport to show we’ve an evolved preference for flat fairness, what the behavioral economist Herbert Gintis calls “strong reciprocity.” Ultimatum games have two players, Proposer and Responder, and a set sum of “money,” say, $4. The Proposer can offer any sum to the Responder. If the Responder accepts, they both get their cuts, but if he rejects, neither get anything. Research indicates that Responders often reject what we would consider unfair offers and Proposers often start with close to a 50-50 split. In other words, Responders are willing to sacrifice potential gain if the Proposer is unfair and many Proposers seem to immediately offer the fair split. Supposedly this shows that people have a simple preference for fairness, which they argue is a hard-wired, positive-prosocial drive.

Obviously, we’re social animals and thus have an evolved knack for some sort of prosociality. But we have to be clear what’s actually exhibited by the Ultimatum game. Relying on a literature review and critique by Cristina Bicchieri and some ideas of Ken Binmore, some Ultimatum game experiments suggest that these results may be more an effect of the perception of the situation or context than a simple preference for fairness. People are conditionally fair depending on their expectation of other’s expectations and often on what they think others will accept given these expectations. It’s not a matter of fairness, per se, as much as it's a matter of what others expect and thus what you can get away with.

For instance, cross-cultural studies [pdf] of Ultimatum games suggest that people’s rejection rate is culturally determined. In some societies, rejection is very rare regardless of the offer. This suggests that people have a preference for meeting situationally relevant expectations rather than a preference for simple fairness. It's the norms in play that matter rather than some absolute or hard-wired standard of fairness, and this influences both what Proposers expect to be acceptable and what Responders expect to be offered. Similarly, Ultimatum games with asymmetric information suggest that Proposers are generally more interested in appearing to meet salient fairness norms – thus decreasing likelihood of rejection – than actually being fair. Consider the case in which the Proposer knows that the chips used in the experiment are worth 3 times more to him than to the Responder and he knows that the Responder doesn’t know this. If we all simply preferred being fair, as opposed to appearing fair to hedge our bets going into interactions, the Proposer should most often offer 75% of the money. That’s the fair value split. As it is, Proposers in this scenario offer slightly less than 50% of the chips on average. Obviously, we don’t necessarily just prefer fairness for its own sake, which is what’s assumed by the positive-prosiciality idea. Rather we prefer to follow whatever norms we take to be expected by others – the less than estimable prosociality.

So if it’s the case that we’re not so much driven by simple, positive prosociality as we are by the desire to do as our peers expect of us – as the situation-relevant norms suggest we should act – then the prospects for this weakened form of web utopianism aren’t all that great either. That is, if the utopianists argument is that the web is essentially good because it allows the intrinsically positive-prosocial motivations of agents to flourish unhindered by the overhead of real world socialization, then it’s founded on a mistake. Our prosociality isn’t as normatively rosy as they assume. It’s a desire to do as we think others expect of us, which is not necessarily good in the way utopianists need it to be for their argument to work.

No ‘Topias

In this post, though we avoided the political versions of web utopianism, we’ve discussed two of the most interesting non-political strains. They clearly don’t hold water. The web isn’t the wholly positive boon to humanity the utopianists want it to be. But neither is it the great destroyer of culture the panicky, proudly paternalist web dystopianists take it to be (aside: avoid Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that actually deserves to be called a rant or a screed. It’s like the web insulted his mother or something). The web is just a massively influential tool – or fact – with impossible to predict social and cultural impact. Some of the impact will be positive, some negative and some both on different time scales. We just don’t know. But utopianism of the sorts considered above assume that the web just is positive. Taken seriously, this assumption mitigates our responsibility as designers, creators, sponsors and consumers of content and experiences on the web. In reality, we don’t know what the real social and cultural results of our actions will be. But we need to act as if they could be negative so that we feel compelled to strive for – not just expect – the positive in the long term. Doing anything else is irresponsible no matter how nice or progressive it would be to believe the web a simply positive force.

Authenticty and The Economy of Esteem

Authenticity was much talked about in marketing circles a couple of years ago. Specifically, in trying to reach a coveted and marketing-wary demographic like young adults you have to appear to be “authentic” in your approach. Your whatsit must “authentically” appeal to them as a spontaneous product of their own milieu and not as a calculated, outsider’s attempt at cynically leveraging their culture against them.

The tricky bit, of course, is that everybody knows that everything for sale is positioned and marketed rather cynically and that “authenticity” as a desirable component of marketing sort of undoes itself. Is this kind of paradoxical? If you design something, particularly a marketing campaign, to be authentic haven’t you automatically rendered it inauthentic? Well, sort of yes and sort of no.

A recent book on the subject apparently claims that “authenticity” is a matter of consumer perception. I take this to mean something like authenticity is the consumer’s perception of the intentions of those producing the item. Particularly the perception that the cynical desire to mimic the target culture for gain wasn’t the (or the primary) motivation in the dingus’s design, presentation, etc. Most marketed things simply aren’t and can’t be authentic in the strict or ideal sense of non-reflective products of their intended demographic’s culture. But they can be more or less successful at giving that impression, effectively hiding their cynical origins.

That seems pretty obvious. What interests me is why hiding cynical origins should matter. Why do we care about authenticity and what is it we’re upset about when faced with inauthenticity?

Too Cool for School

When we see somebody going a little too far in a social situation, trying their damnedest to be cool or funny or drop the right references, slang and posture, we say they’re “trying too hard.” Often this makes us uncomfortable, annoyed, sympathetic and sometimes even angry. Personally, I’m most annoyed by “studied eccentricity,” or over-articulated individuality and forced, awkward public displays of “creativity.” For example, the artsy hipster whose outfits are precisely counter-trend in just the right way and purely on principle. To me, these folks are trying too hard and it makes me uncomfortable. Why?

Well, this situation sort of has the structure of norm compliance from the last post (suggested by a recent article by Learry Gagné, although Jon Elster, Dov Cohen, Georffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit have hit on many of these ideas as well). Keeping it simple, compliers ideally fall into three categories: true believers, esteem seekers and cynics. The incentive to comply is largely based on esteem, belonging and the withholding of both. But the whole thing seems to be governed by what Pierre Bourdieu calls the principle of “disinterestedness” (but Jon Elster hits on a similar idea in his Sour Grapes) If it’s apparent that you’re cynically going after esteem, that you’re complying just so you’ll fit in and be thought well of, then you aren’t likely to get as much of it as if you appeared to be a true believer, that is complying out of commitment to the values invested in the norm.

There tend to be relatively few true believers, yet most people don’t comply cynically just to get esteem. But their compliance can be explained by esteem. Paradoxical? Not really. Esteem seekers don’t comply expressly to get it, but if esteem wasn’t available through compliance, they wouldn’t comply. The availability of esteem is what keeps them complying, but not in the cynical sense that it’s what they’re expressly seeking. Rather esteem is the affective incentive that stabilizes their behavior around a norm. This sets up what Philip Petitt, Geoffrey Brennan and others call the economy of esteem.

Pierre Bourdieu noted that what he called the economy of symbolic goods, effectively the economy of esteem, assumed a “taboo on making things explicit." In a nutshell, the whole economy of esteem crumbles if it’s exposed. That is, true believers as well as esteem seekers and cynics have an incentive to never bring up the pseudo-instrumental nature of the economy of esteem. Realizing, displaying or communicating that it’s an economy, a system for the distribution of some commodity, strikes at its own foundation, i.e. disinterestedness. Esteem is given in proportion to the apparent disinterestedness of compliance. If instrumental interests in compliance are made explicit, Bourdieu’s taboo, the whole thing crumbles and no esteem may be given or accumulated. And as with all taboos, transgression breeds discomfort and chagrin.

The people who try too hard, like the “studied eccentrics” from above, effectively make the whole thing obvious by clumsily attempting to make a bold move in the esteem game. By playing one strategy too obviously – telegraphing the “individuality” hand – they’ve made the whole thing explicit and indirectly transgressed against Bourdieu’s taboo. In effect their bad play reveals the man behind the curtain and it’s sort of annoying; they reveal their probable cynicism and implicate us as fellow players of a game, the playing of which demands that it be taken for reality. Something that presents itself as entirely values based is revealed as partly instrumental and relatively shallow. This is unsettling.

The Inauthentic

Inauthentic marketing, for example, annoys because its cynicism is too obvious. It tries too hard to gain from playing on the tropes, codes and symbols we all use to gain esteem and a sense of belonging or meaning. Basically, it nastily and clumsily caricatures the mechanisms by which we all construct cultural meaning in social situations. The whole economy is rendered explicit and this threatens and implicates us all in a self-wrought but necessary and largely uncynical deception.

So personal authenticity isn’t even “authentic” in the strict or ideal sense (whatever that might mean). Getting back on theme, what we perceive as “authentic” marketing or products don’t try too hard. That is, they never do anything to make the norms, styles and other plays within the cultural economy of esteem explicit. I take it that’s how cynically produced items can be “authentic”; they’re quietly keyed into the playing of the game, not the gaming of the game.

Viral Models are Incomplete

For several years now “viral marketing” has been a part of most marketing campaigns, online and off. Now that the frenzy has effectively died out it’s clear that it doesn’t work the way many of its proponents would have us believe.

1. It tends to be of far lower impact than it’s assumed promise; success tends to be judged in terms of minimally positive ROI. In fact, the vast majority of viral marketing campaigns return negative ROI and only a tiny (really tiny) percentage ever return anything close to the epidemics popularized by Gladwell’s Tipping Point.

2. It’s virtually impossible to predict which items (movies, songs, fashions, etc.) will succeed in a cultural market (check out recent work by Duncan Watts et al. and Luis Bettencourt). Ironically, this is presumably because of the very forces – informational cascades (localized conformity) and network effects in general – that viral marketing supposedly harnesses.

3. Conversion of hub individuals, so-called “influentials”, isn’t nearly as simple or effective as it seems it should be. More research by Watts suggests that normally connected people have a nearly identical chance of starting epidemics as do the highly connected. The important mechanism seems to be the existence of a significant, connected sub-network of easily infected individuals. Also, it’s not at all clear that the basic influentials hypothesis isn’t conflating causation (do influentials cause cascades) and correlation (or are they highly visible people caught in them like everybody else, just slightly earlier). In social markets, which by definition are rife with externalities, correlation and causation are not clearly distinct. But viral marketing flatly identifies influentials as primary causes.

4. The epidemiological analogy isn’t complete. The idea of susceptibility to a cultural artifact is an unexamined assumption, rather than an explanatory mechanism.

My take on these points is that 2) and 3) explain 1). Controversially, I also hold that 4) at least partially explains 2) and 3).

The contagion model viral marketing claims as justification ideally explains (mechanistically) the spread of a contagion through a population. But a key assumption of the model is left largely unexamined. Susceptibility to a cultural contagion (fashion, song, movie, silly online video, etc.) is a parameter of these models, but the mechanism which actually determines this parameter’s value is effectively a black box. Emphasis is put on the spread dynamics and which structures effect the greatest spread, but very little consideration is given to the nature of the mechanisms that determine each agent’s susceptibility. This is a matter of focus and for contagion dynamics – models of how something spreads through a network – this is an appropriate omission. However, for marketing theory, this omission has significant consequences: it obscures the nature of susceptibility to cultural contagions, focusing us solely on the medium of transmission while assuming that the medium is agnostic as to the content transmitted. Network structure is key to explaining how a contagion spreads, if it’s spreadable. But understanding susceptibility mechanisms will help explain what can be spread if the structure is right. As Duncan Watts has said, the ideas that take off have to be right for the society and this comes down to susceptibility. An analysis of the mechanisms underlying susceptibility will help us develop a much better model for viral marketing specifically and cultural contagion generally.

Understanding these mechanisms will in no way guarantee the success of your viral campaigns, however. You’re still open to myriad chance-introducing externalities (the fragility of some types of cascades and the subsequent dicey nature of path dependent process) inherent in social/cultural markets. At best, it puts you in a position to better set success levels, determine rational outlay and generally make your offering more competitive in the cultural market.

In future posts I'll take a stab at some possible mechanisms, mostly drawn from sociology.