Social Media: Rhetoric and Narrative are not Dead

Does social media mean the world of Mad Men style persuasion is really over? Think twice before you answer. Illustration: Dyna Moe.

Last month, a really cool video on the impacts of social media got updated. I’m referring to this video, produced by Eric Qualman at Socialnomics:

I’m a big fan of the video, and often use it as a good, tight primer on how social media is changing our societies. And I say societies because it really is a global phenomenon, not just one for Western Civilization.

There is, however, one argument that Qualman lays out in the video that I’d like to take exception to. At one point, he shows a picture of Dale Carnegie and then a still of the character Don Draper from the AMC show Mad Men. The video then states that the future of marketing and corporate-citizen communications will required “acting[ing] more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men.”

For those of you who do not know the show, Mad Men follows the lives of a handful of men and women in the advertising industry in Mid-Century New York. Frequently the plot delves into the messy machinations of advertising campaigns, as the employees of the firm try to figure out how to get into the heads (and wallets) of consumers.

There is no doubt that social media is leveling the power playing field between corporations and citizens. In some cases, it has turned them into virtual “caged tigers”, prowling and pawing and ready to tear a company to shreds if it makes the wrong move. However, the kind of faith in grass-roots based communication that the Socialnomics video makes is rather naive, and also rather dismissive of one of the most powerful streaks of human existence, the narrative.

Humanity is a story-telling creature. We are constantly evolving narratives to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the world, to socially construct mutual understanding, and to cement our individual places in society. When Mad Men’s lead advertising man Don Draper spins a story around a product — casting, for example, the Kodak slide projector as a time machine taking us backwards and forwards on a carousel of memories — he’s telling us a story. He’s using all the great and awful arts of rhetoric and narrative to connect us to that product.

What social media has done has guaranteed the public a place in the narrative. Now, the average citizen has the ability to talk back, to exchange, to discuss the stories being placed before them. In so doing, however, all it really has done has placed the citizen back into their role as audience to a play — it should be remembered that an essential element of drama is that the audience plays a part as well.

The power of narrative — the power of what is on that stage before the audience — is the power of initiative and creation, and has not gone away. I hope that we will continue to see social media evolve and I hope that it will continue to foster a more democratic society throughout the world. We should not, however, invest in it the notion that it reduces, even one iota, the power of rhetoric and narrative.